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.

I don’t always agree with Schoffman, whose sectarian view of art history seems to narrow his otherwise catholic sensibilities. For example, in his 1996 lecture, “Vessels Of Common Character,” he spoke a bit too passionately of the connection between 14th century Ottoman handcrafts and the work of Micah Carpentier. At the time, the name Carpentier was as ubiquitous in Paris as the name Schoffman is today in Los Angeles. Carpentier’s installation, “The Song Of Degrees” was making its way through the contemporary art museums of Western Europe, and I ran into him at Bistro Pumelle on rue Sans Souci. I asked him about Schoffman’s reading of his work and he just rolled his eyes. “Schoffman’s a good painter, perhaps even a great painter,” he said, “he should stick to what he’s good at, and leave the speculation to the specialists.”

For the passed few years, my good friend and sometimes rival, David Schoffman, has been maintaining a "blog," (such an awful word, but more on that latter) recounting anecdotes from my life as an artist. (http://currado.blogspot.com/). As a latecomer to the 21st century, I have been slow to return the favor. Now that I am no longer teaching at the Lyons Institute of Fine Arts, I find that I have both the time and the inclination to indulge in our new technologies.

And so ... let me begin by stating quite emphatically, that David Schoffman is a most unusual and provocative artist. "Festina Lente," is more than a hollow slogan when it comes to Schoffman's methods and visions. He indeed makes a leisurely haste in his daily crucibles in the studio. To spend time with this erudite and sincere man is to be in the presence of one who truly is intent upon correcting the world through small acts of introspection.