The Masterpiece

In an art gallery filled with bright, shiny people riding the first waves of champagne-fueled fervor, Klara Weber garnered little to no attention whatsoever. The Art Set—that terrifying myriad-eyed, multiple-mouthed beast—stormed every chamber of the exhibit, devouring the hours of the devout and repaying them with venom. New artists were on display and the scent of oil paint had drawn the Creatures of the Canvas from all corners of the city. And they were ravenous.

The crowd was unforgiving, yes, but this year they’d caught a whiff of fresh blood. They’d been teased by tell of exquisite brushwork and borderline reckless impasto; startlingly dominant negative-space juxtaposed with liminal contours second only to those of the gods themselves. It stimulated the stalwart, disgusted the stagnate, and ignited fiery debate. Who was Marcel Moulin? Some said he was a heroin-addled ne’er do well from the streets of Montmartre; others said it was no one man, but a worldwide collective operating under a single name so as to mock the very system it seemed to celebrate.

Klara Weber had heard of Marcel Moulin. She’d recited his name over and over as she’d produced her latest work, as though she’d hoped to conjure the merest modicum of his talent; enough to get her foot in the door, at least.

It had worked.

She now stood across from her painting in the country’s finest gallery, albeit waiting for someone to notice her work, mention its boldness, its borderline repellence. Hell, she would have accepted somebody simply commenting on the heft of its box-frame—it was almost bookshelf-depth. Yet all she could hear were frantic tales of Marcel Moulin. When would Marcel arrive? Would he deliver his new work by drone, as per popular speculation? He was sure to make a splash, that much went without saying.

Then, finally, it happened. Klara was so busy resenting each and every passerby that she almost missed it. A man stopped in his tracks, turned, and fixed his gaze on Klara’s artwork. Then a statuesque woman did the same, then an elderly gentleman, and before long, a small mob had materialized before Klara Weber’s composition. They mumbled at first, expressing their mixed feelings about it. One man wasn’t sure what he liked about the thing, and a lady who seemed to enjoy gesticulating said that it was ugly and beautiful at the same time. Someone drawled that it was reminiscent of Picasso’s use of distortion and another added that it was almost as Hellish as something by Bosch.

It was a young woman who first noticed the pooling of vermillion in the bottom of the box frame’s sill. She mentioned it to her friend and together they traversed the impressively human features that revealed themselves only after a good deal of examination. An eye looked off to the left with an ear just below it. The nose sat further away to the east and hair appeared in tufts, like dry desert grass, throughout the veritable landscape of flesh tones and viscera.

Marcel Moulin had shown up in the most surprising way of all.