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.”
