Though the lawyer obliges, he alerts Irene to the arrangement. Gundlach suggests the lawyer draw up a contract requiring the return of the painting to Schwind in exchange for the return of his wife. Convinced of his own genius, Schwind declares that the painting will one day ‘hang in the Louvre, or the Met, or the Hermitage’. The subject of the painting is Gundlach’s wife Irene, who left her husband for Schwind Gundlach sabotages the painting as means of retaliation. The painting becomes repeatedly damaged and via the lawyer, Schwind asserts his right to restore it. In a series of flashbacks we learn that as a young lawyer the narrator represented Schwind in a disagreement with the wealthy businessman Peter Gundlach, who commissioned the painting.
Mergers and acquisitions are what he is good at, he tells us ‘the years themselves had become a ritual faithfully adhered to, case by case, client by client, contract by contract.’ Lawyers, judges and legal scholars populate Schlink’s fictions, vessels for the author’s preoccupation with moral and ethical dilemmas. Now a senior partner at his firm, he lives a comfortable existence in Frankfurt. He has devoted himself to his career as a corporate lawyer. Schlink’s protagonist and narrator is never named, appropriately, since he is curiously blank himself. The lawyer, who is in Sydney to handle the German component of a corporate acquisition, delays his return flight to uncover the identity of the painting’s anonymous donor. In an author’s note, Schlink notes that though the canvas in the novel is Richter’s, the artist Karl Schwind is ‘purely fictional’, and so too are the circumstances of its acquisition.
Unlike Duchamp, Richter depicts the woman in the stillness of a moment, a theme Schlink echoes in his novel, as his protagonist finds himself in a rare lull. Where Duchamp’s painting assembles a series of abstract shapes to convey the notion of movement, Richter’s painting is sensual, even classical in style. Richter’s painting is itself an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, one of the canonical images of modernism. A large format photograph of the original painting, one of an edition of twelve, is owned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The painting is actually Gerhard Richter’s photo-realist painting ‘Ema (Nude on a Staircase)’. Thought to be lost, the painting has an intimate connection to the lawyer’s past and this coincidence provides the novel its scaffolding. In the novel it is attributed to the painter Karl Schwind. As Bernhard Schlink’s new novel The Woman on the Stairs opens, an unnamed German lawyer views a painting titled ‘Woman on the Staircase’ in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
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