THE KNIFE THAT CUT BOTH WAYS

On BBC’s “Bright Lights” recently, David Schoffman was asked by Philip Tenson, the program’s obsequious host, how the city of Los Angeles had affected his work. As a native New Yorker, David is asked that question often and each time he modifies his answer. Perhaps reckoning that his British audience would not take umbrage, David delivered, what in my mind was his most thoughtful response.

“Los Angeles,” he began, “is a city, staggering in its ugliness. It ranks up there with Riyadh, Chernobyl and Tucson. A day does not go by where I am not struck by the city’s total disregard of urban design. It is a hodge-podge of competing affronts. It is a mass of crushing aesthetic neglect. Braids of cumbersome billboards clumsily project into the sky like lopped fingers. Pedestrian-free boulevards sob with a constant stream of slow traffic. Priapic palm trees compete joylessly with the ubiquity of cement.

“An artist can’t help but thrive in such an environment. A place so estranged from beauty, so indifferent to its own toxic shadows is an oven of ferocious artistic resentment. Every act, every thought, every gesture by the artist is an act of rebellion and critique.

“It’s an emboldening atmosphere where every creation, however slight will be an improvement. So hostile is Los Angeles to the inner eye that even minor talents thrive there.”

“Bright Lights” is fortuitously broadcast immediately following Great Britain’s most popular half hour drama, “Porticoes and Transoms” and David’s interview attracted over half a million viewers. London’s Daily Mirror reported that following the show, travel agents experienced a wave of cancellations of trips to L.A. The most popular substitution was apparently Houston.

ALETHEIA



I’ve gotten many calls since my last posting comparing the work of my good friend David Schoffman with that of my departed colleague R. B. Kitaj. Not a few people questioned my bona fides, challenging my ability, as a lapsed Catholic, to evaluate the Jewish nature of these two giants’ work. Yishai Bar Laytzan even went so far as to call me a “teleological Torquemada” and that I should “stay the hell away from Jewish history.” The Reverend Deacon Stephen Tigglight, despite being a great patron of the arts in his native Wythenshawe , expressed his strong reservations regarding my juxtaposition of Schoffman’s oeuvre to the Pentateuch. He said I hadn’t managed to assimilate the critical aesthetic differences between works that “were divinely inspired and those divinely produced.”

I stand by my assessment.

Forgetting Kitaj for the moment, David Schoffman’s reliance on formal, non-objective, non-narrative pictorial strategies is fully consistent with uniquely Judaic apophatistic skepticism. His work demands a visualization that avoids materiality. As a lapsed Catholic I am uniquely qualified to draw the appropriate distinctions. Christian art is pedagogical, Jewish art is philosophical. Christian art is illustrative, Jewish art is abstract.

The forms in Schoffman’s work confirm the paradoxical Jewish predicament of depiction versus idolatry. His rejectionist stance toward descriptive imagery solves this dilemma through his elastic use of ambiguous symbolism. Drawing from the Kabbalah, Schoffman notates and validates with great originality multiple readings of his work. To stand in front of a Schoffman is like being blinded by the Shekhinah. One is present to a palpable presence yet one remains unsure as to the exact nature of what one is seeing.

If that’s not Jewish art, I don’t know what is.

Closer To Jabès

With the death of R. B. Kitaj, the designation of preeminent contemporary Jewish painter has been bestowed upon David Schoffman. The contrasts in temperament and preoccupation of these two distinguished artists could not be more profound. Kitaj was the exquisite illustrator of themes and narratives germane to the modern, mostly secular Jewish world. His depictions of illustrious figures like Walter Benjamin, Kafka and Isaiah Berlin were indicative of his deep attachment and identification with these towering and uniquely Jewish intellectuals.

Schoffman, by contrast, eschews the literal while cultivating the riches of Jewish abstraction. Having grown up in a religious home in a religious neighborhood in Brooklyn, Schoffman’s complicated and lyrical reflections on the Jewish tradition draw as much from antiquity as they do from contemporary Jewish life. Like Schoenberg, Schoffman is obsessed with the relationship of Moses and Aaron and the uncanny nature of monotheism. The improbable attraction toward the invisible, the unempirical and the silent has been one of Schoffman’s salient themes.

Don’t look for stories or learned quotations in David’s work. In Kitaj you find an almost folkloric gloss of places and people, very much in the tradition of Chagall. Schoffman is more of a philosopher, an evoker rather than a declaimer, more in the spirit of Reinhardt, Rothko and Newman. However, unlike his predecessors, Schoffman has little patience with the severity of reductive self-denial. His is a world fully invested in the senses, a world rich in references to both the pious and the worldly, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi, the Florentine and Venetian.

Kitaj, with his lovable pedantry will be missed. Schoffman is a great admirer of, if not the work, the man and the artist. Some may incline toward Kitaj’s lovely exemplification of ideas, his richly mannered citations and his beautifully bright colors. I for one prefer the complexity and ambiguity of Schoffman’s inventions. Like arcane Talmudic texts, what is expressed is secondary to the gorgeous inevitability of its logic.

Schoffman’s “The Body Is His Book” is not a rumination on the Pentateuch as much as it is the necessary addition of an important new chapter.

IDENTITY THEFT

I was amused the other day when I received the following email:

“Dear Mr. Malaspina,

What you write about David Schoffman is simply not true. Week after week I read your postings and each one is more fantastic than the next. You are spreading lies, weaving elaborate fables, prevaricating and exaggerating. You are a mythmaker, a calumnist, a delusional fantasist. You, with all your convoluted inventions are a literary nuisance.

I don’t even know where to begin. David Schoffman has never been to Morocco, has never exhibited his paintings in Laos, does not windsurf, does not speak Dutch, was not romantically involved with Carla Motta and her twin sister and has never spent a single solitary night in jail.

I have known Schoffman for over twenty years and I can assure you, he does not practice Sufism nor is he a vegetarian. In all the years I’ve known him he never once mentioned an epistolary relationship with Goddard, nor have I ever heard him discuss UFO’s.

The things you write about are spun from whole cloth. They are complete fabrications. As to your purpose, I have no idea.

The David Schoffman I know is a church going father of four who has spent the better part of his adult life practicing family law in Crown Point, Indiana. He hasn’t had a string of exotic mistresses nor does he associate with dancers and architects. True, he paints, but despite his impressive talent, he has never exhibited his work. (I own one of his oils, “Children Playing,” and it hangs proudly above our fireplace).

Mr. Malaspina, you do yourself and your readers a disservice with your weekly deceptions, regardless of how engaging and well written your posts are. In the future, before you publish another vignette, please send it to me for fact checking.

Sincerely yours,
Benny Toland”

Its funny to think that there is someone else with the name David Schoffman. I and so many others associate that name with the high-minded pursuit of aesthetic enchantment and delight. Odd to think that he could be confused with some guy in Indiana.

Anyway, Benny and anyone else out there who is puzzled about the identity of the man the intellectual community knows as “the” David Schoffman, I have posted a recent photo of him above.

THE BREAD OF LIFE

Any pleasure that David Schoffman may take from life will only be that which manages to slip between the gallops of recollection. He lives with the murmur of futility. He paints in order to recover the ignorance that precedes memory.

When he studied with the writer, Allejo Abulafia, the ageless visionary and grand master of Ladino prose, he discovered the inevitability of sadness. Abulafia, who lived for many years among the flaming dunes of southern Morocco, saw life as something entombed in predestination. To him, our personal histories were merely grim rocks of insignificance. It was the artist’s bitter duty to impersonate meaning through creative introspection. The products of that puny introspection should be fit to rest upon Earth’s chest with a noble dignity. If it passes that test, then one has created Art.

Abulafia’s imagination, in his later years, was a dry river. Schoffman told me once that it was his mentor’s weakness for atonement that proved to be his undoing. “Be quick, before you are crucified by time,” were the last words Abulafia wrote in a journal entry titled “Conclusions.”

FATEFUL DETOURS



Experiencing conversation with David Schoffman is a geometrical progression of ever widening tangents and digressions. It’s a mind made transparent by the jags of association. A minor mention of a mosquito bite may lead to a lengthy discourse on Elias Canetti’s “The Agony of Flies.” The subject of sports may lead into Robert Musil’s passion for weightlifting. Musil inevitably leads into Bismarck, which always ends up with Henry Kissinger, the bombing of Cambodia and the overthrow of Allende.

Once, at a dinner party at the home of Maurice Vitel, the former French Ambassador to Luxembourg, the conversation veered toward the question of whether it was morally defensible to poison a flock of sparrows if they actively hindered the cultivation of one’s vineyard. A heated exchange ensued between those who militantly defended the rights of animals and those who militantly defended the rights of wine lovers. In a rare moment of détente while the debaters regrouped around aged cognac and Haitian cigars, Schoffman recounted the following anecdote:

“The failed writer, Boris Khrobkov, a distant relative of Isaac Babel, labored his entire life on an unfinished novel on the subject of the Huguenot exile. Living in the Soviet Union severely proscribed his ability to do the proper historical research and so he petitioned the cultural commissar of Vitebsk a well as the president of the writer’s union for permission to travel abroad. Despite his connection to Babel, his permission was granted for a one-week trip to Paris. His wife and two small children were, of course, required to stay behind.

“On his last day in Paris, where incidentally he did much drinking and very little research, he decided, on a whim, to visit the grave of Ingres at Père-Lachaise. It was late fall and sparrows had gathered in clusters around the islands of breadcrumbs left behind by the cemetery workers. Khrobkov, hung over and bitter about his impending return, grabbed a sparrow by the throat and crushed its skull like a walnut.

“Like any good Russian, he followed that arbitrary act of cruelty with an hysterical, inconsolable fit of weeping. At the very height of his shameless bleating, the great Cartier-Bresson walked by with his small field spaniel Molière. Always ready with his 35mm Lieca rangefinder, he snapped the now famous photograph 'Le Poét Pleurant.'

"Khrobkov returned to Moscow where he was accused of treason and was shot by a firing squad."

THE ANGELS NEVER TAKE FLIGHT



His eyes were like tongues inflamed. He had been up all night and his lids were a soggy crimson (had he been weeping?). His unsteady voice was like a dogcart over gravel. His hands were black with charcoal, his nails, early moons of soot.

He had been drawing.

It was Paris in the 70’s and David Schoffman was known as the hardest working, most unproductive painter among his peers. Sustained by faith, hope and Pernod his long apprenticeship was cheered only by the occasional trip to Rome. He was in the habit of working all night in an improvised studio a few blocks north of the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur. He was at war with what he called “the thunderous silence of Watteau and the silent thunder of Rothko.”

In those days, painting was more a confession then a profession. “Career” was a foreign phrase from the taxonomy of landlords and martinets. Painting was an obsession, a calling, a slow spiral into the perils self-knowledge. It took residence within the entrails of an artist with a fixed and incorruptible mastery. It withstood mockery and failure. It was the insatiable lover.

I am brought back to these memories as I vacation presently in a small villa in Kusadasi. Watching the wind sift through the palmettos, I hear the fishermen casting their nets into the quiet Aegean. Trawling for eel and octopus is also not a “career.”

We were right in those days. And we continue being right.

RESCUED BY ABSENCE



Just when David’s fragile tranquility was almost fully restored, he was forced, once again, to mingle among the footmen and princes of Los Angeles’ artworld. What cruel misfortune to have to endure the festive klatch of a “closing reception.” What horror feigning unmerry gladness among the chilly cognoscenti. I’m so grateful to be curled and wet within the comforting folds of Mother France.

I heard the reception was so crowded one had to wedge one’s way to the bar like a pickpocket in order to get a plastic cup of meek vinegary wine.

I heard that people hissed that Carpentier’s death was fortunate for sales, a crass, though accurate assessment. I’m told that my work was described as gratuitously concupiscent, a judgment I find typically American. Only Schoffman enjoyed unqualified acclaim, a magnet for flattery as if he were a rich and ailing uncle.

Though I left behind no gilded monuments, I was far from disgraced. I would be happy to return to Los Angeles and exhibit more work. Perhaps I will include palm trees in my next series.

CODA

Schoffman informs me that the unbuttoned denizens of Los Angeles need an extra week to see “Three Mendacious Minds”. Tranquilized by summer’s beneficence, armies of tardy sophisticates beseeched the gallery into extending the exhibition for several more days. Some have actually become zealots, returning to the show with the frequency of ardent lovers. I am heartened and grateful to these unappeasable enthusiasts and they are all welcome to visit me in Paris.

Cradled as he is by admirers, David Schoffman is nonetheless an unsatisfied man. When I saw him at the opening he appeared rain-beaten, almost bestial. He never gives throat to pleasure, as if the turbulence of his inner-life is too stirring. Contemplative to the point of desolate, some say he comes off as bruised and discourteous.

I’m told there will be a closing reception on Friday evening, September 7th. If you think David appears drowsy and disconsolate …. lui donnez une étreinte.

Tell him you were sent by Currado!

GRAVEN SILENCE



When David lived in Rome he had a small studio on Via della Reginella above an antiquarian book dealer named Castelvetro. Old Castelvetro would sit on a tattered folding chair in front of his shop immersed in the unraveling of knots plaiting long lengths of delicate twine. His gestures were slow and deliberate. Though void of all gaiety, he was profoundly unserious. With a glazier’s tact his feminine fingers would light ubiquitous cigarettes as he dispensed his primeval street wisdom. He spoke often of Italy and the Shoah, never with bitterness or anger but as if, through a verbal exertion, he could clarify a personal enigma.

One of his favorite books in his shop, a book he insisted he would never sell, was an early 19th century volume of the Talmudic tractate Sotah. He claimed it was the only remaining volume from the famous Leghorn Benedetti Edition. Schoffman was fascinated with this book.

Minimally ornamented, each page with its tiny marginalia of commentary, held for David a peculiar fascination. Castelvetro was very much taken with David’s passionate interest and allowed him to leaf through the surprisingly robust pages any time he felt like it.

David began doing drawings based on these pages and it is from these drawings came the idea for “The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings”.

Castelvetro passed away a few years ago and all my attempts to find out the fate of this beautiful book have come to naught. Perhaps it will turn up one day.

THE OTHER LOS ANGELES



I am happy to be back in Paris, though I fully enjoyed my short sojourn in Los Angeles. Despite what many of my countrymen believe, southern California is not a tattered patch of inarticularity. Who are we to pass judgment? Are we so innocent as to satisfy our flawed self-image with a nostalgic look at Camus, Foucault and Aron? I have news for you. For every Derrida there are a thousand sausage-makers.

Schoffman surrounds himself with an exciting coterie of distinguished artists and intellectuals, all living under the balmy palms of L.A. The poet, Justin Spens has a silver-tipped wit and an astonishing reservoir of eccentric anecdotes. Sitric Hogan, the bird-boned dulcimerist, has the tenderest demeanor and a gift for celestial sight. The satanic imagination of Colette Nolan is thrilling evidence of the obsolescence of interdiction. J. Courtney Wain, despite the inelastic honorific is a multi-levered lover of all things Baltic and is as at home with the lilting lyrics of Juhan Liiv as she is with the minimalism of Lepo Sumera. With all this stimulating company it is amazing that Schoffman finds any time to paint.

But he is, as the sculptor Bernard Fann told me as he dropped me off at LAX, the consummate workaholic. “He inhales with a casual greed what Wallace Stevens called the ‘debris of life and mind’. He exhales paintings.”

A RARE CLASH OF BELLS

The exhibition of David Schoffman’s paintings is an act of benevolence. Highly regarded internationally with a wide rabble of collectors and supporters, Schoffman prefers the unctuous carriage of a buttery mole to the extroverted flamboyance of a lionized genius. The crowds at DCA Fine Art this month recognize this rare opportunity, knowing that David and his work may vanish without a pant for the foreseeable future.

With only a couple of weeks left in the show (Delia Cabral is locked in a ricochet of intensive negotiation trying to extend the exhibition for at least an additional week), the crush of visitors has added an atmosphere of frenzy to the normally quiet gallery.

Careless wanderers mingle with inquisitive art students; swanky westside bon vivants rub elbows with humorless intellectuals: curators, consumed in the uncoiling of Schoffman’s visual puns nestle next to corporate art consultants looking for baubles compatible with Feng Shui.

One thing all have in common is the lamentable knowledge that Schoffman prefers to remain invisible and that if he’s up on the bandstand its best to get up and dance.

WHAT IS OBVIOUS MUST STILL BE STATED

I feel that I must rise to the defense of my friend and colleague, David Schoffman. Someone described his works at DCA as “puny pageants of painterly dexterity.” Another naysayer dilated over “the triviality of his technical mastery.” My favorite was the Dutch critic who called his work “the high watermark of vapid formal complexity for the sheer sake of perfection.”

It seems apparent that these observations are unaccountable to the actual history and conceptual underpinnings of these important pictures. Accustomed to the predictable academicism of post-modernism, David’s breathtaking originality evaded the scope of their understanding.

Far from the withdrawing roar of influence, distanced from the anxious gloss of history, Schoffman watched a thousand sleepless nights from his hilltop studio in East Jaffa where “Rattling Traffic” was conceived.

Based on the prison diaries of 17th century mutineer Carlos Bones, these works are meant to echo the artifacts of Bones’ cloying discontent. Bones, as he longed for what he called the “coughs of the strong seas,” drew strange pictograms on the margins of his scattered papers. Soft rain, surf, shorelines, splintered circles, rainbows twined with ribbons, shadows and piers are but a few of the images found in these diaries.

“Rattling Traffic” is the curve that mediates Bones’ bitter longings with Schoffman’s lamplit exile. Any close reading of David’s work makes this point more than perfectly clear.

THE FIRST NOTICES ARE BEGINNING TO APPEAR ...

This one from Hugo Ruggieri of Milano Finanza:

"David Schoffman began his inauspicious artistic apprenticeship with the pious intent of an honest cobbler. His early work was greeted, however, by the jeers and growls of New York’s critical community. Those first fruits prompted Schoffman toward silence and exile.

"In 1979, he moved to Paris where he met Currado Malaspina. Though he found the mercurial artist sad and opaque, they formed an artistic alliance based on a shared vision of what they called “divided reckonings.”

“'Rattling Traffic' with its buckled diamonds of pigment and channels of complicated forms found its genesis during those gray years abroad. Those faint traces and summery of spells are now fully realized in this odd and important series now on view at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica, California, USA. "

A few days ago, by the solemn banks of Lake Arrowhead where the common life holds greater purchase than the consternations of high culture, I met with David Schoffman to smooth over our differences. We were joined in our Edenic retreat by DCA Fine Art’s governors of grace, Delia Cabral and Kristina Ramsay.

Amidst the nearly deafening arpeggios of the black-necked stilts and the low whistle of the abundant whimbrel, we navigated the estuaries of our disenchantments and reached something resembling a détente.

Kristina, who in her charcoal Barcelona resembled Mérimée's fiery Carmen, was stinging in her rebukes. “We are not at all interested in the bony roots of your infantile spat,” she roared with Antigonean resolve, “you are rotted by the shadows of memory, ruined by pride and disfigured by the phosphorescence of your piffling differences! Have pity and quiet the pendulum of your mutual denunciations! There is a dark cloud swelling over the gallery, discord leads only to the culverts of disaster.”

Properly chastened, our spirits plunged as if hurled from a tower. As we watched the Dipper rise over the glassy lake we shook hands with the weak grip of children. We muttered our apologies with the commonplaces of strangers.

I saw Schoffman’s eyes well up with tears.

I earnestly love that man.

HUMILITY

No work, no matter how accomplished, can justify the unseemly display of hubristic excess on the part of David Schoffman, occasioned by the current exhibition at DCA Fine Art. I too would be pleased if Stan Pessoa described my work on Charlie Rose as “the greengages of art history’s next page.” I would be thrilled if Landor Savage pre-purchased ten percent of next year’s studio output. My lips would brighten and my soul would sing if Epitaph Press were publishing a catalogue raisonné of my early work, even without the critical essay by Chaumeur. But Schoffman has become insufferable.

He’s behaving like a child. Like an eddying elf preening over a cooked biscuit, his giddy self-congratulations are tedious and embarrassing.

I need my tranquility restored if I am to get back to Paris and work productively. I find myself wishing Schoffman some spectacular calamity, shingles, a swollen tongue, a lost limb.

Yes, my work is being well received, but that smug and stately David Schoffman exceeds me at every turn.

My withering hand beseeches you my readers …. Do not get caught in the maelstrom. Schoffman must dismount from his lofty star!

GESTURES SPILLING FROM CRATES

RATTLING TRAFFIC AT DCA FINE ART





Few people realize that the paintings and drawings David Schoffman is exhibiting at DCA this summer are commonly referred to as “The Lost Works.” The pictures literally disappeared after “Yellow Tuesday”, that fateful and largely misunderstood June day in Paris many years ago. Like much of the neighborhood surrounding the Montsouris, David’s studio was looted.

“Mardi Jaune” was a turning point for the School of Pestilence. Our collective uncertainty gave way to lassitude, which in turn submitted to apathy. David was particularly affected. Years of anticipation made him exhausted. With his studio in tatters, stained by the blood of youth, David returned to New York with whatever work he could salvage from the wreckage.

A few years ago, Ricardo de Campos, the Portuguese lace magnate donated a considerable portion of his art collection to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Among the works were three paintings and three drawings from Schoffman’s "Rattling Traffic" series. Seeking restitution, (the movie “A Heart More Distant” is based of this), Schoffman was forced into an unnerving period of angry litigation. The pictures were eventually returned.

Perhaps the publicity inspired by this current exhibition will help locate the remaining paintings.

IN ADVANCE OF THE DCA FINE ART EXHIBITION

I am reminded by Alsatian poet Bertrand Caillebotte's sonnet, “Douze Façons Pour Se Pencher,” that rage and envy are “…doublé par la dette et désespère.”

The falling out between Schoffman and I was caused by a remarkably petty affair. We were at the Beaubourg, admiring “Violin et Verre,” the 1913 still life of Juan Gris when I made the innocent observation that the painting reminded me of David’s picture “The Loom of Minerva.” Well, if you are at all acquainted with David and his pathological “anxiety of influence,” you can probably figure out what happened next.

With blood rushing toward his shiny grey dome and his face contorted into a scuffling beak he looked at me with a contempt I had never imagined him capable of. “Malaspina, you are a scab, you are stagnant water, you repel me,” and with that he turned on his heel and marched out of the museum.

Two frosty years passed without as much as a word until last month’s invitation to exhibit with him in Los Angeles. Well, I have wearied of the corruption of our unfortunate acrimony. David is, quite frankly, a remarkable painter. I am honored to exhibit with him at DCA Fine Art and I look forward to it.

I hope he has lost his preoccupation with Gris.

Malaspina '07


FOR THE SAKE OF NOBLER INTENTIONS

Cushioned by idle comforts, softened by southern Californian lassitude, David Schoffman’s calcified intellect has turned malignant. What madness! Tempted by the faint purrs of public acclaim, (such an unlawful prize!), Schoffman has tricked me, (yes, tricked me!) into participating in an exhibition with him and Micah Carpentier.

If rousing the dead were not crime enough, he acts as if our hideous blood feud was but a lover’s spat. Has that drunken spider gone insane!? Schoffman, living as he does in that ivy-mantled tower of international renown, thinks time has healed the deeper vitals of my rage!

It has not!

I have, however agreed to this exhibition, in no small measure due to the infinite charms of Delia Cabral, owner and director of DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica, California. (If Brecht survived those miserable palm trees, so can I).

Cabral (which in Aramaic means “sternest minds amaze”) is a remarkable impresario who combines a flawless eye with a deep commitment to tasteful elegance. She does this with the dreamful ease of bladed grass. She is patient with my worthless rages, imperturbable toward my luxuriant complaints.

The exhibition will take place in August. I may or may not come to the opening. I will not show my finest work. I will not be vengeful nor will I be forgiving.


Carpentier '81

PETULANCE

The charming and comely interviewer, Francine Claudel, is a renowned vedette of the French stage and screen. Her stature in the Francophone world is analogous to that of Halina Reijn’s among the Dutch or Sinead Kennedy among the Irish.

By no means an expert in the arts, her questions to Schoffman were pleasant, well-meaning generalizations aimed toward the typical viewer. What prompted David’s vitriolic riposte was the simple inquiry as to the “style” of painting he engaged in.

As all painters know, “style” is a word used mostly by philistines and knaves eager to characterize a person’s oeuvre as neatly as one would characterize an ice cream flavor.

Poor, unsuspecting Francine used the wrong word to the wrong guy but as they say in L.A. “it made great television!”

Here is the notorious segment from TF1's series "AMERICAN PAINTERS" aired on February 15th 1991

Irritabilité

Boulevard Saint Marcel was clamorous with traffic and the boisterous, manic racket of urban birdsong. Armies of ignorant bureaucrats obediently made their way toward the slow death of their day jobs and Schoffman and I were feeling comically extraneous. We were sitting at an outdoor table at Le Canon des Gobelins, drinking strong Turkish coffee and nibbling on their wildly overrated Topfen Strudel.

It had been a few years since our last meeting and it took a while to get accustomed to the harsh cadences of Schoffman’s New Yorkese. “Those fuckers don’t know the difference between a paintbrush and a baseball bat!” Tiny missiles of quark cheese sprayed the table like cluster bombs as he spoke. “Those French pricks willfully misunderstand my work. They’re a bunch of anti-Semitic, anti-American, toothless blowhards. They should piss blood, the whole blackhearted lot of them!”

What occasioned this torrent of petulant rancor was a review that appeared in Le Monde under the byline of one Denis Bruel. Describing Schoffman’s recent exhibition of miniature paintings on zinc plates, Bruel likened them to “fancy ashtrays, the kind an uncle brings back from a trip abroad”. He went on to characterize Schoffman as an artist who peaked “too soon and too slightly”. He finished by saying that the American public was to Schoffman “like an adoring mistress, while the French are like a long suffering wife who knows all too well her husband’s faults and foibles”.

I have too say, it was a cruel rebuke even by French standards. David was justifiably annoyed though I remember thinking at the time how much of the criticism rang true. It was a pivotal moment in his career. Professionally, he dropped off the face of the Earth. He hasn’t shown his work, publish an essay or deliver a lecture since. For years, he’s been laboring on his “One-Hundred Paintings” project and I’ve heard through friends that it is the finest work he has ever done.

Meanwhile, those “blackhearted French” have not forgotten my good friend David. TF1 recently ran a four part series on American painters in which David was featured prominently. They called him “the reclusive, mercurial artist who embodies the rough strife of creativity’s embrace. He is a good painter with a bad character.”

ALBERNHEIT

In all the years that we have known one another, Schoffman and I have shown our work together only once.

In the spring of 1990, Berlin was a city marinating in adolescent exuberance. Art galleries were opening everywhere and in the most unlikely places. Gallerie Kunstbrauerel 17 on Zionskirchplatz, under the ominous shadow of the crumbling evangelical church was one such place. It was run by Claudia Musil, the flamboyant doyenne of the German avant-garde, whose chiseled features and colorful hats became an emblem for Euro-hipness.

She asked David and I to design a collaborative exhibition based loosely on the theme of Habermas’ theory of communicative reason, a fashionably obscure post-modern war-horse. Neither David nor I knew anything about Habermas, (which probably made us uniquely qualified for the endeavor), but a friend of mine, a professor at Heidelberg University explained that it had something to do with language.

Well, to be brief, Schoffman and I bought a small German phrase book, a bunch of stencils and some imported Krylon spray paint. After getting furiously drunk, we went to the gallery and got to work painting long German sentences on the crisp white walls, laughing so hard we were in agony. When we were done, the room looked like the aftermath of a verbal food-fight.

Non sequiturs dripped aimlessly next to declamatory broadsides. Fractured syntax squatted defiantly beside eloquent lyricism. Rhymed couplets were paired with garish profanity. The place was a mish-mash of random gibberish, a disconnected, poorly executed hodgepodge of driveling dreck.

The critics loved it.

Schoffman and I have been pretty successful in Germany ever since, but inevitably, whenever we show, our latest work is always compared unfavorably to that legendary frolic at Kunstbrauerel 17.

Bête Comme Un Peintre

David Schoffman draws with the fixed certainty of a caliph but I wouldn’t call him a natural draftsman. His confident line is ruffled by a sense of reckless speculation.

I recently saw an exhibition of David’s drawings and was struck by his poetic sense for the page. Silent intervals give way to scrambled agitation invoking the messiness of thought with the clarity of articulation. His true debt is to the tussled sheets of Frederico Zuccero, those rough sketches cluttered with pentimenti.

In a recent interview with the art historian Toshiro Oh, David described his connection to Italian Mannerism as “a prayerless captivity.” It was a typical Schoffman comment, empty, pretentious and obfuscating.

David, if you are reading this: Shut up and draw!

SINCE UNSUNG

Since the inception of this blog I have received innumerable e-mails with specific questions about David Schoffman’s life. I must admit, I’m a bit envious of his allure.

Many of the inquiries are silly, like, “What does he look like in pajamas?” or “Is it true that his back is covered with pastures of white hair?” Some of the queries are beyond my area of expertise, like, “When is his birthday?” or “Does he use oil or acrylic gesso?”

But certain questions come up time and time again, so I’ll begin to address those that seem to be on many people’s minds.

Dahlia Danton from Los Angeles was apparently one of David’s students at UCLA. She wondered if there was any truth to the rumor that at one time David was a member of a punk rock band.

Well Dahlia, the real story goes as follows: In 1979 David lived in Dublin and dabbled in music, particularly drumming. He was particularly taken with the Takhas, a central Asia percussion instrument made from bamboo and llama hides and sounds like the dropping of cans. Through friends he met Kevin Daley, one of the original members of the Saucerspoons. (This was long before the ‘Spoons’ recorded their “Live in Bethlehem” album). One night in a pub in Doolin, Schoffman scrawled on a beer napkin the lyrics to “Tongued By Philomel,” which was recorded by the Saucerspoons in 1984. The Spoons performed it on “Vin Geller’s Top Pops,”and the song rose to number 38 on the Billboard charts.

He never wrote another song but of late he has been struggling on a contemporary rendering of Kol Nidre, the Jewish prayer for rain.

RAIN MAN MEETS REMBRANDT

In a 1999 review in “Cahiers D’Ivers,” the writer Raymond Quineau described David Schoffman’s paintings as “outsider art performed by an insider.”

An atypically apposite observation by a typically undistinguished critic.

From the late 80’s “The Shape Of Sleep” through “Cohanim,” “The Loom Of Minerva,” and “Rattling Traffic” of the 1990’s and on to the current series of one-hundred paintings, Schoffman’s work looks like the product of a highly sophisticated lunatic.

On the one hand the work is steeped in art historical allusions. On the other hand his projects are always disturbingly unique. Schoffman inclines toward an aesthetic of repetition and like many “outsiders” he has an unnerving patience for detail. He is fervently devoted to the diminutive dot. Monumental pieces are painted with #00 brush. Layers of complicated patterns are composed of tiny, tic-tac size brushstrokes. His pictures trill with an insect-like drone and being with a group of these works can be a profoundly disturbing experience.

I recently ran into Quineau in Rome where he was working as a consultant for an anonymous American art collector. I asked him if he was keeping up on the vicissitudes of Schoffman’s erratic career. He answered me with an icy glower. “These days, Malaspina, I don’t look at art … I just buy the stuff.”

ACCIDENTAL AFFINITIES

An important influence on David Schoffman’s development as a painter was the legendary Cuban conceptual artist, Micah Carpentier. Author of innumerable manifestoes, Carpentier is best known for two enduring masterpieces: “The Mind Is A Place Of Vague Things” and “The Song Of Degrees.”

As a young art student Schoffman served as an informal amanuensis to the reclusive master, answering mail, performing tasks around the studio and tending the garden. “Idleness and humility,” Carpentier would intone, “are strangers to me.”

Schoffman claims to have had a hand in conceiving “The Song Of Degrees.” He is lying.

Carpentier’s nephew has devoted his life to maintaining his uncle’s powerful legacy. He is the executor of his estate and the editor of his massive literary output.

He has a modest website where examples of “Degrees” can be seen.

(http://www.artmajeur.com/micahcarpentier/)

I miss Micah. He was a good and dear friend. I have posted above, one of my favorite photographs of him, playfully hiding behind his beautiful paper bags.

THE GIFT

The other day I was leafing through an old weather beaten copy of Dolfeto’s classic novella “Besos del Follaje”. I love the chapter where he describes in excruciating detail the luckless pair, Monique and Simon, getting married. Drawn by strong but unwarranted passion, the two of them shuffle nervously at the muddy makeshift alter on Fern Hill. Dolfeto is a master in combining comedy and rage in an elegantly dissonant prose.

I had forgotten that this particular edition (Goulote, 1989) included black and white reproductions from Schoffman’s earlier series “Chorister.” It really was an inspired choice. These moon-blanched images conjure so poetically the atmosphere of irreverent reverence that Dolfeto was so famous for.

I’m embarrassed to confess that my copy of the novella was actually inscribed to me. It reads: “To Malaspina, toward whom I have mixed feelings.”

THE BODY IS HIS BOOK (continued)

It has always mystified me how a recluse like David Schoffman found such a devoted following. I was in Shanghai last week, meeting with a group of junior curators from the Quijon Bo when David’s name came up.

“Oh yes …. We studied his work in graduate school. Is he still working on “The Body Is His Book?” Is he really making one-hundred paintings?” “Have you seen any?” “What is he like?” “He looks just like John Malkovich!”

Schoffman only shows his work on rare occasions and must be coaxed to do so. He devotes himself to large-scale operatic projects that take years to complete. He keeps critics and curators at bay and is even guarded among his colleagues.

And yet, whether I’m in Shanghai, Tokyo, Anatolia, Zurich, New York or Miami, people are fiercely interested in David Schoffman’s work.

So, for the record: “The Body Is His Book: One Hundred Paintings” is about half finished. David has about fifty stunning images hung in orderly rows on his studio walls. The work is rich and complex and unlike anything else out there. He is patiently working every day, slowly bringing the work to a state of startling perfection.

Also for the record: He looks nothing like John Malkovich.

DRAWING ON IDEALS

Among life’s necessary misfortunes is the need to earn a living. I’ve always been lucky along those lines. Ever since my first exhibition at Gallerie Perec, I have managed to sustain a comfortable existence.
(see: http://www.artmajeur.com/curradomalaspina/) From real estate moguls to the despots of dingy caliphates, my work has been collected by a wide clique of minor mavens.

Schoffman, God bless his noble heart, always had trouble with the mercantile aspect of his chosen vocation. He sees his work as a critique of capitalism and the fact that most artwork is reduced to mere baubles for the well heeled has irked him since the beginning of his career.

I remember one heated conversation that nearly ended our friendship. We were sipping mojitos at Café Marti in Santiago de Cuba after delivering back-to-back lectures at Universidad Oriente at a conference on Aesthetics. Maybe it was the Cuban water, (though more likely the Cuban rum) but Schoffman was rambling on about the “theory of reification” and “commodity fetishism.” At one point I snapped, grabbed Schoffman by the collar and hollered in his face: “If Titian could sell his work to Charles V, who, neither holy nor Roman was certainly a son of a bitch, then certainly I can sell my work to the Sultan of Brunei!”

I have to say one thing for my dear, pure and righteous friend. He puts his money where his mouth is. Schoffman draws the figure with a devotion and the prolonged patience of a mendicant lama. His steely determination and delicate touch has produced some of the most lyrical works on paper in recent memory. Committed to his ideals, he sells most of his drawings for under $100.

Making these important works of art accessible to everyone is as commendable as it is professionally irresponsible. It simply makes all the rest of us artists look bad.

I recently ran into Schoffman in Rome. I was there participating in a symposium with the improbable title “Guido Reni and Contemporary Figurative Painting.” I was consoling myself with a Campari and soda at Aretino’s on Via Vittore Emanuelle when who walks in but David Schoffman arm in arm with the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever seen. “Malaspina,” he roared in a typically Ugly American fashion, “What the hell are you doing here?” When he introduced me to his gorgeous companion as “my wife, Nadya,” I realized how private and reclusive Schoffman really is. He is fond of quoting Maimonides’ aphoristic prescription for serious endeavor – “Don’t waste time being sociable” – but I had no idea to what extreme he was prepared to take it. My ignorance of the basic fact that my good friend was married both astonished and embarrassed me. All these years, and all I really knew about him was his work.

When I returned to Paris I was determined to learn as much as I could about this puzzlingly interesting painter. It became an obsession. I interviewed anyone I could who had even the remotest contact with him. Press clippings and exhibition announcements described the public Schoffman. It was Schoffman the man that piqued my curiosity and like many serious people, there isn’t much of a paper trail. To say that outside his work he has led a life without incident would be a gross over-simplification. It is really the fact that outside of his paintings and his writings, all else pales into insignificance.

I did, however, learn one tidbit of personal data that if shared would not, (I hope), compromise his guarded nature. It seems that Schoffman collects fluffy slippers that are in the shapes of caricatured animals. He has hundreds, if not thousands of pairs. His collection is so comprehensive that he is often consulted by professionals in the field.

It’s an unfortunate hobby for such a distinguished mind, but then again … who am I to judge.