COREY MERTES

The Art Tour

The Southmoreland neighborhood in Kansas City’s Rockhill District boasts an eclectic mix of Colonial Revival mansions and Arts and Crafts–style homes, whose residents appreciate the area’s open parkland, curved roadways, and native stone fencing typical of the late-19^th-century City Beautiful Movement. Today home to the city’s artistic and intellectual elite, the neighborhood features, in a limestone-bordered hollow just west of Oak Street, undulating Southmoreland Park, site of the annual Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, and, a short walk away, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. The Nelson, as the latter is familiarly known, is separated from 47^th Street to the south by two acres of gorgeously designed sculpture park, where on any given day passersby might observe children gawking up at Claes Oldenburg’s and Coosje van Bruggen’s immense, signature “Shuttlecocks,” or lazing adults tossing frisbees to their bounding pet dogs. 

A canopy of hornbeams provides shade to the flagstone walks that line the vast front lawn. Though recently the leaves have begun to turn yellow, the summer’s notoriously oppressive humidity is still a blight on local memory, so even rumbling gray skies do not easily discourage those savoring a stretch of the great outdoors. Visitors to the park cannot miss another kind of tree: “Ferment,” by Roxy Paine, a gnarled, 56-foot-high dendritic sculpture made from stainless steel. The docent, dressed in a pumpkin-colored skirt and blouse, passes by on her way to the front entrance. She is late for the tour and traverses the brick path in long quick strides, lanyard flopping. She looks up but not at the sculpture. Instead, she regards the darkening sky and its own gathering ferment. At the first drops of rain, she opens her umbrella. She eschews the tall staircase to the main entrance and, though only a volunteer, enters the museum through an employees-only door next to the stone panel titled “Bas Relief Woman,” by Gaston Lachaise, an elegant homage to the artist’s wife, depicted here in the nude. 

On the north side, two men in their thirties approach the back entrance at the end of a long reflecting pool, which together with illuminating neon skylights and a square island made of gilt bronze comprise the work “One Sun / 34 Moons,” by Walter de Maria. The taller man reaches the door first having walked two paces ahead the full length of the pool. He holds it open with an exaggerated sweep of his free arm and nods, flashing a smile that isn’t a smile. His solidly built companion wears dark pants, a colorful sweater with windowpanes outlined in black, and a tight frown. Anyone but a literalist would understand that the two have been arguing.

Directly below the pool is the underground parking garage. Despite ample free parking on the street, an elderly couple has paid the twelve dollars, and not merely to avoid the rain. The water from the pool and the light from the hidden sun are visible through the overhead skylights. After exiting their Lexus, the man double-checks the locks and the two link arms at the door as if entering a royal ball expecting to be formally announced. He walks stiffly upright, seemingly unaware that his thin moustache and sports jacket and slacks are no longer in fashion. It is only Saturday but his wife is wearing a jacket also, one that matches her beige wool skirt and heels, an outfit she might normally reserve for church. The gift shop is situated opposite them as they pass through the glass doors. Although running late for the tour, they decide to stop. Their pinched stares as they browse through books betray secret hopes that their spouse will suggest they remain or else get a cup of coffee upstairs at Thou Mayest or an early lunch at Rozelle Court, and skip the tour. But a shared sense of decorum compels them both to note the time and proceed to the tour as planned.

Back in the sculpture park, a much younger husband and wife have lost track of time. From outside its transparent walls, they are directing their three children through an art installation titled “Glass Labyrinth.” It is a true labyrinth—one with only a single path—about ten feet high and triangular. The youngest boy—Quentin, we learn, when the lanky father calls his name—does not seem to be listening. For a second time he has hit a dead end and is on the verge of tears. Further on, his sister giggles as she zigzags methodically, hands pressed against the glass walls for support, while the eldest raises his arms in triumph having reached the triangular space at the labyrinth’s core.

The father is dressed business casual, perhaps intending to go into the office later. The mother appears more at ease, at least from afar. She’s wearing loose pants and a plain striped t-shirt beneath a long, unbuttoned black cardigan sweater. Nevertheless, her hair is arranged in a French twist that gives an impression of maximal effort. With a sigh that indicates she is second-guessing their decision to bring kids to an art tour, she points to her watch. Her husband responds by steering Quentin to the center of the labyrinth while the others hustle out at their mother’s command.

Also on his way to the tour is a single man wearing glasses. His survey of every female he walks by only fails to include a plump art student, distinguishable by her tattoos and piercings and the sketchbook tucked beneath her arm. Another couple arrives at Kirkwood Hall first. They separate wordlessly, the man to examine the eight huge tapestries illustrating the plight of Phaeton, son of Helios the Sun God; the woman to wander airily beneath the twelve 30-foot-high columns made from black marble, which they will soon learn was quarried in the southwest of France. Outside, the rain intensifies. It lends weight to the imputed thoughts of a cast bronze of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” and a hint of impermanence to the nation’s largest collection of Henry Moores.

*

In Kirkwood Hall the docent leaves her umbrella at the information desk and announces to the scattered company that the art tour is about to begin. Slowly, like fillings to a magnet, the young man, the art student, and the four couples, the last of whom must first round up their roving children, form an arc between two of the eight mottled gray columns that frame the four antechambers—smaller columns than the black ones that dominate the main space. To begin, the docent explains they were made regionally from St. Genevieve marble. As the group crosses toward the first gallery, two high-pitched barks resonate in contrast to the solemn grandeur. A small dog—white, furry, and wet—is on the loose near the south entrance. Also noticeably damp, a hooded figure scutters after it, while a dripping teenage girl, possibly a college student, laughs quietly beneath Phaeton’s descent into the river Eridanus.

As soon as the hooded figure—a boy, we learn, who might also be an undergraduate—scoops up the dog, he is informed by security about the museum’s prohibition against animals. The boy and girl are together. She explains that the dog is not theirs: they were playing miniature golf on the art-themed course when the rains came, and the dog was roaming the grounds. They resist the guard’s offer to take it, and instead agree to go. But as they head out, the storm can be seen whipping up the reflecting pool. At the door, they look behind them and notice that the guard has turned his back. With hardly a glance between them, they duck suddenly into the hallway marked European 1750-1950 and, suppressing giggles, attempt to blend in with the departing tour.   

In the group, no one fails to notice the latecomers tagging along. The girl is wearing jeans with holes in both knees. Beneath her green hood a head of sandy blonde hair is revealed, mussed from the hood and the rain, but also, it might be inferred, in a manner consistent with her practice. Over one shoulder hangs the strap of a gray backpack—dappled, half-full, a thick water bottle protruding from the side pocket. Her footwear consists of hiking boots, well-worn. She moves with a natural ease that one might expect to be reserved for the well-off.

The boy exhibits a smile that suggests an informal worldview. His jeans also have holes but in the back pockets, which are empty; an empty money clip sticks out carelessly from the front pocket where you would expect a smart phone to be. He brushes back his hood moments after his partner does. He has the limpid blue eyes and disheveled towhead of a surfer, unlikely as such an avocation might be here, a thousand miles from the nearest sea. When the dog peeks its head from the girl’s pouch, he presses it down lightly and, for her benefit, begins to whistle while pretending to inspect the roomful of masterly art.

It’s a majestic space. On a tufted leather bench, a man leans back to take in one of Monet’s expansive “Water Lilies,” which catches the eye first. Nearby, an auburn-haired woman examines Matisse’s “Woman Seated before a Black Background.” Though the room is bustling, Emil Nolde’s “Masks” hangs unobserved, as if its subjects—among them the shrunken head of a Munduruku man and a red demonic prow from a Solomon Islands canoe —are too ghastly to consider. High school students on a field trip crowd against a glass case protecting Degas dancers rehearsing for a ballet. 

“This particular piece was removed from the Museum Folkwang by the Nazis.” The docent has steered the straggling band in front of the Nolde. “Hitler condemned Nolde’s works as ‘degenerate art.’”

The taller of the two men who had been arguing earlier clasps his partner’s forearm. “Ooo. Me likey.”

“Behave.”

“The irony,” the docent adds, referring to her clipboard, “is that Nolde himself was a member of the Danish section of the Nazi Party—and a vocal antisemite.”

“Me no likey.”

His partner waves a hand and chuckles. The two have made up. “You could teach him something about degenerate,” he whispers with a grin.

The grade school girl has separated from the tour and stands in front of a gloomy Daumier oil. She is reaching out to touch it when her father comes up from behind and gently pulls back her hand.

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “No touching.”

“They look cold.”

“They just left the theater, it says here. ‘Exit from the Theater,’” he reads the title on the placard.

“That girl looks bored.”

“Stunned, more than likely.” It is the mother who has approached, holding Quentin’s hand. She peers in. “Can you read the playbill?”

“Gibberish. Must have been a shocking performance.”

“They’re moving on. Q has to go to the bathroom.”

The father looks over at the others exiting the chamber. “The dad looks like Abraham Lincoln,” the daughter decides.

“Same hat. It makes him look taller.”

“He looks cold.”

The man smiles. “Come on, honey,” he says, taking her hand.

Father and daughter catch up to the tour as mother and son retrace their steps. Of the group, only the art student remains, and only momentarily, busily sketching Signac’s view of the Château Gaillard.

Singleton, Traversi, Fantin-Latour. The art student, too slow to keep up with her sketches, instead takes pictures with the camera around her neck. A security guard discreetly informs her that photographs are verboten. “Comme c’est gauche,” says the sturdy man to his partner, eyebrow raised. The eldest son of the couple with kids overhears him and, to his mother, who with her youngest has caught up to the tour, whispers, “They’re speaking French.”

Now it’s the elderly couple’s turn to fall back. The man stands in the center of the room reading a brochure. With the docent droning in the background, his wife glances idly at one painting after another before stopping to read an exhibit label for what is described as an esquisse,titled “The Oath of Brutus After the Death of Lucretia.”

“Not the Brutus. An ancestor.” Still reading, she has spoken to the figure approaching from behind. Finally looking up at the painting, she adds in a semi-formal—as opposed to her usual formal—tone, “Why did he kill her, I wonder?”

“It was suicide, honey.” Her head jerks. It is not her husband behind her but the tall man, separated from his mate.

“I am sorry. I thought—”

“She was raped. Brutus the hero prepares to avenge her—” He raises his arm like the knife-wielding figure in the painting.

“Raped?”

“—and save Rome from tyranny.”

Still tagging along, the young couple with the dog are seated on a bench; they are the only ones not viewing the artworks. They sit close enough for their hips to touch, their legs intertwined at the ankles. Together they are petting the dog, whose head, with irresistible timing, peeks out alternately from each side of the pouch, like a whack-a-mole inviting caresses instead of the mallet. They kiss: a kiss noticed by all. It lingers. Even members of the group whose backs were turned look their way, somehow aware, as if through a sixth sense imparted upon them by the Picassos and the Gauguins, that innocence is nearby. The girl retrieves a bag of corn nuts from her backpack, hands a few to her partner, and they feed the dog, observed by the entire tour. When the snack is gone, they allow the dog to lick salt from their palms. The girl rests her head on the boy’s shoulder in a scene more peaceable than Monet, more graceful than ballerinas. Almost simultaneously, they begin to shiver, as if realizing for the first time they are wearing wet clothes. Without speaking, they remove their sweatshirts. He stands up to shield the girl as she relocates the dog to her backpack, leaving it unzipped just enough for the dog’s head to emerge.

They have passed through Egyptian, Greek and Roman and been introduced to English Pottery. The elderly man leans in to ask his wife when lunch begins, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her focus is on the two men in front of her holding hands. The younger couple’s adolescent boy has removed his phone and is playing some kind of game as discreetly as possible.

In Contemporary Art, the mood livens. Unconsciously, the couple with the dog has followed—never close enough to become a part of the tour, yet always nearby, as if some intuition has told them that this group will provide them cover. Half-serious, they move stealthily, their eyes shifting, like fugitives in the movies trying to blend into a train station crowd.

“Mom, that man over there isn’t moving.”

Everyone who passes comments on a museum guard who isn’t a museum guard at all. It’s “Museum Guard” by Duane Hanson, a lifelike sculpture made of fiberglass and liquid polyvinyl acetate.

“It’s so realistic. I thought it was a real person.”

When the young couple walks by, the boy lifts his arm and playfully salutes. In doing so, he leaves enough space for the dog to jump free. Upon landing it begins to circle and bark, capturing everyone’s attention. The young man chases after it, laughing, and soon the girl—not his partner, but the much younger girl who is there with her brothers and parents—is giggling and trying to catch the dog too.

“Oh my.” Aghast, the docent is regretting her decision to let the infraction slide. “You—you can’t—”

“Honey, be careful,” the mom calls out.

The dog darts under a bench, through the girl’s legs, then in between figures on a fake street corner comprising the sculpture “Chance Meeting,” giving the impression of a chase scene from some zany old film. 

“Sacré bleu!” says the tall man, smirking to his partner.

The elderly man turns soberly to his wife. “I saw this coming.”

A security guard—a real one—blocks the frenetic dog’s access to the adjoining gallery. Finally, the young man snatches it up. The guard and the docent are quick to approach, armed with rebukes. Neither he nor his partner offers any defense. They agree to leave quietly.

The murmur that issues from the reassembling tour soon subsides. They have come to view art, after all, and turn expectantly toward the Abstract Expressionist room where they find, as everyone does, in its generic titles and archetypal forms avatars of their own identities. Quentin must be restrained from swinging by the steel half-moon on David Smith’s “Wagon III.” Heads in the group angle to behold Rothko’s “Untitled #11,” Hedda Sterne’s “Airport #1,” Pollock’s kinetic “No. 6, 1952,” as if to propose by the queerness of their postures the timeless and vexing question, But is it art?

Masterpieces in Sculpture Hall on the way to lunch. Max Ernst and his wife hold court as a minotaur and a mermaid. Meleager and Atalanta lean in for an embrace, naked astride the slain Calydonian boar. By now the group is too impatient to pause. Across Kirkwood Hall, the noon-hour commotion of Rozelle Court, in the dramatic style of a 15^th-century Italian piazza, beckons. The smell of food at mealtime reminds the body it is not made of stone.

“Let’s meet here again at one o’clock, folks.” Despite an attempt at colloquial good cheer, the docent’s already long day is betrayed by her posture. “Only European art after that,” she says listlessly, “200 to 1600,” helpless to rein in the drifting assembly.

The line in Rozelle is long, extending into the hall. From the back, the group can see through the main entrance that the storm is over. Sunlight illuminates the antechamber like the first words of a divine promise.

Visible on the outdoor steps are the ejected young couple with their new dog. They remove paper bags from their backpacks and pull out sandwiches and fruit. After the girl balls up a corner of bread and tosses it awkwardly onto a lower step, the boy does the same but first stands in order to fling it farther. Having eaten both morsels, the dog returns. Then the girl says something and the two sprint toward one of the miniature-golf holes, a scaled-down version of the museum and its front lawn, shuttlecocks included. They circle it, trailed happily by the animated dog.

Standing near one of the massive black columns, the tour group brings up the rear of the line. There is a sadness to the columns with their variegated Corinthian capitals that they did not notice earlier. It is the implication in their splendor that others before them led bigger and better lives. It is the same unpleasant truth of all art, whether depicting mythological tales or timeless love or decisive battles; princes, cardinals, moments of religious passion: something more substantial preceded us and is forever gone. It is a feeling that, along with the group’s hunger and fatigue, contributes to their unease.

When the line has moved forward, they can no longer see the young couple, although each of them, as their sightline is about to be obscured, peeks back to capture one last glimpse. Inside the restaurant, they finally feel sufficiently at liberty to express their thoughts.

“Imagine bringing a dog into a museum.” The tall man flinches as his partner picks something from the nape of his neck. Holding up a fallen leaf from one of the courtyard plants, his partner says simply: “Leaf.” 

“What is the point?” the tall man continues. “They hardly even looked at the art.”

The elderly woman is rummaging in her purse. “I hope they’ll be okay. Sometimes those stray dogs have rabies. Do you think we should contact someone?”

“Who?” Her husband sounds perturbed.

“The authorities! I don’t know who. The pound.”

Holding his tired young son in his arms, the man with the kids muses to his wife, “I wonder where they’ll go next?”

She is staring at the green fountain at the center of the restaurant—ignorant, unlike the docent in line nearby, that it was once a part of the Roman baths belonging to the emperor Hadrian. Without blinking or looking at her husband, she says hopefully, “Maybe we’ll see them on the way out.”

“I doubt it. No . . . They’ll be long gone.”

“But where? They didn’t look like they have a place to go.”

The docent overhears. She’s been eyeing the vaulted ceilings, the cloistered walkways, the bronze medallion zodiac signs embedded in the floor. She turns her head but remains silent.

“Who knows?” the man says wistfully. Neither he nor his wife acknowledges their fidgeting eldest son, who tells them he is starving. “Wherever youth takes them.”

Corey Mertes received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Film and Television Production from the University of Southern California. His short stories have appeared in many journals and have been shortlisted for the American Fiction Short Story Award, the Tartts Fiction Award and the Hudson Prize. His debut story collection, Self-Defense, was published in February 2023 by Cornerstone Press.