What if instead of a woman Snow White was a guy? Here is my re-imagining of the classic Grimms Brothers story Little Snow White-
Once upon a time, on the Isle of Manhattan, lived a handsome but rapidly aging art dealer who dreamed of a life in the country away from the crowds and chaos of his city life. He had amassed a fortune selling beautiful and important collections of paintings, sculptures, and photographs from all around the world, but his constant quest for newer and more interesting acquisitions was exhausting and was making him old before his time. In an attempt to slow down and explore the beauty in the mundane, he began to romantically pursue much younger and impressionable graduate students who studied things like hieroglyphics and the sexual implications of Monet’s watercolors. Eventually, one of his paramours became with child and in his desire to achieve the dream of his idealized country life, the art dealer decided to go all in on his family fantasy and proposed to the graduate student. She was in the throws of writing her thesis on the use of menstrual blood in medieval illuminated manuscripts and politely declined his offer.
Nevertheless, a winsome baby boy was born on September 26, solidly a Libra but on the cusp of being a Virgo, with all that that entails. His besotted father hastily whisked him away from the complicated influences of his quickly radicalizing mother and purchased a quaint country home in the Hudson River Valley, where he could raise his son. He had chosen to name the boy Whit, which he had been assured by some hipsters he had met in Bushwick was a very strong and European name, and he liked the sound of it. While in the country the father raised his son to understand and appreciate the finer things in life, especially art. The child was enrolled in painting, welding, and art history classes from a young age and frequently went antiquing throughout the valleys of the northeast corridor with his father, looking for rare and exotic early American antiques and treasures. While away from the city, the prestigious art dealer kept track of his status amongst art critics and collectors through his subscription to ARTnews magazine. He was pleased to see himself mentioned amongst the greats in the art world annually, and while his focus was now on child rearing, his position and status in that scene were very important to his sense of self.
Of course, the art dealer was not involved with the day-to-day upbringing of his son, choosing instead to outsource the minutia of his child's life to a host of domestic employees. A French au pair, an Irish housekeeper, and an Italian chef provided a well-rounded and international upbringing and instilled in the boy old-world traditional values of kindness, humility, and grace. In due course, Whit grew into a handsome and talented artist himself, all of the lessons and training had paid off and he was accepted into a very prestigious fine arts program at Columbia University. His father was proud but secretly pleased because he had studied art history at Yale, which everyone knew was the superior school. The art dealer had grown older and though he was still classically handsome, it was becoming more difficult for him to attract the interest of young graduate students, even the ones in the sciences. He was also struggling professionally due to a few misguided acquisitions and an inappropriate and poorly timed installation of regional Southern Mammy memorabilia. He had begun to fear that his prestige in the art world was fading.
This fear was confirmed when one idle Saturday morning while reading the most recent edition of ARTnews over a leisurely brunch, he was confronted with a front page picture of his son under the headline ‘The Art Worlds Newest Golden Boy”. Smiling back at him from the cover was a photo of his stunning son in a derelict-looking warehouse surrounded by bright and imaginative abstract oil paintings, Whit's signature style. He quickly flipped to the article, where it mentioned in passing that Whit was the son of ‘the formerly celebrated’ art dealer, but he had chosen to create his own art instead of profiting off of others' talents. The insinuation was clear to his father, and he was furious.
In his ensuing rage, the art dealer called up his favorite painting framer with a dark request. The framer, a classically trained carpenter from Poland, was summoned to the house in the Valley and tasked with creating a frame the height and width of Whit amidst a pure white canvas backdrop. Once completed, the frame was sent to the art dealer’s gallery in the city, where it sat in the middle of the room - uncovered. The father invited his son to his gallery to see his newest acquisition. He called the piece ‘Snow’ and explained to Whit that the absence of paint signified purity and neo-classic modernity. While Whit was leaning over to examine the painting, his father crept up behind him and pushed him violently into the canvas, trapping him in the frame.
The painting now reflected the extremely handsome Whit, represented as a classically formed Grecian God wearing his old paint-covered Levis and a simple white tee with a look of confused bemusement and acceptance on his face. His father was convinced that with this extraordinary painting on display, he would quickly regain his relevance in the art scene, and without his son to compete with, he would hold that position indefinitely. However, the art dealer's plan soon monumentally backfired. The ‘Snow’ painting quickly caused an uproar amongst art historians, collectors, and the general public. The juxtaposition of both classicalism and modernism in the frame and the look on Whit’s face entranced viewers, Soon people were coming from all over the world to view the painting, and a rumor quickly spread that the canvas had healing powers. A group of seven women, one each from the Seven Sisters colleges, began making a pilgrimage every weekend from their respective liberal arts institutions to the painting to leave offerings of flowers, specialty breads, and overwrought poetry for the painting, which was quickly developing its own cult following. The art dealer angrily threw away all of the altars and offerings to the painting every night and fumed at how things had turned out.
While the most recent edition of ARTnews had featured a prominent piece about the art dealer and included a retrospective of his career, the main focus of the article had been on the acquisition of the ‘Snow’ painting and emphasized his refusal to publicly state who the artist was. He was unsure what to do, as he could not sell the painting, but keeping it on display was becoming increasingly problematic. One blustery winter morning, a group of biogenetic doctoral candidates from Carnegie Melon decided to stop in to view the painting before heading to see a matinee performance of the Lion King on Broadway. The soon-to-be doctors stood in a semi-circle around the painting and made anatomical observations about the characteristics of the man on the canvas. One brought up his musculature, another his uniquely colored eyes, and the quietest of them all, a diminutive Philadelphian named Andora, mentioned the curvature of his lips. Seemingly possessed by a force within the painting, she was propelled towards the canvas where her own chapped thin lips connected directly to Whit’s. A silent alarm was activated, and a member of her cohort began filming the whole thing on his phone with the intention of uploading the video of his classmate making out with a painting to Tik Tok later. Before anyone knew what had happened, the painting sprang to life, and Whit was pulled out of the canvas and into Andora’s much smaller and weaker arms.
Nothing was said, but the attraction between the artist and the scientist was palpable, and they left the gallery hand in hand and gazing into each other's eyes. The pair walked out into the snowy Manhattan day and disappeared into the white flurries. The art dealer, alerted by the alarm, rushed to the gallery only to see the empty canvas in the middle of the room. His fear and fury co-mingled and ignited the frame in a large fiery explosion that quickly spread throughout the rest of the gallery. As he stood amongst the burning ruins of his life's work watching the invaluable art go up in flames, he began dancing until he too succumbed to the fire.
