The Perfect Landscape (15 page)

Any doubts that Hanna had at the outset about Agusta’s capabilities have gradually given way to trust and gratitude for her drive and unstinting hard work. Agusta is resourceful and not easily stressed. She doesn’t focus on problems but seeks solutions and has the knack of implementing them in a way that satisfies everyone. Agusta would do a good job as director of the Annexe, Hanna thinks to herself.

Baldur has kept his distance from Hanna. Politeness reigns between them, but Hanna is careful not to take him into her confidence. The friendliness that characterized their early interaction, which was based on their old friendship, disappeared like dew in the morning sun after that meeting. Agusta gives
Baldur support, but Hanna doesn’t get involved and doesn’t ask how the project is progressing.

The two events, the international landscape exhibition and Hanna’s landscape exhibition, will open at the same time as the Arts Festival in Reykjavik, which of course is perfect from an artistic perspective and from the point of view of the gallery, but Hanna now suddenly finds herself with far less time to prepare. Leifur and Anselma haven’t seen the need to keep her informed of their ideas until the last possible moment; they want to prepare part of their projects in situ, and this involves a degree of uncertainty that is hard to handle. One way for Hanna to contain her worries and anxiety is through exercise, and so she has gone back to the fencing piste again.

Hanna also used the time when Steinn was off to look into the idea that another painting, like
Composition in Blue
, might be under
The Birches
, and she came up with something significant. She is burning to let Steinn in on her discovery.

Now that they are sitting together over coffee Hanna can’t help looking at him in surprise. The Steinn that she has known since she arrived is not at all the real Steinn, but the man who was ill, frightened, unsure, and convinced that he was going blind but couldn’t bring himself to go to the doctor.

Steinn and Hanna are both visual people; they experience the beauty of life first and foremost through images, and for Steinn the thought of losing that must have been unbearable. And he was probably truly terrified at no longer being able to be the family’s breadwinner; his pride was in tatters. Now he is a changed man. Directly after coffee he comes to her eagerly and with a gleam in his good eye. Hanna feels that for the first time she realizes how tall and well built Steinn is.

“I need to show you something,” he says, as he had before, and they agree to meet in the basement later in the day. Walking down the stairs Hanna’s heart is thumping with excitement. Now that Steinn is back Hanna feels at home in her work; he is invaluable to her, and she suspects she is not the only one in feeling that. Everyone has been unusually cheerful today.

Steinn goes straight to the computer and retrieves the picture, which he enlarges on the screen. Hanna waits to tell him about her discoveries. She puts down the book she was holding under her arm, a large book about the CoBrA painters. A folded sheet of paper is sticking out of it. Steinn shows her the screen.

“You see, I got the X-ray images of the painting before I went into the hospital. They are most informative.”

Full of anticipation, Hanna looks at the image on the screen, and then she realizes to her disappointment that she cannot make head or tail of it. The image is in black-and-white, and dark shadows compete with lighter patches.

“This is the left half of the painting,” Steinn explains. “The largest X-ray film at the hospital is forty-by-fifty centimeters, so we needed to do it in two sections.”

Hanna gently puts her hand on Steinn’s arm to stop him because she cannot make out what she is looking at on the screen.

“Steinn,” she says slowly to calm him down as he is the excited one this time, unlike before when it was she who struggled to slow down to his tempo. “Can you just explain to me what we’re looking at? What does this X-ray show? I didn’t even know it was possible to take an X-ray of a painting at a hospital. So what are we seeing?”

Steinn looks at her, smiling; he is quite simply happy. He’s in his element now, she thinks to herself.

“An X-ray is just an X-ray, no matter what it’s of. You know that artists’ paints, oil paints, always contain small amounts of heavy metals. And these metals are visible on an X-ray—that’s why we can see these shapes so clearly here. OK, only black on white, or maybe white on black. The metals show up white on the X-ray.”

Hanna looks at the black-and-white image on the screen, dark and light patches, but she doesn’t see what he sees. To help her Steinn takes hold of the mouse and moves the cursor over the lines and shapes on the screen. After a while Hanna can make out half of the half-moon shape from the image.

“It’s like the shapes you get in rock formations,” she says. “Once you’ve seen a shape in a rock formation that’s the way you always see it.” And now she can also make out the diagonal stroke that breaks up the half-moon shape. Mentally rotating the image onto its side she is finally able to tell Steinn what she saw when he was lying unconscious on the floor and
Composition in Blue
was propped up against the wall directly in her line of vision.

“I didn’t think it through then, but I’m absolutely one hundred percent certain that the paintings are exactly the same. I mean totally the same—d’you get what I’m saying? Not as if Sigfus had done a number of paintings with the same motif but with some variations, but like he’d simply painted two paintings that are identical. Don’t you think that’s strange? I don’t get it. I’ve looked at many of Sigfus’s paintings and read all the books there are about him, examined the data the gallery has and everything, but I’ve never come across two identical paintings.”

Hanna doesn’t voice what she is thinking; she doesn’t need to. It has, of course, occurred to her that the gallery has not only been given a forgery attributed to Gudrun Johannsdottir, which
The Birches
almost certainly is, but also it could be that
Composition in Blue
, which the gallery was given the year before with so much jubilation, is a forgery. She doesn’t mention it because it was Steinn who examined the painting at the time. He made a serious oversight and it is unnecessary to spell it out. Steinn makes no response.

“Turn it on its side a moment,” Hanna asks, and Steinn rotates the image on the screen. He also brings up the other X-ray, rotates it, and puts them side by side. Finally he goes into the gallery’s database and brings up a picture of
Composition in Blue
on the screen as well. He changes the settings on the image of the painting so it appears in black-and-white. Hanna follows his movements in silence. The similarity between the lines and shapes on the images is not only great; the structure is almost identical. Hanna looks at Steinn in triumph, but he just stares at the screen mumbling.

“Yep, this is what I suspected. I was thinking about this half-moon shape; Sigfus painted this a lot at the time.”

“I’ve worked out what might have happened,” says Hanna. She can’t wait any longer. “Well, not who painted
The Birches
, but I realize that in fact it could be that
Composition in Blue
turned into
The Birches
when it was in Christian Holst’s possession. When his estate released this painting it was in the same condition as it is now. I had the auction house send me a photograph. The picture fits exactly, but on their list the painter was down as unknown and the value was a mere fraction of the eight million Elisabet paid for it.”

“That doesn’t explain why the painting was changed, the trees, and the mountain? Did that also happen in Holst’s time?” asks Steinn, but Hanna carries on without answering him.

“Holst bought up Elisabeth Hansen’s entire collection. And I’m dead certain she bought a painting from Sigfus. I came across something when I was going through the records about Gudrun in the archives. They were friends, as you know, Sigfus and Gudrun.”

“Surely you’re not going to tell me that Gudrun painted over one of Sigfus’s pictures?” Steinn asks, surprised and in disbelief.

“No, of course not,” replies Hanna. “I still don’t know who painted over the picture or altered it later. At the moment I’m only talking about how a painting by Sigfus could have got into Holst’s possession.”

Hanna reaches across for the large book lying on the table.

“First I found a letter in Gudrun’s records, and then I started looking in books for pictures of Sigfus’s from this period, until 1940. I also photocopied the letter Gudrun wrote; you must let me read it to you.”

Crossing his arms, Steinn nods his head, waiting.

“Here’s the letter,” Hanna says. “Gudrun wrote it to her friend Mundi when he was in Italy. Just before he died. I find it so sad to think that they never met again. ‘Copenhagen, October 15, 1938. My dear friend, The ladies in Nansens Street and I have been rather downcast since you, my dear friend, set off on your southern travels. The accordion lies untouched in the corner, and in your absence few make their way over here. I do hope that you recover soon, so that we may all sing together again, very shortly.

“‘By the way, I went to an interesting party yesterday evening. Our friend, Sigfus, took me to a midweek soiree at Mrs. Hansen’s; it is she who has purchased the many abstract paintings. At these soirees, selected artists are offered a free meal every Wednesday. Sigfus was invited on this occasion because Mrs. H assuredly wanted to buy a painting from him. She had seen it at an exhibition of abstract paintings where Sigfus was involved last summer—when we had our exhibition at home.

“‘He was pleased to take me with him, but as you know, it is not anybody who is invited to Mrs. H’s house, and she viewed me with displeasure even though dear Sigfus introduced me with enthusiasm. I was ready to walk straight back out, but he took me firmly by the arm.

“‘Mrs. H is a queer one; you, my dear Mundi, could easily capture her expression—and her hair color, I wonder which chemist’s shop that comes from? All the abstract painters you have heard about were there—Egill Jacobsen, of course, Ejler Bille and Carl-Henning Pedersen and others. And their paintings were displayed on every wall; her apartment is absolutely crammed with these paintings, full of animals, masks, and symbols. She didn’t open the package with Sigfus’s painting, just slipped it into the back room. Maybe she didn’t want the others to know that she was buying from Sigfus; they are all as penniless as each other and all want to sell her their pictures. You should have seen how well we ate.

“‘I don’t always understand what their paintings mean, but abstract art fascinates me, although I don’t have the courage for it yet. Some of the paintings are very memorable. When I look at my own landscape paintings, I see very little to recommend them. But that is what I’m doing at present, and we will
see what the future holds. Sigfus was not bashful about the company. And they had plenty to talk about; I had to keep my wits about me to keep up because many of them spoke at once, largely about the possibility of war of course.’”

Hanna stops reading and hands Steinn the photocopy. She dries her eyes.

“They were such good friends and colleagues. Gudrun and Mundi, I mean.”

“So you mean the butcher got Sigfus’s painting included in the deal when he bought up Elisabeth Hansen’s collection?” Steinn is pensive. “But why did it not turn up—oh no, of course. Someone painted over it. But who could that have been? When the painting was in his possession?” He shakes his head. “At any rate, Gudrun didn’t do it.”

“I think we can stop worrying about Gudrun,” says Hanna. “She clearly isn’t in any way linked to this. The question is what painting lies underneath. It’s highly likely that it’s by Sigfus. You can see that these paintings are almost identical,” she says, looking at the screen.

“I saw a sketch of
Composition in Blue
at an exhibition in Copenhagen about two years ago,” she adds. “There were also paintings by Gudrun. I was working on the exhibition with the Cultural Institute in Copenhagen and went to visit it. And the paintings by Sigfus from this period, around 1940, were very much in that style.
Composition in Blue
hadn’t been found then, d’you remember? It was found with some people in Denmark a number of months later, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was some family or other who owned the painting,” replies Steinn. “It never emerged who bought it and donated it to the Icelandic state. Maybe it was only publicized over
there—that could be. It was known that he did a painting from these sketches and called it
Composition in Blue
.”

Hanna gives him a meaningful look. Opening her book about the CoBrA painters she’d brought with her, she shows Steinn a small black-and-white picture.

“Look at this!” she says triumphantly.

Steinn looks at the picture. Then he takes the book over to his big workbench, and, laying it down, he reaches out for the magnifying lamp. Shining it onto the picture, he pores over the book. Then he straightens up, rubbing his good eye.

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

Hanna goes over to the table and he hands her the magnifying glass; she examines the picture more carefully. It shows Sigfus Gunnarsson as a young man, Egill Jacobsen, and two other painters at a fine arts exhibition in a small gallery in Copenhagen in 1938. Egill later went on to become one of the CoBrA artists, and this was one of the first exhibitions he took part in. Various paintings are visible in the background; one of them is just like
Composition in Blue
.

Hanna and Steinn look at each other. There can be no doubt. It is extremely likely that the painting Elisabeth Hansen saw at the exhibition in 1938 and then bought from Sigfus was indeed the painting that looks remarkably like
Composition in Blue
. The date fits at any rate.

“Hold on a moment; this isn’t all,” says Hanna. “The butcher donated the majority of the collection he bought from Elisabeth to a museum on Jutland. The museum has a register of all the paintings that came from him. I got in touch with them and there is no painting by Sigfus Gunnarsson. So the butcher must have kept it.”