CALYPSO
The lamentable year teaching life drawing at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków was a year David Schoffman would prefer to forget. The rivalries among the singularly ungifted faculty were mind numbing in their petty insignificance. The students were incorrigibly lazy, preferring to spend their afternoons drinking Wisniak and eating bigos. The models were torpid and fat.
Like all the decisions in his life, both bad and good, this one was motivated by a woman. Malgorzata Tuwim was by all accounts, an enchantress without peer. She was like a Celtic queen with her green-hazel eyes and bright copper hair. David referred to her as his Thracian Nereid.
She was also as toxic as bromine.
I think David did something like two thousand drawings of her. Before moving back to New York, he buried them in a shallow ditch on the outskirts of Opatów behind the now defunct saddle factory.
These drawings have recently come to light and after six months of restoration, fifty-five of them are being exhibited at Knoblauchgalerie in Berlin.
Malgo was at the opening and she remains as beautiful as ever.
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