And now a few words about the late Cuban artist, Micah Carpentier. Schoffman and I met him in Zurich where he was enjoying the benefits of an unearned fame. He had talents that appealed to his Swiss hosts; a love of middlebrow poetry, an aptitude for the local patois, knowledge of useless facts and the ability to persuade through flattery.
This was in the early eighties, shortly before he died and there was little left of the old Carpentier, standard-bearer of the Latin American avant-garde.
He is best known for his eccentric “The Song Of Degrees,” a series of lush, virtuosic drawings on tawdry paper bags. (Some of these works can be seen on a website maintained by his nephew, also named Micah Carpentier, at http://www.artmajeur.com/micahcarpentier/).
Wrongfully accused of being overly facile,libeled as hollow and impossibly vain, Carpentier destroyed warehouses of work with the appointed sureness of a monarch. He would violently defenestrate huge unfinished canvases and litter his studio with the crumpled pulp of rejected works on paper. In the spring of 1963, enraged and defeated, Carpentier had an epiphany.
The work he destroyed had a hideous form of majesty. In their disheveled state they retained an impossible dignity. Through injury his work was finally redeemed.
He developed a hunger for detritus. He fastened on decay like a zealot. To him, the brackish, the orphaned and the shabby were suddenly the splendid and the serious. Elated that he had finally learned to lure junk to perfection, he began work on his series of bags that to this day have a strange and enduring beauty.
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