THE AVANT-GARDE IS WASTED ON THE YOUNG

I've been criticized lately for what has been perceived by some as a "fixation" (intérêt excessif) regarding the young art critic and curator Spark Boon. One reader, reminding me of an 'intérêt excessif' of recent American vintage called me a "bully," while another incautious subscriber had me publicly baptized as a "post-modern parvenu," (Journal of the Association of Art Editors,  Where the Meek Minds Dwell, Dorothy Pankaj, Spring 2013/ V. xxvi, No. 1). 

Conté crayon and watercolor on paper, Spark Boon, 2013

I feel that I am forced to respond.

The case of Mr. Boon is an interesting and disturbing one. After earning his masters at CalArts, the prestigious southern Californian powder keg of Delphic convolution, Boon made a minor name for himself curating the now justly forgotten New York exhibition Lyotard in Leotards: Transgender Meta-Narratives in an Age of Mechanical Self-Gratification.

His recently published masters thesis, Châtelet, Pandémie and Foucault and the Decline of Imagery in Post-Colonial France argued eloquently if not ponderously in favor of what he called "an imageless ur-art of perpetual subversion". Now, after meeting my good friend, David Schoffman, Boon has supposedly found religion in of all things, figure drawing. His very public Road to Damascus moment is a self-congratulatory mea culpa of titanic narcissism. 

Pastel on paper, Spark Boon, 2013

 His presumption toward continued legitimacy within the very discourse that he currently mocks is based on a slight and feeble group show at Brooklyn's Launch/Red gallery where he exhibited a few collages based on his studies of artistic anatomy. This type of ironic dodge is precisely why I dismiss both Boon and Schoffman as reactionary, recidivist Romantics clinging to the tired values of beauty and craftsmanship.

The Shoulder Girdle: Front View, mixed media on paper. Spark Boon, 2013 (Courtesy of Launch/Red, New York)

 

CARPENT TUA POMA NEPOTES

The apprenticeship of Spark Boon was a long and arduous one. Mentored by my pedagogically parsimonious friend David Schoffman, Boon was held at all times at an impregnable distance.

David Schoffman ( l.) and Spark Boon (r.). Location and date unknown

For his part, Boon's fawning obsequiousness verged on pulpy servility. He even took to emulating Schoffman's sartorial quirks and unmistakable speech patterns, complete with Brooklyn accent.  

And yet the young Boon managed to glean from the recalcitrant recluse many valuable ideas - specifically about drawing.

Mixed media on paper, David Schoffman, 2011

 Despite the obvious weaknesses in both character and native ability, the young man did, at times, eclipse the older artist. In his conceptual daring, his technical inventiveness and in the sheer volume and speed of his production, Spark Boon has shown a unique and disarming originality.

Tar and encaustic on prepared birch plywood, Spark Boon, 2013

It seems fairly evident that in Spark Boon the reluctant David Schoffman created a veritable monster.

IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT (OR THE IMPLANTATION DIP)

Sometimes what seems at first like the gentle surveillance of a curious fan turns out in the end to be an obsessive invasion of one's privacy. I've had my share of adoring followers, those foolish few who, indifferent to the protocols of socially accepted boundries innocently trespassed the exclusive acres of my intimacy. I've dealt with them all in different but similar ways (typically involving my friend Etienne Mendès-Gratin, préfet de police de Montparnasse). My American colleague David Schoffman has a much greater challenge in the wild, wild west of southern California.

David has a midnight stalker who, though still within the precincts of the relatively harmless, might possibly be upgraded to the category of the unhinged. He/she has within him/her the potential of destroying/upending the very foundation of Schoffman's already crumbling/disintegrating way of life.

Irrationally paranoid, David is terrified of the prospect of some third-rate, trust-funded, near-sighted graduate student stealing his hard-earned ideas. Combine that with an equally consuming fear of enclosed spaces and you have a plausible rationale for Schoffman's peculiar work habits.

You see, he paints only in the middle of the night (generally from 11:30 pm to about 4:30 am). He also keeps his ground level industrial studio door wide open regardless of the weather or the time of year. In this way he avoids the bustle of normal working hours with all its unrewarding disturbances. Put another way, he is able to completely evade reality.

Just imagine his astonishment when photographs like the ones reproduced here started appearing on websites like studiosLA.com and Today'sAvant-Garde.com.

Close-ups with telephoto lenses have already captured David concocting his oil painting glazes with their secret recipes. Hazy snapshots have substantiated the long held rumor that Schoffman uses magazine clippings to access images for his work. We now have documented evidence that he uses tracing paper, projectors, grids and graphite transfer sheets in order to compensate for his faulty draftsmanship. There is now incontrovertible proof that Schoffman's claim that all his materials are first-rate, lightfast, archival and ph neutral is patently false and misleading.

What also comes as a slight revelation is that despite his vehement denials, David's nocturnal routines are not confined to the making of art. 

GULLED BY GALLANTRY

It is a mixed blessing for artists well within the fluted straits of mid-career to be suddenly lauded by the young. Panegyric praise tacks a bit too closely to eulogy. Unequivocal valediction is more redolent of ashes and incense than the vital stench of sweat and sperm. I caution my good friend David Schoffman against callow critics bearing gifts.

The young Brooklyn wunderkind Spark Boon was in Los Angeles recently kissing the ring of one of the art world's greatest recluses. Picking paintings as if they were fresh strawberries, the flamboyant critic/curator (is that not a conflict of interest?) is assembling a retrospective of my easily flattered friend's work.

New York critic/curator Spark Boon reviewing work in David Schoffman's Culver City studio, February 2013

I've plowed this fetid field before. A few years back I was seduced by the fetching femme-fatale of academia, Orestia Shestov, into submitting to a week's worth of inquisitorial privacy probing masquerading as 'research.' Sure it was flattering at first to be grilled by a gorgeously bookish intellectual but it didn't take long for the entire ordeal to deteriorate into a catechism of recriminating innuendo.

Orestia Shestov, 2013 (photo courtesy of Plangent Press)

With a voice as commanding as a Cossack, Shestov accused me of all manner of artistic negligence and fraud. She cited the work in my 2004 exhibition, Croquis Salaces at the Musée
de la Ferraille Culturelle in Bordeaux as an example of what she called "classic retreads"- "paraphrases retravaillées de thèmes fatigués" - (Shetov speaks a beautifully nuanced idiomatic French albeit with a Alsatian accent). She latter published a none too subtle hatchet job in the widely read Hors de Propos, costing me innumerable sleepless nights where I plotted elaborate revenge fantasies.

All I'm saying is that Schoffman should be skeptical of the honey tongued flummery of budding, ambitious arts professionals. To them, old fossils like us are merely opportunities - thin pretexts for their own petty, parasitical aggrandizement.

Shestov made sure to feather my loins before she twisted the dagger into my throat. I just don't trust that character Boon. Just look at his moustache!

 

UBI BENE, IBI PATRIA

For an avowed aesthete, my spartan friend David Schoffman lives a life of cultivated immunity. If this seems like an obvious contradiction it's because his unsystematic, self-abrogating lifestyle is just an elaborate form of hypocrisy.

Some admire his 'purity' - he eats neither meat nor kidney beans (the latter said to resemble too comfortably the form of a human embryo), owns neither a computer nor a telephone and restricts his philandering to those over the age of majority - though most see in his behavior a perverse form of Baudelairean dandysme.

It's unpleasant socializing with him, he abjures too much. He is my inverse reflection, my antipodal doppelganger, my corresponding counter-comrade and the fact that our friendship has endured this long is a tribute to the irrational. I, as an unapologetic gourmand, a lover of food and wine and noise, find being around David with all his severity is like being enveloped in a dark medieval cloak of overbearing piety. Even his musical tastes (if you can grant him the charity of having any taste at all) are spartan in the extreme. Anything beyond the homophonic jolts him into spasms of anxious agitation. It's as if a deviant voice or an independent rhythm might threaten his equilibrium. 

Perhaps he conserves his felonious impulses for the studio. His paintings reflect the opposite of his celibate demeanor. They are plush, grandiose, sybaritic romps of sensuality and excess.

Few people know the wild side of Schoffman. Most just witness his overt pretensions to high cultural priesthood. But in his studio, with his doors locked and his halogen kliegs tilted to Euclidean perfection, David is a libertine monster of luxury and over-statement. It is the only place he feels completely at home and it is there, and only there where he finds that vague, sloppy sensation that some refer to as 'happiness.'

A Symmetry of Edens, oil on linen, 11 x 6 feet, David Schoffman, 2013

PRETTY PICTURES, FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

Adifa Khadan, the well-respected, under-appreciated senior provost of Madrid's famed Instituto de las Artes Plásticas is mostly known for her dry wit and impeccable organizational skills. It's been said that on any given day, Khadan knows precisely how many paper clips and ball point pens are on the desk of her less than fully trusted office manager. She has a photographic memory, perfect musical pitch and is fluent in seven or eight languages including Ladino and Sanskrit. She has single-handedly transformed the Art Institute from a bastion of pre-Republican agitprop kitsch to one of Europe's hotbeds of avant garde, cutting-edge. post-modern conceptualism.

Adifa Khadan 2013

So successful as a college administrator, it is often forgotten that Khadan is a prolific and widely collected painter of note. Her recent series of large scale pastels, "Moses Crosses the Nile" was exhibited at Pagis/parish in New York and though it was greeted by the critics with mixed reviews, the public was unanimous in its indifference.

By contrast, an earlier series of works. "Myopic Prophets," a large scale suite of works-on-paper based on the litergical music of the south Saharan Berbers is still considered the most lucid, graphic argument in support of Edward Said's thesis of Orientalism. 

My good friend David Schoffman in his new role as international art world impresario has recently curated a show of Khadan's work from the early eighties when she was still very much under the influence of Latin American artists like Micah Carpentier and Don Juan Al Azar.

This mixed-bag of uneven ditherings serves as further proof that artists should avoid university campuses the same way lions should stay clear of zoos.  Either you stay in your studio or you teach.

You can't do both!

Adifa Khadan, 1986

Adifa Khadan, 1986

Adifa Khadan, 1985

  

SEH ONE STULLIESHA

Each winter my coddled colleague, David Schoffman spends six weeks "working" in Jamaica. He owns a small cottage in Bull Savannah a few miles west of the Nassau Mountains in Saint Elizabeth Parish.

David Schoffman's Gyalis Street cottage, Bull Savannah, Jamaica

He claims he loves the light and judging from my few brief visits, his infatuation seems justified. I just don't buy the fact that he goes there to work.

View from David Schoffman's Bull Savannah studio

Each year, the only evidence of work that ever surfaces are a few minor sketches of the same anonymous young woman.

This is very strange because as is well known, David Schoffman hates to draw and only does so under duress. 

People have compared these works to Andrew Wyeth's legendary Helga Paintings, a comparison that sends Schoffman into paroxysms of unbridled rage. The idea that a "secret woman" is somehow furtively cloaked behind a veil of dissimulation reeks of the kind of opportunistic gimmickry that David abhors. At the same time, when he is asked about the identity of his model, Schoffman shrugs and dodges like a tobacco executive in front of a
Congressional Committee.

A few years ago, on my way to Havana to visit Micah Carpentier's oldest son Danilo, I stopped in Jamaica for a few days to see David. Bull Savannah is fairly remote and it is Schoffman's habit to stay home most evenings and retire early to bed. One night, unable to sleep, I decided to take a walk along the limestone bluffs and listen for the hollow moans of the famous Black River crocodiles. I had had a few pernods at dinner and I ended up getting lost by the decrepit Chalice bauxite mines. By the time I returned to David's cottage it was almost 3 in the morning.

I was stunned to see a light on in his studio. I quietly propped myself up on an empty 50 gallon drum (for some reason these big rusty drums are everywhere in the Caribbean) and angled myself to get a view from an open window. Unbeknownst to David and his guest, I took the following picture with my phone.

    

 

THE REMAINS

My good friend, Los Angeles painter David Schoffman, sent shock waves across the artworld and sent the international art markets into a convulsive tailspin with his sudden announcement that he was giving up painting for good.

At a press conference in The Hague, (why The Hague? ... is there some oblique connection to the International World Court? Nothing Schoffman does is void of symbolic intent, irony, self-mockery or lyric allusion), flanked by both his New York and London dealers, Schoffman assured the assembled journalists that this was not just a simple exercise is Duchampian dissembling. 

"I'm hanging up my brushes for good," he told the audience in the meticulously choreographed 'no questions allowed' gathering that was broadcast live simultaneously on Dutch cable TV and Skype (4AM Los Angeles time). "I have nothing more to say, nothing more to prove and nothing further to learn," he continued. Jaws dropped and prices soared as the nonchalant Schoffman proceeded to deliver an ad hominem attack on critics, curators, collectors, third-world despots, Islamic extremists, multi-national corporations, climate scientists, the media, NASA, the IRS, the UN and Whole Foods.

When questioned later about his motives by Het Parool's Rijckaert Barendsz, Schoffman shrugged off any suggestion of high purpose stating simply that "... painting is obsolete, bereft and irrevocably dead, and quite frankly, I am the one who killed it."  

An exhibition of David's final works is scheduled for the spring of 2014 and is tentatively titled "Decomposing Pictures: Uncritical Carrion from an Archaic Artist." I suppose his studio assistants haven't given up their craft as hastily as their boss.

Semitic Philoxenia

Knowing that he was a native New Yorker, when he arrived at the Selahattin Doha Resort and Spa his Qatar hosts had a royal breakfast of bagels and lox awaiting him at his hotel suite.

David was stunned by the warmth of his reception. He had heard about the Middle Eastern culture of hospitality but nothing prepared him for the warmth and generosity that he experienced from the moment he landed at Doha International. One of the many photojournalists who were on hand at his arrival captured a shell shocked Schoffman standing beside a larger than life bust of the "founder of the modern Qatari State" the one-eared Daoud ibn Asad.

He was there as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Western Asian Arts and was expected to deliver the closing lecture at the annual  Doha Conference on Color and Colonialism. That he felt like a pawn in a political kabuki goes without saying. David knew from bitter experience that whenever the word "colonialism" is used in a public or academic context, the best course is to swiftly make for the (uncontested and unoccupied) hills.

His talk included references to Gerome's trip to Jerusalem, Delecroix's sojourn in Morroco and Renoir's obsession with Algeria. He discussed Matisse and Ingres and analyzed in depth their depiction of regional stereotypes. 

Solomon Wall, Jean Leon Gerome, 1863

The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, Delacroix, 1854

Odalisque, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1870

Matters became a bit thornier when Schoffman devoted the latter part of his talk to the complicated issue of  Judicum Giacomo Ghazi. Lesser known than his contemporary Phillipe Ahmar but by no means less colorful, Ghazi's story, though undeniably loaded, was nonetheless extremely germane.

Portrait of Judicum Giacomo Ghazi, Faun Roberts, 1931

Born just outside the city of Jubail in eastern Saudi Arabia in 1873, little is known about his early life other than his date of birth. He came from a family of gulf fishermen and spice merchants. Some scholars claim that he was a descendant of Nestorian Christians, basing their claim on some dubious, possibly forged documents. Others insist that he was the great-grandson of the mufti of Ha'il. What everyone agrees upon is his notorious apostasy.

Around the turn of the 20th century Ghazi was sent by the Emir of Buraydah on a vague diplomatic mission to Estonia and Lithuania. What was supposed to be a four week excursion turned into four years. When he finally returned to the Arabian Peninsula he had two small children and was married to the niece of the chief rabbi of Ostrog.

It didn't take long for him to figure out that western Europe might be a more hospitable environment and in around 1904, penniless and disgraced, he moved with his family to Paris. He quickly fell in with le bande de Picasso, enjoying a life of artistic bonhomie, promiscuity and antic subversion. 

from left to right, Cocteau, Jacob, Kisling, Gros, Picasso and in the back with the moustache, Judicum Giacomo Ghazi

 The audience at the Color and Colonialism conference were not particularly impressed with David's scholarship. When he reached his conclusion (some vague point about the reciprocal lure that the West had on the artists and intellectuals of the Arab world) he was greeted with a muted tremor of polite applause.

The next morning for breakfast he was served pancakes and fruit .

 

HE DIDN'T BUILD THIS

Most people don't realize and fewer seem to care that my ingenious colleague David Schoffman holds the United States patent on the Hackle-T:150. (The EU patent is held by an ertswhile mutual friend who shall remain nameless pending the outcome of some numbingly complex litigation - [but let's face it, how much fly fishing do they do in Luxembourg?])

Hackle-T:150 working drawing, David Schoffman, 2004

According to the fly fishing periodical of record, Buzz Tembault's Reel View, the Hackle-T:150 is used as a primary hook by 48% of regular and semi-regular casters. Impressive numbers but what is even more impressive is that this tiny little invention provides a handsome nest egg for David and his family. 

Now I'm not counting his money but between his thriving stature within the cozy, unregulated art market and his yearly residuals from the Brown Trout set, David needn't worry about the high cost of cadmiums.

And yet, my generous friend still devotes a significant portion of his time to what the Americans call, "giving back." (Interestingly, in France we do not have an equivalent expression, the closest I've come up with is "étant une ventouse"). 

I am speaking of course of David Schoffman the teacher.

Schoffman conducting a drawing workshop, Los Angeles, 2012

On any given day, one might find David lecturing an avid auditorium of graduate students on the fine points of late Renaissance Venetian printmaking or conducting a marathon life drawing workshop for a grubby mass of heavily pierced teenagers or demonstrating the delicate finesse of watercolor painting to an eager claque of retired senior citizens.

 One might reasonably ask 'why does he do it'?. Can one man be so benevolent and selfless?  Is this measureless bounty of munificence legitimately heartfelt?

There are several theories floating around the art world addressing this enigma. One suggests that Schoffman's charity is an endless act of expiation, a perpetual atonement for some mysterious malfeasance of his misspent youth. Another posits the theory that David's Molochian appetite for adoration and attention is scarcely satisfied by his accomplishments and therefore his ego demands constant and renewable nourishment. Still others insist that the chump change he earns from his teaching gigs is squirreled away, supporting a series of serragli of coast to coast mistresses.

Having known the guy for nearly 40 years, I believe it is simply a matter of attention deficit. Schoffman is constitutionally incapable of spending long, lonely hours in his studio. Now that his career is firmly established and the demand for his work seems endless he is able to consign most of the hard labor of putting paint on canvas to a small battalion of underpaid assistants. Since he himself does not fish - as far as I know, David is ambivalent to lakes, rivers and anything else that falls loosely under the catagory of Nature - he has to do something with his time.

The Body is his Book #99: One-Hundred Paintings. David Schoffman (and his workshop) 2012

Le Cri des Gloires

The Garland's Struggle Sketchbook, date unknown. David Schoffman. very (private collection)

After the fire, so little of his work survived, what remained among the rubble was quickly collected, cleaned and stashed away in a secure Adler and Co. vault in Zurich. Oddly, a full inventory was never officially recorded. An uncomfortable mystery still surrounds both the circumstances of the fire and the immediate aftermath. What is clear is that since September of 2010 a small trickle of heretofore unknown works by my good friend David Schoffman have appeared on the market and have been sold at ridiculously high prices.

TOO MUCH SUN

Portrait of Oisan T. DeBurca, mixed media on napkin, David Schoffman. 2012

"It's hard to keep the assassins away."

That's how my dear colleague David Schoffman greeted me when we met poolside at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood. I was in Los Angeles for a few days last week conferring with a cabal of untrustworthy curators and decided to dedicate a few leisurely hours to catching up with my friend.

"Ça va pas, non?" was all I could say, dumbstruck by yet another of David's fantasies of professional persecution. For years, despite his enormous and unwarranted success, my poor comrade nurses one grievance after the next.

"Even paranoids have enemies," quoting, once again, the inexorably quotable Delmore Schwartz.

I know I shouldn't have asked but my better judgement was impaired by the sparingly clad pair of ingenues sitting to our left.  "Who is it this time," I absentmindedly asked as I stole a subtle gander at what I took to be evidence of the existence of God.

David, whose skills of draftsmanship have been the envy of us all dating back to our student days, grabbed a cocktail napkin and within seconds drew the unmistakable profile of the Irish art critic, Oisan T. DeBurca.

I kept the drawing.

I needed something to quickly jot down a phone number.

I truly love L. A.

IN FLAGRANTE DELICTO

David Schoffman and Dahlia Danton, Cancun, 2012

The meteoric success of David Schoffman's artistic enterprise is due in no small measure to his wife of twenty-seven years,  Genviève Belleseins-Chatte. Acting as his publicist, business manager, ghost writer, amanuensis and mother confessor, Belleseins-Chatte  tirelessly devoted herself to her husband's career. It was Belleseins-Chatte who planted phantom bidders at countless auction houses, who surreptitiously hired "critics" to write glowing magazine and newspaper reviews and who single-handedly negotiated the now legendary mid-career retrospective at the Hebonshirre in London.

Genviève Belleseins-Chatte is also a remarkable and capable woman in her own right. For years, an associate professor of semiotics at Rutgers, she is the author of some two dozen books including the classic, genre-bending literary whodunit "Dismantled Cars and Buttoned Cloth." I always thought she was too good for my friend David.

Now we learn that Schoffman  is just another spineless Lothario. It is now clear that this philandering  skirt chaser has been exceeding even the French in his penchant for extra-curricular romance. His follies have left his intimates aghast. Now he stands an exquisite ruin, a royal remnant of his unearned renown.

And for whom does his avid heart beat? What feathery frolic authored his demise? Which ravishing strumpet indiscreetly bared her bonnet to the public causing the scandal that threatens to end Schoffman's supremacy?

It is none other than the silken-haired, white-throated third-rate painter Dahlia Danton!

Portrait of Philip, Oil on canvas, Dahlia Danton 2012 (courtesy of MacNeice/Fuller Gallery, NY)

CHESHVAN IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH

The Squared Letters of Yaweh is a series of intricate oil paintings by the young Israeli artist Alpha Adon-Yakob. A former classmate of the up and coming Brooklyn based curator and critic Spark Boon, Alpha is well acquainted with the byzantine political intricacies of the New York scene.

The Squared Letters of Yaweh: Yod, Alpha Adon-Yakob, 2012

Despite his Zionist pedigree (his grandfather Shabtai Mintz, a sniper in the pre-state Stern Gang was hanged by the British on the gallows of Acre), Adon-Yakob is more drawn to the harps of Babylon than to the olive orchards of Gethsemane. 

Boon included him in the now infamous Exiled/HardCore exhibition at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the ensuing succès de scandale catapulted the young expatriate into artworld stardom.

My good friend David Schoffman took a keen interest in the young Israeli artist (Schoffman speaks a mellifluously fluent albeit biblically inflected Hebrew) and introduced him to scores of New York artworld hotshots and power brokers. Many saw in their  relationship a faint, tender echo of the Warhol/Basquiat pairing of the 1980's. It's a testament to Schoffman's legendary generosity that he granted the younger artist an uncircumcised grace and never begrudged his meteoric art market inflation. 

The Squared Letters of Yaweh: Vav, Alpha Adon-Yakob, 2012

 

 

 Until now.

When asked in an interview published in the current November issue of Arte de Nuestro Tiempo to name his most profound influences, Adon-Yakob  rattled off a laundry list of minor Middle Eastern performance artists, a couple of third-rate poets and Kafka. When pushed to name whom he thought were today's most overrated personalities he replied, "Lady Gaga, Hassan Nasrallah and David Schoffman."

Ouch! 

 

Bruised But Not Yet Beaten

 Academic and artistic salons throughout Europe are currently awash in a torrent of senseless controversy. Believe it or not, the issue at hand involves the age-old agon of "expertise versus ingenuity." Though reasonable minds could have expected this issue to have been settled by Micah Carpentier and the Parisian School of Pestilence, our flawed and fractured times carry with it a faint patina of collective amnesia.

The specific case in point revolves around the Venezuelan painter Hector-Tony Retto and his unwieldy influence on contemporary painting.

 

Hector-Tony Retto,  Bajándome los Pantalones, egg tempera on enamel,  1981

His mesmeric, mandalic egg tempera panels are rich disquisitions on the aesthetic of repetition. His widely exhibited works influenced an entire generation of young artists whose historical compass was previously frozen in the broad-brushed frenzy of the fifties. Painters as disparate as Michaela Incrote, Balu Mengisti and Bob Stein all fell under Retto's spell producing pared down, patterned emblems of rational, flat pictorial space. 

My good friend David Schoffman has also been implicated in what has come to be known as "Retto's derivative dossier" (here we call it "le dossier dérivé de Retto") - a list of well-known contemporary artists whose originality have recently come into question.

Though Schoffman's work ethic has been ridiculed in the past his connection to Retto is something altogether new. Though I admit to seeing some superficial similarities, in all the years that I've known him, I have only heard Schoffman mention the prolific Venezuelan but once.

David Schoffman, The Body is His Book #63, oil on panel, 2009

A much more compelling case can be made for Schoffman's shameless appropriation of the fabric drawings of Velimir Shtern, the Soviet painter who was murdered by Stalin shortly after the infamous Doctor's Plot show trials of 1952-53.

Velimir Shtern, untitled work on paper, 1949

But this, alas, we will save for another time.