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| David Schoffman and Dahlia Danton, Cancun, 2012 |
The meteoric success of David Schoffman's artistic enterprise is due in no small measure to his wife of twenty-seven years, Genviève Belleseins-Chatte. Acting as his publicist, business manager, ghost writer, amanuensis and mother confessor, Belleseins-Chatte tirelessly devoted herself to her husband's career. It was Belleseins-Chatte who planted phantom bidders at countless auction houses, who surreptitiously hired "critics" to write glowing magazine and newspaper reviews and who single-handedly negotiated the now legendary mid-career retrospective at the Hebonshirre in London.
Genviève Belleseins-Chatte is also a remarkable and capable woman in her own right. For years, an associate professor of semiotics at Rutgers, she is the author of some two dozen books including the classic, genre-bending literary whodunit "Dismantled Cars and Buttoned Cloth." I always thought she was too good for my friend David.
Now we learn that Schoffman is just another spineless Lothario. It is now clear that this philandering skirt chaser has been exceeding even the French in his penchant for extra-curricular romance. His follies have left his intimates aghast. Now he stands an exquisite ruin, a royal remnant of his unearned renown.
And for whom does his avid heart beat? What feathery frolic authored his demise? Which ravishing strumpet indiscreetly bared her bonnet to the public causing the scandal that threatens to end Schoffman's supremacy?
It is none other than the silken-haired, white-throated third-rate painter Dahlia Danton!
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| Portrait of Philip, Oil on canvas, Dahlia Danton 2012 (courtesy of MacNeice/Fuller Gallery, NY) |
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