Sunday, July 29, 2007



HUMILITY

No work, no matter how accomplished, can justify the unseemly display of hubristic excess on the part of David Schoffman, occasioned by the current exhibition at DCA Fine Art. I too would be pleased if Stan Pessoa described my work on Charlie Rose as “the greengages of art history’s next page.” I would be thrilled if Landor Savage pre-purchased ten percent of next year’s studio output. My lips would brighten and my soul would sing if Epitaph Press were publishing a catalogue raisonné of my early work, even without the critical essay by Chaumeur. But Schoffman has become insufferable.

He’s behaving like a child. Like an eddying elf preening over a cooked biscuit, his giddy self-congratulations are tedious and embarrassing.

I need my tranquility restored if I am to get back to Paris and work productively. I find myself wishing Schoffman some spectacular calamity, shingles, a swollen tongue, a lost limb.

Yes, my work is being well received, but that smug and stately David Schoffman exceeds me at every turn.

My withering hand beseeches you my readers …. Do not get caught in the maelstrom. Schoffman must dismount from his lofty star!

Friday, July 27, 2007


GESTURES SPILLING FROM CRATES

RATTLING TRAFFIC AT DCA FINE ART





Few people realize that the paintings and drawings David Schoffman is exhibiting at DCA this summer are commonly referred to as “The Lost Works.” The pictures literally disappeared after “Yellow Tuesday”, that fateful and largely misunderstood June day in Paris many years ago. Like much of the neighborhood surrounding the Montsouris, David’s studio was looted.

“Mardi Jaune” was a turning point for the School of Pestilence. Our collective uncertainty gave way to lassitude, which in turn submitted to apathy. David was particularly affected. Years of anticipation made him exhausted. With his studio in tatters, stained by the blood of youth, David returned to New York with whatever work he could salvage from the wreckage.

A few years ago, Ricardo de Campos, the Portuguese lace magnate donated a considerable portion of his art collection to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Among the works were three paintings and three drawings from Schoffman’s "Rattling Traffic" series. Seeking restitution, (the movie “A Heart More Distant” is based of this), Schoffman was forced into an unnerving period of angry litigation. The pictures were eventually returned.

Perhaps the publicity inspired by this current exhibition will help locate the remaining paintings.

Friday, July 06, 2007




IN ADVANCE OF THE DCA FINE ART EXHIBITION

I am reminded by Alsatian poet Bertrand Caillebotte's sonnet, “Douze Façons Pour Se Pencher,” that rage and envy are “…doublé par la dette et désespère.”

The falling out between Schoffman and I was caused by a remarkably petty affair. We were at the Beaubourg, admiring “Violin et Verre,” the 1913 still life of Juan Gris when I made the innocent observation that the painting reminded me of David’s picture “The Loom of Minerva.” Well, if you are at all acquainted with David and his pathological “anxiety of influence,” you can probably figure out what happened next.

With blood rushing toward his shiny grey dome and his face contorted into a scuffling beak he looked at me with a contempt I had never imagined him capable of. “Malaspina, you are a scab, you are stagnant water, you repel me,” and with that he turned on his heel and marched out of the museum.

Two frosty years passed without as much as a word until last month’s invitation to exhibit with him in Los Angeles. Well, I have wearied of the corruption of our unfortunate acrimony. David is, quite frankly, a remarkable painter. I am honored to exhibit with him at DCA Fine Art and I look forward to it.

I hope he has lost his preoccupation with Gris.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Malaspina '07


FOR THE SAKE OF NOBLER INTENTIONS

Cushioned by idle comforts, softened by southern Californian lassitude, David Schoffman’s calcified intellect has turned malignant. What madness! Tempted by the faint purrs of public acclaim, (such an unlawful prize!), Schoffman has tricked me, (yes, tricked me!) into participating in an exhibition with him and Micah Carpentier.

If rousing the dead were not crime enough, he acts as if our hideous blood feud was but a lover’s spat. Has that drunken spider gone insane!? Schoffman, living as he does in that ivy-mantled tower of international renown, thinks time has healed the deeper vitals of my rage!

It has not!

I have, however agreed to this exhibition, in no small measure due to the infinite charms of Delia Cabral, owner and director of DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica, California. (If Brecht survived those miserable palm trees, so can I).

Cabral (which in Aramaic means “sternest minds amaze”) is a remarkable impresario who combines a flawless eye with a deep commitment to tasteful elegance. She does this with the dreamful ease of bladed grass. She is patient with my worthless rages, imperturbable toward my luxuriant complaints.

The exhibition will take place in August. I may or may not come to the opening. I will not show my finest work. I will not be vengeful nor will I be forgiving.


Carpentier '81

Monday, June 04, 2007

PETULANCE

The charming and comely interviewer, Francine Claudel, is a renowned vedette of the French stage and screen. Her stature in the Francophone world is analogous to that of Halina Reijn’s among the Dutch or Sinead Kennedy among the Irish.

By no means an expert in the arts, her questions to Schoffman were pleasant, well-meaning generalizations aimed toward the typical viewer. What prompted David’s vitriolic riposte was the simple inquiry as to the “style” of painting he engaged in.

As all painters know, “style” is a word used mostly by philistines and knaves eager to characterize a person’s oeuvre as neatly as one would characterize an ice cream flavor.

Poor, unsuspecting Francine used the wrong word to the wrong guy but as they say in L.A. “it made great television!”

Here is the notorious segment from TF1's series "AMERICAN PAINTERS" aired on February 15th 1991

Tuesday, May 22, 2007


Irritabilité

Boulevard Saint Marcel was clamorous with traffic and the boisterous, manic racket of urban birdsong. Armies of ignorant bureaucrats obediently made their way toward the slow death of their day jobs and Schoffman and I were feeling comically extraneous. We were sitting at an outdoor table at Le Canon des Gobelins, drinking strong Turkish coffee and nibbling on their wildly overrated Topfen Strudel.

It had been a few years since our last meeting and it took a while to get accustomed to the harsh cadences of Schoffman’s New Yorkese. “Those fuckers don’t know the difference between a paintbrush and a baseball bat!” Tiny missiles of quark cheese sprayed the table like cluster bombs as he spoke. “Those French pricks willfully misunderstand my work. They’re a bunch of anti-Semitic, anti-American, toothless blowhards. They should piss blood, the whole blackhearted lot of them!”

What occasioned this torrent of petulant rancor was a review that appeared in Le Monde under the byline of one Denis Bruel. Describing Schoffman’s recent exhibition of miniature paintings on zinc plates, Bruel likened them to “fancy ashtrays, the kind an uncle brings back from a trip abroad”. He went on to characterize Schoffman as an artist who peaked “too soon and too slightly”. He finished by saying that the American public was to Schoffman “like an adoring mistress, while the French are like a long suffering wife who knows all too well her husband’s faults and foibles”.

I have too say, it was a cruel rebuke even by French standards. David was justifiably annoyed though I remember thinking at the time how much of the criticism rang true. It was a pivotal moment in his career. Professionally, he dropped off the face of the Earth. He hasn’t shown his work, publish an essay or deliver a lecture since. For years, he’s been laboring on his “One-Hundred Paintings” project and I’ve heard through friends that it is the finest work he has ever done.

Meanwhile, those “blackhearted French” have not forgotten my good friend David. TF1 recently ran a four part series on American painters in which David was featured prominently. They called him “the reclusive, mercurial artist who embodies the rough strife of creativity’s embrace. He is a good painter with a bad character.”

Monday, April 30, 2007



ALBERNHEIT

In all the years that we have known one another, Schoffman and I have shown our work together only once.

In the spring of 1990, Berlin was a city marinating in adolescent exuberance. Art galleries were opening everywhere and in the most unlikely places. Gallerie Kunstbrauerel 17 on Zionskirchplatz, under the ominous shadow of the crumbling evangelical church was one such place. It was run by Claudia Musil, the flamboyant doyenne of the German avant-garde, whose chiseled features and colorful hats became an emblem for Euro-hipness.

She asked David and I to design a collaborative exhibition based loosely on the theme of Habermas’ theory of communicative reason, a fashionably obscure post-modern war-horse. Neither David nor I knew anything about Habermas, (which probably made us uniquely qualified for the endeavor), but a friend of mine, a professor at Heidelberg University explained that it had something to do with language.

Well, to be brief, Schoffman and I bought a small German phrase book, a bunch of stencils and some imported Krylon spray paint. After getting furiously drunk, we went to the gallery and got to work painting long German sentences on the crisp white walls, laughing so hard we were in agony. When we were done, the room looked like the aftermath of a verbal food-fight.

Non sequiturs dripped aimlessly next to declamatory broadsides. Fractured syntax squatted defiantly beside eloquent lyricism. Rhymed couplets were paired with garish profanity. The place was a mish-mash of random gibberish, a disconnected, poorly executed hodgepodge of driveling dreck.

The critics loved it.

Schoffman and I have been pretty successful in Germany ever since, but inevitably, whenever we show, our latest work is always compared unfavorably to that legendary frolic at Kunstbrauerel 17.

Friday, April 20, 2007


Bête Comme Un Peintre

David Schoffman draws with the fixed certainty of a caliph but I wouldn’t call him a natural draftsman. His confident line is ruffled by a sense of reckless speculation.

I recently saw an exhibition of David’s drawings and was struck by his poetic sense for the page. Silent intervals give way to scrambled agitation invoking the messiness of thought with the clarity of articulation. His true debt is to the tussled sheets of Frederico Zuccero, those rough sketches cluttered with pentimenti.

In a recent interview with the art historian Toshiro Oh, David described his connection to Italian Mannerism as “a prayerless captivity.” It was a typical Schoffman comment, empty, pretentious and obfuscating.

David, if you are reading this: Shut up and draw!

Thursday, April 12, 2007


SINCE UNSUNG

Since the inception of this blog I have received innumerable e-mails with specific questions about David Schoffman’s life. I must admit, I’m a bit envious of his allure.

Many of the inquiries are silly, like, “What does he look like in pajamas?” or “Is it true that his back is covered with pastures of white hair?” Some of the queries are beyond my area of expertise, like, “When is his birthday?” or “Does he use oil or acrylic gesso?”

But certain questions come up time and time again, so I’ll begin to address those that seem to be on many people’s minds.

Dahlia Danton from Los Angeles was apparently one of David’s students at UCLA. She wondered if there was any truth to the rumor that at one time David was a member of a punk rock band.

Well Dahlia, the real story goes as follows: In 1979 David lived in Dublin and dabbled in music, particularly drumming. He was particularly taken with the Takhas, a central Asia percussion instrument made from bamboo and llama hides and sounds like the dropping of cans. Through friends he met Kevin Daley, one of the original members of the Saucerspoons. (This was long before the ‘Spoons’ recorded their “Live in Bethlehem” album). One night in a pub in Doolin, Schoffman scrawled on a beer napkin the lyrics to “Tongued By Philomel,” which was recorded by the Saucerspoons in 1984. The Spoons performed it on “Vin Geller’s Top Pops,”and the song rose to number 38 on the Billboard charts.

He never wrote another song but of late he has been struggling on a contemporary rendering of Kol Nidre, the Jewish prayer for rain.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007


RAIN MAN MEETS REMBRANDT

In a 1999 review in “Cahiers D’Ivers,” the writer Raymond Quineau described David Schoffman’s paintings as “outsider art performed by an insider.”

An atypically apposite observation by a typically undistinguished critic.

From the late 80’s “The Shape Of Sleep” through “Cohanim,” “The Loom Of Minerva,” and “Rattling Traffic” of the 1990’s and on to the current series of one-hundred paintings, Schoffman’s work looks like the product of a highly sophisticated lunatic.

On the one hand the work is steeped in art historical allusions. On the other hand his projects are always disturbingly unique. Schoffman inclines toward an aesthetic of repetition and like many “outsiders” he has an unnerving patience for detail. He is fervently devoted to the diminutive dot. Monumental pieces are painted with #00 brush. Layers of complicated patterns are composed of tiny, tic-tac size brushstrokes. His pictures trill with an insect-like drone and being with a group of these works can be a profoundly disturbing experience.

I recently ran into Quineau in Rome where he was working as a consultant for an anonymous American art collector. I asked him if he was keeping up on the vicissitudes of Schoffman’s erratic career. He answered me with an icy glower. “These days, Malaspina, I don’t look at art … I just buy the stuff.”

Tuesday, March 20, 2007


ACCIDENTAL AFFINITIES

An important influence on David Schoffman’s development as a painter was the legendary Cuban conceptual artist, Micah Carpentier. Author of innumerable manifestoes, Carpentier is best known for two enduring masterpieces: “The Mind Is A Place Of Vague Things” and “The Song Of Degrees.”

As a young art student Schoffman served as an informal amanuensis to the reclusive master, answering mail, performing tasks around the studio and tending the garden. “Idleness and humility,” Carpentier would intone, “are strangers to me.”

Schoffman claims to have had a hand in conceiving “The Song Of Degrees.” He is lying.

Carpentier’s nephew has devoted his life to maintaining his uncle’s powerful legacy. He is the executor of his estate and the editor of his massive literary output.

He has a modest website where examples of “Degrees” can be seen.

(http://www.artmajeur.com/micahcarpentier/)

I miss Micah. He was a good and dear friend. I have posted above, one of my favorite photographs of him, playfully hiding behind his beautiful paper bags.

Monday, March 12, 2007


THE GIFT

The other day I was leafing through an old weather beaten copy of Dolfeto’s classic novella “Besos del Follaje”. I love the chapter where he describes in excruciating detail the luckless pair, Monique and Simon, getting married. Drawn by strong but unwarranted passion, the two of them shuffle nervously at the muddy makeshift alter on Fern Hill. Dolfeto is a master in combining comedy and rage in an elegantly dissonant prose.

I had forgotten that this particular edition (Goulote, 1989) included black and white reproductions from Schoffman’s earlier series “Chorister.” It really was an inspired choice. These moon-blanched images conjure so poetically the atmosphere of irreverent reverence that Dolfeto was so famous for.

I’m embarrassed to confess that my copy of the novella was actually inscribed to me. It reads: “To Malaspina, toward whom I have mixed feelings.”

Friday, March 09, 2007

THE BODY IS HIS BOOK (continued)



It has always mystified me how a recluse like David Schoffman found such a devoted following. I was in Shanghai last week, meeting with a group of junior curators from the Quijon Bo when David’s name came up.

“Oh yes …. We studied his work in graduate school. Is he still working on “The Body Is His Book?” Is he really making one-hundred paintings?” “Have you seen any?” “What is he like?” “He looks just like John Malkovich!”

Schoffman only shows his work on rare occasions and must be coaxed to do so. He devotes himself to large-scale operatic projects that take years to complete. He keeps critics and curators at bay and is even guarded among his colleagues.

And yet, whether I’m in Shanghai, Tokyo, Anatolia, Zurich, New York or Miami, people are fiercely interested in David Schoffman’s work.

So, for the record: “The Body Is His Book: One Hundred Paintings” is about half finished. David has about fifty stunning images hung in orderly rows on his studio walls. The work is rich and complex and unlike anything else out there. He is patiently working every day, slowly bringing the work to a state of startling perfection.

Also for the record: He looks nothing like John Malkovich.

Friday, February 23, 2007

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.

Thursday, January 18, 2007


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.

Monday, December 04, 2006

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.

Monday, November 20, 2006


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.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006


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.

Sunday, November 05, 2006


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?!

Saturday, November 04, 2006


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.