I unlocked the barn doors and reached inside, my fingers on the light switch. "Scared?" I
said.
"Yes," she said.
"So am I," I said.
Remember now: we were standing at the extreme right end of a painting eight feet highand sixty-four feet long. When I turned on the floodlights, we would be seeing the picture
compressed by foreshortening to a seeming triangle eight feet high, all right, but only five feet
wide. There was no telling from that vantage point what the painting really was -- what the
painting was all about.
I flicked on the switch.
There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Berman gasped in wonderment.
"Stay right where you are," I told her, "and tell me what you think of it."
"I can't come any farther?" she said.
"In a minute," I said, "but first I want to hear you say what it looks like from here."
"A big fence," she said.
"Go on," I said.
"A very big fence, an incredibly high and long fence," she said, "every square inch of it
encrusted with the most gorgeous jewelry."
"Thank you very much," I said. "And now take my hand and close your eyes. I am going
to lead you to the middle, and you can look again."
She closed her eyes, and she followed me as unresistingly as a toy balloon.
When we were in the middle, with thirty-two feet of the painting extending to either side,
I told her to open her eyes again.
We were standing on the rim of a beautiful green valley in the springtime. By actual
count, there were five thousand, two hundred and nineteen people on the rim with us or down
below. The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck. There were
farmhouses here and there, and the ruins of a medieval watchtower on the rim where we stood.
The picture was so realistic that it might have been a photograph.
"Where are we?" said Circe Berman.
"Where I was," I said, "when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in
Europe."
IT is ALL PART of the regular tour of my museum now. First come the doomed little girls
on swings in the foyer, and then the earliest works of the first Abstract Expressionists, and then
the perfectly tremendous whatchamacallit in the potato barn. I have unspiked the sliding doors at
the far end of the barn, so that the greatly increased flow of visitors can move past the
whatchamacallit without eddies and backwash. In one end they go, and out the other. Many of
them will go through two times or more: not the whole show, just through the potato barn.
Ha!
No solemn critic has yet appeared. Several laymen and laywomen have asked me,
however, to say what sort of a painting I would call it. I told them what I will tell the first critic to
show up, if one ever comes, and one may never come, since the whatchamacallit is so exciting to
the common people:
"It isn't a painting at all! It's a tourist attraction! It's a World's Fair! It's a Disneyland!"* * *
It is a gruesome Disneyland. Nobody is cute there.