DAVID SCHOFFMAN: THE MAN, THE ARTIST

People often ask me what it’s like to be an intimate friend of such an exotic character as David Schoffman. They see his work, hear his lectures and read his essays and they imagine an artist of uncommon decency, rapacious erudition, solemn dignity and incorruptible determination. They envision a glamorous bon vivant whose good fortune is the well-deserved recompense of genius. They picture him in his studio, where choruses of angels guide the splendored strokes of his brilliant intuition. I think to most people, David is the stuff of legend, a mythological archetype of their idea of the artist.

I recently chanced upon of a short film of David Schoffman in situ, depicting a typical day as he tries to wrestle the savage paroxysms of inspiration.

LITERATURE

St. Mark’s Helium Table, David Schoffman’s first and only book of poetry, was published amid a cloudbank of controversy. Written in the early 80’s, a period in which David was involved with an unholy host of deviants and crackpots, the book is replete with gorgeous renderings of what he called “life’s unsavories.”

The contentiousness surrounding this slim volume of verse centered around the depiction of Girat Verhoeven, known to most people as the founder and former CEO of Seattle’s Nijintech Industries. It seems that in 1979, Schoffman and Verhoeven temporarily shared the modest accommodations of eastern Turkey’s notorious Elazig Prison. In the poem “Was It Henna,” David described their cell as a “rotting, clammy cavity/ perfumed with piss camphor/ lenient with disinfectant.”

Verhoeven sued for defamation of character when in an interview published in The Acephaly Review, Schoffman identified him by name as the inspiration for book’s eponymous poem. What nettled the litigant most was the tercet, “his chived, discomforted countenance/whittled by opiates/degraded and dimmed.”

The highly publicized trial helped Schoffman sell over 10,000 copies of his book, an enormous figure for a book of poetry. Three rancorous weeks of testimony yielded nothing for Verhoeven but rendered the severe judgment of hackneyed incompetence for Schoffman’s lyric abilities.

No new volumes are forthcoming.

AIUS LOCUTIUS

I am an embalmer of a crumbling friendship. I have endured the fetid slime of gratuitous vilification, yet I rise above the Race of Reptiles and overlook the affront. The trilling of the thrush’s throat could not have been more explicit. The rank indecency of David Schoffman’s recent attack on me is a grim reminder of his covetous misery. Yet, as I sit here in my luxurious garden, swilled by the perfume of Peruvian daffodils and sweet alyssums, I can only offer my forgiveness and compassion.

In a recent interview, broadcast on Canal Plus, David Schoffman offered some unjustifiable and calumnious characterizations that betray the covenant of our friendship. I include an excerpt below:

UCCELLI



It’s been well documented that David Schoffman has an avid fascination for birds. In a 1995 profile in Prague’s Nový Prostor, Schoffman spoke at length about the maniacal mewl of the Silesian Eagle Owl, a bird whose enveloping wingspan and conspicuously ornate facial disc are legendary throughout Central Europe. In the same interview David described the six months he spent in Sri Lanka studying the Spotted Dove and the Ashy-Headed Laughing Thrush. “I drew constantly,” he said, “trying to depict the rapture of flight and the showers of light as they played off of the brilliant infinitude of brown and gray. It was a painter’s paradise and “Chanticleers and Columbiformes,” my series of hand-colored monotypes would have been inconceivable without this seminal experience.”

What David failed to mention in the article was the string of damp beds, the pangs of unembroidered poverty, the galling feuds and oppressive doubts that characterized that six-month sojourn. I remember receiving letters full of odd hallucinations, paranoiac fantasies and erotic misadventures. Names like Mosby the Sailor, Silas The Street-Prophet, Mufti Sam and Lalima filled his rambling missives that read more like novels and irate manifestoes. To this day I am unsure how much of what he wrote was true and how much was fantasy.

That was many years ago, and David has been leading a productively sedate, even boring existence for some time. I am happy that Prolix Press has recently re-issued “Chanticleers and Columbiformes” in limited edition. It is a sobering reminder that the wages of disquiet, traded by the gifted hand, can yield precious monuments to our more noble selves.

THE GUESTS OF ABRAHAM


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.

SHIFTING MUSES


David Schoffman is losing his eyesight. Like Degas, Borges and The Green Lantern, David’s macular disinterphicus is slowly shepherding him into the gloomy pitch. “The Body Is His Book,” his ongoing series of dizzyingly transcendent paintings may well be his last. As he descends into the black-tar of blindness, he continues to work with the unforfeited optimism of a dreamer. As the starless shroud begins to muffle his wildness, the urgency of his vision becomes more pressing. His newest works show no signs of despair and as he lifts the flag upon the mast of his artistic mission, he pulses forward with ambition and ever increasing complexity.

“The invention of painting belongs to the gods,” he wrote to me last week, quoting Philostratus, “and the gods are reclaiming their gift.” I am ashamed to say that a part of me rejoiced, as the only artist worthy of exciting my nasty competitive impulses will soon be receding into inactivity. This ugly urge is further testament to the titanic nature of David’s genius.

Eyes maimed by blindness may only husband other talents, greater gifts, for an intellect as supple as Schoffman’s will not be scuttled by mere infirmity.

He has already shown signs of a tectonic shift. An accomplished amateur musician, David has begun composing a song-cycle based on Hesiod’s Works and Days. The first piece, “What’s All the Fuss About the Slayer of Argus” is a catchy, somewhat sentimental ditty that may very well catch fire in today’s extremely eclectic music scene.

AUTHENTICITY

It’s time to acknowledge the debt, owed by David Schoffman, to two illustrious though unsung artists of the recent past. Schoffman’s evasions are understandable. His fears that a nod toward his predecessors may taint his eminence are well grounded. Accolades accrued through misconception will ultimately sully a well-earned legacy so I have taken it upon myself to illuminate upon David’s artistic antecedents.

Medussa Moratti knew no pangs of constraint nor did he harbor the fitful discontent of his peers. He was a man comfortable in his own skin and at home in his own studio. Though virtually unknown, Moratti’s work was extremely influential among the Parisian avant-garde of the 1970’s. His perplexing treatise, “Toward The Unsung,” unlocked a convulsive wave of ribald experimentation. That his reputation was eclipsed by his acolytes is one of the many injustices he suffered as a visionary. Below is “Fervid Geysers Rise,” a piece that proved instrumental in Schoffman’s development.


The Canadian Bedouin Noah Clrec was slightly better known. His gauzy paintings depicting wreaths of vapor, buoyantly gladdened by gravitational ambivalence were well received at the time though largely unrecognized today. Schoffman was among a small circle of frothy young artists who attended his regular lectures at The Free School on Boulevard Arago. Clerc often referred to his theory of “bolted withdrawal,” a form of sensual self-denial that ultimately leads to original invention. He argued that through willed isolation, artists could free themselves of what he called “the commanding hiss of history” and create un-mined categories and modes of expression. An early untitled Clerc is reproduced below.


Schoffman will undoubtedly deny the shadow this casts upon his reputation. He prefers the naked myth that defines him as the stony hedge of ingenuity.

The naked feet of an appropriator are rarely kissed.

FAUST


I am very fond of David Schoffman. And though there is no balm to be found in such sentiments between men, there are times when I think that my affection for him borders on love. But it is a backbreaking exertion, toil of excruciating industry, a labor that rewards with only the wages of humiliation and grief.

His character is the small voice of weights and measures. He is a striver who sees human interaction as trade. Long ago he renounced his faith in art in favor of the puny stanchions of acclaim. He would barter his Atman for even the slightest material advantage. He would betray a colleague, double-cross a friend, denounce his kin in order to till the clay of his career.

The first-fruits of his labor were quite impressive. As a young man, fresh out of art school, he caught the gleam of Patricia Paschal, chief curator for contemporary art at the auction-house Betise Françoise. She recklessly sponsored his assent by planting bogus bidders to swell the estimates on his under-incubated paintings. The product of David’s vigorous coital enterprise ended badly for Patty - her marriage to film director Sandor Van Hoght was shattered, her credibility as an art dealer, destroyed - but quite well for him. It was a succès de scandale that sent his prices soaring.

Ever since, Schoffman’s story has been one of professional bouquets and personal iniquity. He has banished grace to garner eminence and he has been triumphant.

I am his only remaining friend.

MARS THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND

At the recent 14th Annual Conference of Poets and Scholars in Chicago, I attended an interesting symposium entitled “Jehovah’s Mooring: The Resurgence of Academic Drawing in the United States.” Among the speakers was Francois Clarel, the distinguished linguist from the Université de Cergy-Pontoise. From his privileged Val-d’Oise perch, the return of the largely discredited 19th century French pictorial aesthetic is a laughable matter. To Clarel, this is the sort of folly that makes Americans so adorable and so pitiable in French eyes.

Many attendees agreed and yet the smug nature of his assertions was rather insulting to his hosts. It was to the great credit of my friend, David Schoffman to have had the grace and presence of mind to speak on the subject with greater equanimity, unwavering dignity and sparkling erudition.

In brief, David’s argument is that the history of painting up until the mid-19th century is a story of a client-based economy. The dependence upon patrons and princes delayed the advent of “pure self-expression” till Baudelaire. Notable exceptions like Blake or Goya’s Quinta del Sordo notwithstanding, to greater or lesser degrees, the customer was always right. Perhaps the highpoint of craven subservience to the moneyed clientele was the 19th century French Academy.

Drawing, according to Schoffman, was always the exception. Renaissance and Baroque artists painted for their clients but drew for themselves and their workshop assistants. Drawing was almost never meant for public consumption and as such was always more speculative, fluid and personal. In effect, it was self-expression before this type of urging had a name.

The recent American fascination with 19th century drawing techniques such as “sight-sizing” is an unwitting retreat into creative subservience to the marketplace. The United States with its Puritanical undercurrents is the perfect breeding ground for this type of phenomenon. Distrustful of the senses and fascinated by quantifiable statistics, many of today’s revisionist artists are drawn to an aesthetic that serves simultaneously as a theology and an exam.

Schoffman’s speech received a prolonged standing ovation, a rarity among the jaded community of pointy-headed tenured know-it-alls. Later that evening at the reception hosted by the glamorous socialite Shania McBean, David, much to the astonishment of his collegues, kicked the shit out of the pompous professor Clarel.

LIVING LIKE BRUTES


Delivering a lecture at the Saur Center for Post-Graduate Studies attended mostly by young people working on their Masters degree in the visual arts, David Schoffman noted that the students in general, quoting Virginia Woolf, were “unhappy and rightly malignant.”

The dry, hot air of the auditorium held the faint odor of cabbage and not a few of the students lightly dozed during the forty-minute talk. The putative topic, as advertised in the department’s monthly brochure, was “The Delirium of William Blake,” but Schoffman, notorious for his impromptu digressions, wandered off into Dante’s depiction of Ulysses. “Considerate la vostra semenza,” Schoffman roared, stirring the somnolent and alarming the security guards who the week before had to quell a near riot after a bearded lecturer screamed something equally menacing in an equally foreign tongue.

Evoking Inferno’s 26th canto or any other canto for that matter among MFA students is typically seen as bad form. These newly minted artists do not want to be prodded into a messianic fervor by a middle-aged painter who still uses a palette knife. They want either densely packed hermetic aphorisms that include the word “conflate” or the word “disjunction” (or, preferably both), or they want practical marketing tips they can use the next time the dealers come marching through their cramped studios.

Speaking in Italian is also seen as bad form, as is French and Latin. Young artists today are linguistic nativists, preferring to communicate in the international language of mammon. Collectors, I was told rather bluntly by a professor of New Genre Studies at NYU, are uncomfortable around polymaths of any sort but are particularly put off by one with a ring in their nose. “By the time an art student reaches grad school, they are pretty well trained in keeping their erudition on the down low.”

So Schoffman, a man famously remote and inaccessible, was innocent of these niceties and stumbled, hat first, into a cauldron of cynicism. “Fatte non foste viver come bruti/ Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza,” he continued, completing the tercet. “Artists,” he went on, “remember your origins! It is not gain, but enlightenment that you are after!”

I’m not certain whether David actually managed to finish his sentence, but the pie seemed to come out of nowhere. A group calling itself “Nuevos Destructores de Imagen” claimed responsibility and later circulated a manifesto around campus entitled “Against The Color Blue.”

FLAMES ALONG THE GULLET


“Don’t misuse the gift.”

Those were Bruno Mazzotta’s last words before seeing David Schoffman off from the port of Fortaleza. Mazzotta, Brazil’s beloved poet of grief (second only to the unapproachable Prato Mauro), had just finished his long awaited volume of sonnets, “Crags and Escarpments,” and was working with Schoffman on the illuminated edition. Together with David’s lapidary illustrations, the book went on to win the coveted “Borda Dourada Prize” as 2001’s best literary collaboration of text and image.

Their creative alliance, paraphrasing the famous Portuguese proverb, was like a mosquito on an unharvested grape.

A few years earlier, Schoffman was in Sao Paulo exhibiting his flawed series of lithographs “Flames From The Eighth Crevasse” at Martin da Fonseca’s now defunct Museum of Erotic Art. At a dinner party at Guadencio’s, the trendy bistro known for spiking its Cajuzhho with marinated flaxseed, the two artists had a notorious public row.

It seems that Mazzotta’s wife Fabiola - a woman whose passion for Cachaca rum had instigated not a few South American scandals in the past – began toasting her Caipirinha’s to what she graphically described as Schoffman’s thewy sexual stamina. The poet was understandably infuriated and with great ceremony, challenged the painter to a duel.

To avoid more grievous injury, Schoffman promptly clocked Mazzotta squarely on the jaw, ending the party and sending the injured poet to the emergency room. Later, through lawyers, they agreed to settle all claims and damages by Schoffman’s agreement to work gratis on the sonnet project.

“Crags And Escarpments” sold 1,400,000 copies and was translated into 23 languages. Schoffman, who toiled in front of his easel creating 31 unique paintings for each of the 31 poems, did not receive a single cruzado for his efforts. To this day, the ownership of the actual pictures is being contested in court.

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.

THE DANCE OF THE CRANES

“I imagine my death -for me it’s a form of theology -as a gentle waning moonlight replacing the flicker of a scented candle.” He was drunk when he said this. In those early Paris years, Schoffman inclined toward the morbidly poetic when he had a few too many Pernods. It made a strong impression on me. Despite the sentimental stupidity of his mixed metaphors, I was impressed by David’s callow seriousness. He spoke of “the white milk moments” of his early affinities when he discovered Shostakovich’s quartets, Ribera, and the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. He was always a dreamer and I guess he still is, though now his dreams are shapeless and vague.

I wouldn’t say that success has tainted the integrity of David’s work, but woven through the threads of his renown are the echoes of melancholy. His new work is both beautiful and tragic, obsessive and restrained, thoroughly modern yet inexplicably obsolete.

“The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings” is a mercurial tour-de-force that ruminates on the dark potential of intelligent self-pity. It is a monument.

Whenever I ran into Schoffman in those early years when armies of artists colonized the dingy, derelict fringes of Paris hoping to run into the ghost of Henry Miller, he always claimed his latest work to be an abysmal failure. When he spoke, he was barely audible, a gravelly mumble would spill from his lips like a dying diesel. To call him depressive would simplify the quirky sensitivity that determined his saturnine behavior. Artists like Schoffman believe that nothing short of the fate of Western Civilization is at stake when they enter the studio.

He disapproved of my work. “Malaspina,” he used to say, “You are pandering to the trivial tastes of the rabble with these bloated confections.” I wanted to tear out his liver. At the time, the name “Currado Malspina” was beginning to boil throughout Europe and the thought that my work was anything less than brilliant was an impossible fantasy only a madman dare entertain. Schoffman was anything but a madman, but at the time he certainly was a jackass.

The image above is an example of one of the pieces from the period in question.

And now a few words about the late Cuban artist, Micah Carpentier. Schoffman and I met him in Zurich where he was enjoying the benefits of an unearned fame. He had talents that appealed to his Swiss hosts; a love of middlebrow poetry, an aptitude for the local patois, knowledge of useless facts and the ability to persuade through flattery.
This was in the early eighties, shortly before he died and there was little left of the old Carpentier, standard-bearer of the Latin American avant-garde.

He is best known for his eccentric “The Song Of Degrees,” a series of lush, virtuosic drawings on tawdry paper bags. (Some of these works can be seen on a website maintained by his nephew, also named Micah Carpentier, at http://www.artmajeur.com/micahcarpentier/).

Wrongfully accused of being overly facile,libeled as hollow and impossibly vain, Carpentier destroyed warehouses of work with the appointed sureness of a monarch. He would violently defenestrate huge unfinished canvases and litter his studio with the crumpled pulp of rejected works on paper. In the spring of 1963, enraged and defeated, Carpentier had an epiphany.

The work he destroyed had a hideous form of majesty. In their disheveled state they retained an impossible dignity. Through injury his work was finally redeemed.

He developed a hunger for detritus. He fastened on decay like a zealot. To him, the brackish, the orphaned and the shabby were suddenly the splendid and the serious. Elated that he had finally learned to lure junk to perfection, he began work on his series of bags that to this day have a strange and enduring beauty.

A few words about “The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings.”

David Schoffman has an untamed genius for impractical ideas. For the past five years he has been working on a series of one-hundred small paintings that he plans to install as a tightly compacted group. The last time I spoke to him, (which was sometime in late summer) he had about 29 pictures he considered complete. In other words, at this rate, he will complete this project sometime between 2018 and 2020

Don’t get me wrong. The paintings are thrillingly beautiful. Every detail is coaxed into perfection by his scrupulously discerning brush. Schoffman’s imagery, his color and his line are dazzlingly complex. The work is nothing short of visionary. But seriously …. 2020?!

I met Schoffman in 1980 when he was living in Brussels. If I remember correctly, he had graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design a few years prior to our meeting and was living in Europe doing research on Hans Memling. We were introduced by the Flemish sculptor Vin Van Toefl. Van Toefl was working on a huge commission from the University of Nijmegen and was employing as assistants artists who could arc weld. You might say that it was in this context that David and I first bonded.

David got fired first. He was, in truth, a terrible craftsman and would accidentally spot-weld his ladder to any and everything in close proximity. I got fired for breaking a bottle over Van Toefel’s head. Schoffman and I soon found ourselves sharing a studio in a warehouse above a waffle factory.