Two folders

Around that time two folders arrived from Paris addressed to me. They held reproductions of the paintings of Van Gogh and Matisse. My French cousin Freddy had learned from my gentle mother’s letters that she had sent him after the war years, that I was a budding young artist. I have the folders still, stained and dog-eared—they are my first loves, my first exemplars, sent to me by my handsome French cousin from the City of Art. They became the models for my self-education as I painted my own clumsy versions of the fluid Matisse and the groping Van Gogh, painted on shirt cardboards at my “lady’s desk” in the corner of the narrow entry of our apartment on 136th Street. And I knew with absolute certainty that I would be doing this for the rest of my life. Vera Klement