Like many immigrants to the United States, David Schoffman experienced fully both the exuberance of opportunity and the diligence of pain. His early struggles with idiomatic English were often comic. Overhearing how an acquaintance had “quit cold turkey,” he wondered for years about the hazards of the nation’s ubiquitous deli counters. When an embattled critic described his first one-man show as “the trifling bathos of a party-hearty paper-pusher,” he was completely flummoxed, and remains so to this day.
Like Unamuno’s Quixote, David found his true fatherland in exile. Though never comfortable with America’s Levitic distrust of the senses, he is fully at ease in the country’s ritual embrace of pragmatic, can-do independence. He realized early that the culture was a thriving polyphony of personal re-invention. Together with lawyers and clergymen, schemers, rouges, recluses and visionaries stoked the hot flame of liberty’s torch. It’s a nation of cardsharps and Schoffman fell in love with it as only one not native to it can.
His rise to the upper echelons of artistic Elysium was an unparalleled act of creative deception. Claiming to be the illegitimate son of the eccentric Marchesa Luisa Casati, he inveigled an audience with Jefferson MacNeice, the former curator of painting and drawing at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge. Passing off some drab watercolors of his “mother” that he hastily painted on the train from New York, he arranged an exhibition devoted to the beddabled Casati legacy. For a fifty percent split on the proceeds I agreed to write the catalog essay and filled it with mad claims, cross-referenced footnotes and a phony blurb from a feeble Andre Derain.
The rest is (recent art) history.
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