GEIST SHMEIST

Danton, Screaming Past the Furies, 2006

It is the unique misfortune of David Schoffman, that despite a thriving career as a painter, a monstrously large gambling debt - accrued through an ill advised addiction to martesh, a game of chance involving toothpicks and trigonometry – requires him to carry a near full teaching load. Though he claims to be indifferent to his students’ successes, throughout the years, many of them have gone on to become well known, accomplished artists.

None is more accomplished and well known than Dahlia Danton.

Danton’s large-scale installations have been exhibited in London, Paris, Sao Paolo and New York and have received lavish if not overly extravagant praise. At last fall’s Zagreb International Art Fair, Dahlia’s guitar string sculptures broke the sales record previously set in 2006 by René Boulet. When she showed her paintings at DCA in Los Angeles earlier this year, the entire exhibition was purchased before the opening by the screenwriter Pops LeChess.

I happened to have been in L. A. during the Danton exhibition, peddling my own screenplay, a musical interpretation of the Marquis de Sade’s Le Cure de Prato. (I’m currently contracted to do a second draft for MazeTuck Films). I found Dahlia’s paintings fascinating in their bleak and sovereign subservience to good taste. Adamant in her ambivalence to history, she sees virtue where others see a stubborn lack of originality. The credulity of the market is a popular theme in certain academic circles within the United States. Danton is expert in lyrically conveying this vacuum without recourse to irony or dialectic.

Schoffman can take pride in producing such gifted students, capable of capturing so elegantly the spirit of the age.

FAITH BASED INITIATIVE

His rigorous upbringing within the Apostolic Church of the Divine Rent has given David Schoffman a unique window into interfaith dialogue. One of three major denominations of northern Alberta, the tenets of the Divine Rent are firmly rooted within the mainstream charismatic, eschatological persuasions.

It was for this reason that David was chosen to preside over the First Annual Ecumenical Artist Convention, which was held in Las Vegas in early June. It was truly an historic event with participants from all artistic disciplines, representing every confession, from every region in the world.

There were Sufi sculptors from Turkistan, Haredi filmmakers from Boro Park, Jihadist cartoonists from Khartoum, Opus Dei muralists from Rome, evangelical lithographers from Georgia, Shinto painters from Osaka, animist enamellers from Bangkok, glassblowing Gnostics from Gondar Provence, silk-screening Sikhs from Kuala Lumpur, batiking Ba’hai from Haifa, Catholic ceramicists from Belfast – you name it, they were there.

It was rather amazing to what degree the participants saw eye to eye on core issues. For one thing, they were united in believing that God was great. Some were sure He was all knowing, others thought He might have a few blind spots but they all agreed that He was pretty terrific.

Being artists, they tended toward more liberal renderings of their respective doctrines. For example, though they disapproved of the homosexual lifestyle, they were strongly in favor of gay marriage as long as it was a union between a man and a woman.

David conducted the symposia with his usual aplomb and dazzled the crowd with some virtuosic glossolalia. Beginning with the coherent locution, “Alaska, I’ll ask her, Al-Aqsa,” he went on a searing stream of garbled tommyrot for a full twenty-five minutes. Even the Brooklyn black-hats were impressed.

The conference ended with a bagel and lox brunch and a fabulous performance by Uri Geller.

BABBA KAMMA, BABY

Together with Augustine’s City of God and Lucan’s Medea, the Babylonian Talmud has pride of place on David Schoffman’s nightstand. So taken by its legalistic whimsy, its colorful anecdotes and the musicality of its prose, that David spent an entire year of his graduate study on a Fulbright in Arbil studying Aramaic.

It was a labor of love when the publishing house of Gilgul & Neshamot invited David to design the cover of their soon to be released, 2009 edition of this classic sixth century work. (The fully annotated, twenty-nine volume, CD audiobook will be narrated by Matisyahu and Seymour “Toots” Marley).

I would urge my readers to pre-order a copy since it will be printed in limited edition and will surely become a collector’s item in years to come.

THE THRESHOLD DOWN

The temporary unraveling of David Schoffman’s career was due to events that are fairly typical in the rutty world of international art trading. The fact that he has rebounded with such alacrity and grace is due in no small measure to his rock-ribbed fortitude and his ruthless, daring cunning.

Before his eagerly awaited early death in 1988, art dealer Andreas Holbach was known as “the twelve-tongued serpent of the studio.” In his tireless pursuit of the new, Holbach would gallivant around the globe looking for the new cash cow.

In the mid-eighties, the young, bootless hooligan, David Schoffman, darling of the princes of taste and the denizens of le beau monde, was seen as that bountiful bovine. To his peers, his blustering oversized encaustic icons were shallow exercises in cloying vaingloriousness. To Holbach and his ilk they were the polished gems of early genius.

David and Andreas became the twin halves of an art-dealing juggernaut … until the day when they were not.

A drug habit and a drowsy market prompted Holbach to unsaddle a boatload of Schoffmans on the cheap and in a hurry. You don’t have to be John Maynard Keynes to figure out what happened next. With his devalued work flooding an already bloated bazaar, the paintings of David Schoffman began to be judged on their merits and were found severely wanting.

It wasn’t until 1999 that David surfaced from his self-imposed exile with the now legendary exhibition, Lenox Avenue Paintings. Both the critics and his colleagues were prepared to tear out his liver but instead were forced to acknowledge, in the words of Karl Colovito, “that a fresh wind had awakened a subtle poignancy in the former blow-hard.”

The fact that David stole most of his “new” ideas from me was not noted at the time.

“Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed”
Byron

On a recent trip to North Africa, David Schoffman found himself severely dehydrated and dangerously low on gasoline near the small village of Ksar Kibbeh. Known for its ancient granaries and its warm, hospitable inhabitants, it was the perfect place to avert a catastrophe.

Sipping mint tea and nibbling on spiced chard at the local café, David made the fortunate acquaintance of the famous ethnomusicologist, Na’im Bouteille, who happened to be in town attending a wedding of one of his nephews.

It was from Bouteille that David first learned of the Vavzayin.

Uncommonly secretive even within the clandestinely hermetic world of the sub rosa, the Vavzayin is a loosely federated faction of animistic nomads whose coded beliefs are articulated exclusively in painting. Their densely detailed cosmology is so impenetrable that scholars and anthropologists alike have quietly agreed to ignore them.

Much to his disgrace, Schoffman lifted a small astrological icon off the wall of a desert outhouse and smuggled it out of the country. It now hangs ignominiously in his kitchen.

NOBLESSE

The Comtesse de Charbot, one of the most discerning collectors of David Schoffman’s work, died last week in her country estate in Saint-Quirin. Known equally for her erudition and her caprice, the Comtesse, or “Tessileh” as she was known by her intimates, was a fixture among the Art Fair cognoscenti. Catholic in her tastes, her collection includes significant works by Gounod, Walker, Prince, Webern, Schapiro and Schoffman.

Generous to a fault, Tessilah was a reservoir of good will to scholars and curators alike. Last year’s Assemblage/Gounod exhibition in Bern was made up almost entirely of works from the de Charbot estate. Delmont Livni’s definitive monograph on Webern’s works on paper owes much of its scholarship to its access to the de Charbot Library and Archive in Levallois.

I could go on and on describing Tessileh beneficence, she was a Maecenas and a Sarasvati all rolled into one.

I believe, however, that her legacy will be her legendary support for Schoffman. She began buying his work in the 70’s when David was an obscure miniaturist, waiting tables at the Arpege and showing his work in small group shows in alternative galleries around Paris. She was among the first collectors to recognize his nascent genius as well as his infamous shortcomings. One might say that she scolded him into becoming an important artist.

Though throughout her long life she always held me and my work in contempt – she once described my monotypes as “saleté de gouttière” – I will always remember her with great affection and respect.

THE PAINS OF REDIRECTION

The Margozotti twins played a vital role in David Schoffman’s decision to drop out of divinity school and devote his full energy toward becoming a painter. Nothing, I think, is more incompatible with the vow of chastity than the arborescent glamour of Doina and Anneli Margozotti … but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Doina, the more genial of the two, could flog a full throat of bacchanalian rage even in the most peevish of curmudgeons. Her bearing was that of a double-jointed reptilian Circe, a seductress, a blight to temperance and a mocker of moderation. To know Doina was to be helplessly crushed by the anvil of infatuation.

Anneli, who dressed mostly in rubber, had a keen sense for the aesthetics of pain. She was all claws and teeth and sweat and smell and approached deviance with the piety of an imam.

Schoffman, whose will was as soft as bread was summarily flattened into an anemic pulp. His simplicity was red meat for the twins and what little chance he had to defend himself against their charms was quickly annihilated as soon as they took off their clothes.

The Margozotti twins were the first art models David encountered when on a whim and a dare, he enrolled in his first figure drawing class at New York’s Art Students League. It wasn’t long till God took a powder and David was renting a dimly lit basement studio on Elizabeth Street.

Within a few years, he had his first one-man show and his hundredth broken heart.

DIPLOMACY

The Gujerati mural, David Schoffman’s immense 1989 fresco painted on the vaulted ceiling of Qatar’s luxurious Abbasid Hotel remains one of the most popular cultural attractions of the Middle East. Brightly hued fabric airlessly held aloft in whispers of subtle brushwork fill the hotel’s lobby with honeyed luminescence. The work is a veritable alphabet of painterly effects and viewers are consistently stunned by the enormous work’s improbable intimacy.

Schoffman was awarded the commission by default after the original artist, Alexei Rouaud was tragically killed in a freak accident involving a sled and a coping saw.

Unaccustomed to working on such a large scale, David developed a unique process by which he could intermittently view the painting from a suitable distance by swinging from the scaffolding on hemp cable riggings. This apparently amused his hosts to no end and they took to calling him Numa, the name of Tarzan’s pet lion.

The hotel bar, Les Eyzie, is a favorite watering hole for Al Jazeera journalists and David’s work has become much beloved among them. Sensing an opportunity, the State Department has asked David to spearhead Operation Desert Draftsman, a soft-power ploy involving a series of life drawing workshops to take place in high schools across the Arab world.

This summer he will be studying Jebli at the Pollard Language Institute in Langley Virginia.

VENTRILOQUIST AT LARGE

The Ethics of Desire

David Schoffman’s work is seen by many as a lambent explication of post-stucturalist theory. The Ethics of Desire, was seen as Schoffman’s visual tone poem, a fingered dance of painterly destabilization which ruptured the notion of self, replacing it with new, non-objective signifiers.

A paper by Gramsci Professor Newton Suzuki of Bryn Mawr referred to The Ethics of Desire as the seminal “object lesson of value-laden, binary opposition”.
He went on to describe Schoffman’s “cunning appropriation of Western ‘moments’, misaligned with the vernacular of the East, creating fictive Euclidian spaces few contemporary artists seem intellectually capable of.”

Cloistered as I am in my Rue Gabriel Lamé studio, a place cluttered with books and periodicals, I read these descriptions of my good friend’s work and only one word comes to mind:

"Connerie!"

BLACKENED IN OBSCURITY

Unkempt, with parched wrinkled skin the color of rust, David Schoffman shows the wear of long nights in the studio. It has been his habit for many years to work as others rest, and sleep, only briefly, and only in the light of day.

He owns neither telephone nor computer, and those with whom he is in contact understand that he reluctantly welcomes visitors on Sundays only.

He prefers the company of writers and is particularly close to Janco Rasa, author of Sesso the Fool and Shapeshifters.

Once, after a long period of fallow inactivity, David tried to reverse his circadian meter, but failed miserably. The California sun’s brilliant luminescence and the unabating urban din confused him. It was the closest David ever came to madness.

Few have seen his new work, but countless rumors are circulating. Some have openly speculated that there is no work to be seen, that David hasn’t lifted a paintbrush in years and that his eccentric schedule is but a rueful dodge. Others think he is writing a memoir or drawing detailed maps of his native Canada.

In an interview last year in Hmm, David spoke elliptically about plans for an illuminated edition of Paradise Lost.

I think he is just flat out of ideas.

TROUPE DE CINQ

The predominant theme behind the School of Pestilence’s flurry of manifestoes in the 1980’s was the general rebuttal of post-structuralist meta-linguistics or what Stanwyre simply called “Gebisse.” At the time, Paris was a lexical Valhalla, a hotbed of hypotheses, a theorist’s shanga-la. Together with David Schoffman, Micah Carpentier, Darius Frommel and Yvette Chabanais we antically argued that the only enduring value worth fighting for was sensuality.

In our shabby, tin-roofed Théâtre du Risible on rue Joseph Liouville, we staged weekly roundtables consisting primarily of drinking cheap Alsatian wine and arguing loudly, deep into the night, until the concierge next door called the police.

We weren’t taken very seriously until the Sans Voix Immobile exhibition where Schoffman first showed his now famous Rattling Traffic paintings. The critics were generally lukewarm but Nannette Fabriquant, at the time the doyenne of French art journalism, raved in a two-page review in Centaur Gaullist, calling Schoffman “le prochaine sauvage de notre epoch.”

Fabriquant was soon appointed French ambassador to Burkina Fasso, Schoffman moved to Tel Aviv, the Théâtre du Risible was condemned as a “threat to public hygiene” and the School of Pestilence disbanded in typical, artistic acrimony.

LINOLEUM

Kimberly Roberts of the New York Critical Review called David Schoffman’s new sculptures “playful assaults on Cartesian uncertainties.” Shabu Caldéron, writing in Splatt described the work as “artifacts from the rosy smoke physics of practical chaos.” Dobrynyn used just one word: “combustible!”

Few knew that Schoffman worked in three dimensions, but for many years, he has been secretly laboring on the series of pieces now on view at Teresa Odena Modern.

The work most discussed and debated in the salons and saloons of New York has the cumbersome title: “The Dagger of Abraham Refuses To Think.” It is a life-size facsimile of a badly bruised Toyota Camry, constructed entirely from wood flour, burlap and linseed oil. Dangling from the crippled rearview mirror is a miniature Mount Moriah that inexplicably sways as if from a breeze. The license plate reads Soren 1843 and on the backseat, scattered like confetti are Ike Turner album covers. A Post-it on the pretzeled steering wheel has the phrase “the child strikes in combat” written four times.

Some called the work unnecessarily obscure. Others insist that it is clumsily overdetermind. The vast consensus however is that the exhibition is one of the most challenging of the season.

It is rumored that the reclusive Russian collector, Vlad Dracolya purchased almost every piece in the show.

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.

THE AROMA OF MERCY

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Peder Bayer, Norway’s most pessimistic poet (a designation coveted by many talented competitors). He goes on to write in his famous essay “On Second Thought” that “intimacy leads to betrayal more reliably than remedy leads to cure. Like the vibratory night call of the wood thrush whose song beckons as it laments, we sigh through life’s tenuous filaments, craving fixity within the groves of impermanence.”

Bayer’s words come to mind as I meditate upon the growing enmity between David Schoffman and myself. The mounting distaste for Schoffman’s fickle conceits has affected my wellbeing, making me vulnerable to odd agonies of both of body and mind. Sadly, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him, even as an adversary would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

If I think about this dispassionately, which of course I cannot, I am resolved to Hobbes’ observation that "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe." Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” identified certain hostile impulses as stemming from “the narcissism of minor differences” and if anything, Currado and I are cousins of the same stained cloth.

I am guilty.

THE WILTING OF THE GREY WOLF

David Schoffman insists that the two or three unsold drawings from Live Draw are emblems of virtue. He maintains that had his work lost its edge, he would have sold every last scrap. The fact that he failed to delight everyone equally refutes my contention that he has migrated from the avant-garde to a populist, decorative mode of expressive denial.

He deludes himself.

I was told by a friend who was in attendance at Saturday night’s bacchanal that Schoffman’s work flew off his pad like ravens and that collectors vied for position with ham-fisted greed and ungainly enthusiasm. This friend, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told me that David concealed several drawings, looking toward DCA Fine Art’s follow-up exhibition, “Live Draw Detritus” where “unsold” works from Live Draw would be displayed.

How cunning my friend has become! This former lion of perilous artistic experimentation has calcified into a leathery reminiscence of hard-earned achievement. He is now content to be the pharisaical apologist for tinsel and frippery.

Oh David …. What lovely drawings … and so inexpensive!

Les Ficelles Silencieuses de Dessins

Something is most assuredly amiss.

For twenty-two years I have greeted each new day with a pain au chocolate, hot milk and the early edition of Le Vers L’Avant, the Midi’s finest newspaper. I rely on its inky pages for a mature, dispassionate rendering of the world’s events. Free of idle speculation, puerile gossip, tendentiousness and hype, L’Avant is an artful relic of a non-existent past.

I was therefore irritably confounded when today’s Art and Culture section led with the following headline: “The Sorcery Of Chalk: David Schoffman Stuns California Crowd With The Silent Strings Of Drawing.”

What a half-lunged, nimble-tongued burlesque! Empty of analysis, vacant of scrutiny, Schoffman could not have received better press had he paid for it! Sending a journalist to DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica to cover the farcical “Live Draw” was bad enough. The toadying servility of the reporting, comparing Schoffman to the likes of Dominique Pécuchet and Veronique Bouvard, two of the Republic’s finest living artists, was a rancid exercise in American style public relations.

I have cancelled my subscription.

LIVE DRAW
EIGHT ARTISTS - THREE MODELS - LOTS OF PAPER

I detect a weakening in David Schoffman’s convictions. His normally strident tones have turned dulcet and accommodating. He seems battle weary and tentative. There is neither thrill nor frenzy in his carriage and those of us who have grown accustomed to his ardent theatricality are now left with only the gaunt niceties of respectable politesse.

Could this signal the curfew of his creativity or merely the solemnity that comes with age. His former self was a shapeless ecstasy, an intellect inflamed, a noisy chorus of urgent enthusiasms. Now he is a vacant precinct of predictability and habit. Where he once sought provocation, he now strives toward effortless geniality.

Perhaps this explains his flirtation with “public drawing”. Maybe Live Draw signals the tug of an inevitable decay, a muffled retreat into the featherbed of pleasing picture making. It could be that the false calm of insouciant color and nimble line are precisely the ideals toward which Schoffman currently leans.

The public will have a chance to evaluate all this on Saturday night, May 24th at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica.

I’m grateful that I can’t attend.

LIVE DRAW

What shapeless buffoonery! What ill-timed chicanery! Has age yielded no wisdom? Has profit fouled all perspicacity? Has throbbing Mammon thrusted the former vicar of the avant-garde into the cozy innocence of FIGURE DRAWING!!!

David Schoffman is about to break artistic wind, betraying the finely crafted monuments of his illustrious career, by participating in what is mockingly called “Live Draw.” When I read about this carnival of paltry exhibitionism in the otherwise respectable periodical Art Ltd, I was stunned into a state of pagan speechlessness. The former valor of my dear friend David has now been crushed by the common cause of gain.

In our early days together, David and I forswore the antiquated exercise of life drawing as a relic. For thirty years we honored our vow to pursue the new and relinquish the grizzled clichés of the Academy.

And now this!!

If only for their rarity, I would love to purchase one of his drawings. Though the camel-dunged products of his perfidious treachery will undoubtedly be lovely, (David was always a gifted draftsperson), their real value will be as documents of decay and artistic discourtesy.

THE KISS OF THE MARKETPLACE

David Schoffman‘s career reflects the immense disorder of his peculiarly peripatetic ambitions. He tries to find merit in everything equally. He wanders like a tramp from exhibit to exhibit, packing his résumé with a trail of incompatibles.

In 2008 alone he has shown his lucid watercolors at Camillo Galeani’s Galleria Cavallo Puzzolente, his Gunwale lithographs at Kunstsheide Berlin and his unfinished series of encaustic medallions at the Nijmegen Art Fair.

I admit that commercially his kettle continues to boil but he is reaching boat-bottom in ideas and execution.

And now, in Santa Monica, California, he is about to participate in the madman’s mission of drawing in front of a gallery full of spectators. On Saturday evening, May 24, David will be featured in DCA Fine Art’s rekindling of its popular Live Draw exhibition. Three fabulously naked models will apparently gambol about the gallery while a group of eager artists attempt to render them without distraction. Schoffman’s impromptu works typically sell (at absurdly low prices) while he’s in the midst of making them.

It’s all terrifically crass, though I would advise coming early.

CLANKING TOWARD IMMORTALITY

Humble as brine and bashful to a fault, David Schoffman dodges the sinless bouquets of acclaim with dignity and grace. The turbulent spank of celebrity is something he eschews. Disarmingly chaste in matters of self-promotion, he prefers to remain unseen and have the radiance of his work speak for itself.

I was therefore stupefied to find my good friend David splayed shirtless on the cover Doucement magazine, the mint of Parisian middlebrow journalism. Sandwiched between an incurious puff piece about Jacques Dutronc and an over-exposed photo essay on Palestinian medical students in Havana was a five-page interview with Schoffman. In it I learned that he climbs a rope ladder for exercise, that he hates cabbage and that as a child he tried to teach himself Greek by memorizing the folk songs of Vasilis Karras.

Perhaps in an effort to burnish his image, David has decided to venture into the cloudy realm of bourgeois respectability. Maybe he is trying to correct the prevailing image people have of him as the fastidious roué, charmed equally by invidious caprice and naked intelligence. Maybe he feels the need to dispel the rumors of his encroaching madness. Maybe he is dissatisfied that the central hymn of his legacy is a cadaverous fable of unrequited appetites.

Or maybe he is in a waking dream, rattling the cage out of boredom.

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!