In the Bedroom of Lennart Anderson
This story just had to be told
Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson. Sign up here:
My late father’s brownstone in Brooklyn is about to be sold, and his work is relocating. One painting, however, cannot be moved: the fresco on a wall of his bedroom.
I have a story that won’t get lost with that picture, but it feels that way. So, I’m preserving it here as a kind of memorial for that painting.
(Sorry, Dad, but I just can’t resist.)
The fresco is the painting my mother first saw at my father’s wake after her 40-year absence from that house. Spying it, she’d stunned me, murmuring, “We’d always talked about doing that in there.” (They’d traveled all over Italy together.)
It was painted, however, shortly after Lennart married his second wife, Barbara, in the 80s. He’d painted it for her.
I’m not a big fan of the Lennart Anderson Idylls. But this scene has a woman posed in a powerful way, a composition I appreciate. There are also no breasts in the entire picture, save for the heavy chest of a reclining older man. Hats off to my father for a fresco featuring only a man’s full frontal, a veritable foil to the tradition of Jupiter and Antiope!
(The child hanging onto the man’s leg is pretty creepy, however.)
The fresco appeared when I came home from college one Christmas. I was amazed at how quickly it had gone up.
That holiday was distinguished for being among the first to welcome Barbara’s family to the house. They gathered downstairs on the parlor floor.
There, his elderly mother-in-law had brought a tin of homemade cookies. My father loved homemade cookies. “What do we have here?,” he said, eyebrows raised, pulling that tin toward him across the coffee table.
Watching his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, I realized he’d made a similar move on those cookies a few minutes earlier. He’d even used the same approach.
“You just did that!” I erupted. “You’re going in for seconds and pretending it’s your first!”
No one cared, of course. But I knew he had a sense of decorum vying with his appetite. He shot me a busted look of mischief, hand frozen, eyes shining.
Moments like this were what I lived for.
No one teased him like I did (and he knew it). I’d missed this while I was at school, and I was just getting started.
In his bedroom, I checked out the new wall art. We were alone together on the second floor.
“Nice picture, Dad,” I began. “But where’s the mirror for the ceiling?”
I was smiling, open-mouthed, recalling those ads for the Poconos with the heart-shaped beds. I laughed, but he sputtered.
How could I say such a thing? And to my father!
I must have known it was a risky jab. And for an extended moment, I tried to keep laughing, hoping he might still break a smile.
But he was always very sensitive about his work. (Aren’t we all?)
Writing this, I feel for him. Barbara’s family, her parents, sister, and nephews, were gathering downstairs.
But, I also understand now how I’d learned such transgressions from the master himself.
At age three or four, I brought home a Christmas tree ornament I’d made at nursery school. It was a little clay bomb, a roundish turd, but I didn’t see it that way. I’d pushed beads into its brown concave center and painted it with a green tempura. A paperclip protruded to serve as a hanger. In my eyes, it shone like a bauble made of glass.
I brought it to him by the parlor floor’s bay windows, where he crouched decorating our Christmas tree.
“You don’t expect to hang THAT on the tree, do you?,” he leveled. Classic Dad. His voice was gruff, comical, and … dead serious.
My body flushed with mortification. I ran to find my mother in the kitchen. But then, rage hit like lightning. I stopped midway and spun around by the pocket doors to the dining room.
“You’re supposed to like everything I make!,” I howled.
He’d broken the rules and said what was on his mind.
Fifteen years later, so had I.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking of that memory when I made that quip to him in his bedroom.
Still, such lessons do become our warp and weave.
Leaving him in the bedroom, I descended the stairs to join the party as a pall descended on his holiday. I regretted what I’d done.
The chairs were pulled from the dining area into the living room to make a circle with the couch for visiting. That tin of cookies was on the coffee table. His mother-in-law sat on one of those chairs, smiling, hair white, spine a bit curled. Mrs. Stenglein was from Croatia, “the Old Country,” as my father referred to such places (His parents referred to Sweden this way.). Mrs. Stenglein’s head nodded as my father eventually joined us.
The conversation progressed, and I felt the tension from the bedroom release. My father sat smiling, legs crossed, attentive. I don’t recall exactly who else was there; I know it was early in this new marriage because we all sat this way.
Mrs. Stenglein did not speak much, so she caught our awkward-with-each-other attention when she did, acknowledging the new painting. Gently, she continued, a twinkle in her eye as she addressed my father:
“I did look for a mirror on the ceiling.”
I don’t know if his body flushed. I do know he stayed put. In my mind’s eye, I see him frozen mid-chew, elbow to knee, body angled toward her. Only his eyes moved.
They gleamed as they sought and held mine.
To his enormous credit, he knew this was among the very best moments of my young adult life.
Love this, Eliza, especially "At age three or four, I brought home a Christmas tree ornament I’d made at nursery school. It was a little clay bomb, a roundish turd, but I didn’t see it that way."
I think we all have some craft thing made in childhood that looks like a turd.
Took me straight back to those awkward chairs-in-a-circle, meet the extended 'blended' family gatherings! I love that is was the 'full frontal' that broke the ice.