THE VEIL OF SECRECY

David Schoffman is as reclusive as a prairie dog in winter, a solitary artistic egghead, an introvert of the first order. In our thirty years of friendship, I’ve visited his studio maybe a half a dozen times. He is famously secretive about his work. To see his paintings, one must wait for his intermittent exhibitions.

To follow the progression of his ideas one must rely on rumor. One such rumor circulating recently is that Schoffman has embarked on a singularly impractical project of such quixotic magnitude that most agree will never see the light of day. I am referring, of course, to the bizarre compendium of small paintings collectively known as “The Body is His Book.” It has been reliably reported and confirmed elliptically by Schoffman himself in an 2005 interview in ArtContext that the plan is to complete 100 pictures using only a double zero kolinsky sable paintbrush.

Sean Van Belge, the former Sotheby’s intern whose infamous tell-all memoir “Branding and the Credulous Collector: My Life in the Art World,” earned him the ire of just about every human involved in contemporary art, recently snuck into David’s studio posing as a UPS delivery man and snapped a few hasty pictures. The photographs above, originally published in Missile, appear to add credence to at least some of the speculation.

CLUES

In the spring of 1985, David Schoffman disappeared. By some accounts, he was missing for 18 months. According to other accounts he was sighted twice during that period of time, once on the Saronic island of Salamina and once in Barcelona where he was spotted playing a dangerous drinking game at a bar called Panchitos.

By all accounts, his absence suspiciously coincided with the disappearance of Fayette Lombardi, an art student who regularly attended David’s lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute. Fayette was a highly regarded performance artist whose senior thesis had something to do with prolonged sunbathing while covered with stenciled quotations from Lord Byron.

Today, Lombardi is a news anchorwoman at WKIA in Indiana City and has recently published a memoir titled “When I Was Naked”, about her years as a “near-professional extrovert.”

The unattributed drawing above appears among the book’s many illustrations with the caption, “Here I am, in post-coital repose, drawn by a friend, during my ‘lost years’.

PRAGUE

My infrequent trips to Prague are almost always unpleasant. I find the beautiful cityscape bleak, cloying and quaint. The intersecting chimneys that line Kaprova Boulevard reflect a sickening sapphire light that tint the clouds with dread. Lazarska Street, where common life bustles with resignation is like the filthy tail of an elegant animal. And the much-admired view from Strelecky Ostrov is simply a postcard from Purgatory.

The one shining light, the landmark that makes any trip worthwhile is the small, smoky jazz club across the street from the Mustek metro station known to the locals as Veleslavina’s. Every Thursday night the place is packed to hear Guido Tocca’s resplendent redefinitions of polymodal chromatism. This cat can play.

I am bitterly envious that the cover art on Tocca’s last CD’s is a painting by my friend and rival David Schoffman. Schoffman has a tin ear and such primitive tastes that his idea of good music are bands like the Sonora Seven and Darba.

I recommend to any serious listener any and all of Tocca’s discography. My personal favorite is the 2007 recording “Dazzled by Dawn: Live in Antibes.”

what once I was, and what am now

With John Milton turning 400 and with the popular noise of the deadly swarm having far from abated, David Schoffman has returned to Samson Agoniste for guidance and inspiration. As a Nazarite is separate to God so too is David to his art. His childish optimism still pictures his work as the seal of silence that corrects the world. As a bondslave to painting, he spends his light in his cramped atelier, far from what Milton called the “daily fraud.”

What a fool to think the sun is speechless beyond his studio walls. What arrogance to assume that upon drawing his tools he has made himself exempt from our collective culpability. His adamantean nobility is ill-fitting and ridiculous. His work is simply not that good.

What! You think I should dull my spear just because his wife just delivered a son?

THE SONGS OF THE HEART

David Schoffman's beautiful bride, a magnanimous and sublime woman whose many virtues highlight her husband's dim pessimism is on the verge of birthing a child. I find few things more sensual than the naked body of a woman in full fecundity. I flew in from Paris for two reasons.

One, to initiate litigation against my former dealer Byron George of the now defunct New York gallery Sardanapalus Modern and two, to draw David's darling mate in her lovely morning dress.

Tempests come and go but the hushed air that precedes birth is a cherished field of bliss.

TWENTY-FIVE FOOLISH DOLLARS

In Auvers-sur-Oise, 35 kilometers northwest of Paris, there is a quirky little shop called Prix Bas et Maladroit which seems to sell just about anything. On one trip I bought a stuffed dove, a bottle opener in the shape of a sperm whale, an American style toaster and a cassette tape of Jean Gabin reading La Chanson de Roland. The whole assorted hash cost me less than 50 euros.

David Schoffman’s 400 Drawings is an untamed orchard of exquisite invention. It’s a drowsy mix of refinement and anarchy where no two drawings are alike. And like my favorite shop in Auvers, everything is ridiculously under-valued.

I’m afraid that this new venture represents the first full sobs of David’s madness. He is numb both to reason and to sound business practice. Twenty-five American dollars is what a family spends at Starbucks for a coffee and few croissants. It’s what parking used to be at the Bibliothèque Nationale before they raised the price. I spend more each month on late fees at Visuelle, my local movie rental place.

But as we say in the Midi, "ce n’est pas mon pâté!"

FROM AN OCEAN TO A FETID PUDDLE

I hate to see my friend David Schoffman treating his radient drawings like dust. How can he offer up the fruits of his atrocious labors for such a pittance? Like a mute canary I hold my tongue and watch as he suffers the indignity of playing the herring merchant. Is it need that skewed the compass of his staunch character or maybe it's just another episode of his antic imagination.

If I had $10,000 I would gladly give it to him. The hucksters hook is an awkward cudgel in his hands. This project has turned him from a verb to a noun, from a visionary to a scavenger, from a blazing torch to a mousey messenger.

But alas, I'm no fool. I just purchased six pieces!

A HARBINGER OF PROGRESS??

Summoned by sudden, unanticipated expenses, unimagined sums of tyrannical proportion that threaten the flames of his zealotry, David Schoffman has abandoned the hypnosis of his obsessions and has entered the world of commerce.

The art world grieves as the banking crisis has made collectors more circumspect. Schoffman’s own Maecenas, the disgraced Bakunin Brothers CFO, Sebastian Faure, who personally owns four hundred of David’s pieces, is now under indictment and is living in Umm al-Quwain awaiting extradition.

The well is dry but David won’t be doomed.

In an unusual venture that critics are already speculating will irredeemably redefine the art trade, Schoffman is offering to sell his drawings for the pitiable sum of $25 apiece!

He has set aside 400 of some of his best works and is currently consulting with the marketing firm of Fabbri & Fabbri in order to launch this unorthodox endeavor.

I can only wish him luck in this new, mournful misadventure.

THE CRISIS AND THE FUTURE OF ABSTRACT PAINTING

In a small hotel overlooking the picturesque beaches of Porto Corsini, a small group of painters, poets and scholars held what has been described as the liveliest and most important conference on abstract painting in fifty years. Dennis Carioca, Dahlia Danton, Fritz Mahon and Soutelle D’Auberville were among the luminaries participating in the event.

Among the papers submitted were, “Malevich: Cups and Saucers,” “Stella!!” and “Flatness and Beyond.” It was the latter that created the most excitement. Few subjects stir the partisan passions of painters more than the issue of space.

Dahlia Danton, in her dual role as advocate and surrogate, shocked the assembled luminaries with the presentation of David Schoffman’s uproarious video which is posted above.

The remainder of the conference dealt exclusively with the alleged limitations of the shallow.

THE BODY IS HIS BOOK

David Schoffman labors over his paintings with a prolonged and maddening patience. It literally takes him years to complete a small work. Finnish filmmaker, Risto Arwidsson documented the progress of a piece for the duration of three full years. He recently distributed this video which includes Bobby Layton's strange song "Knights of Pain."

MICAH CARPENTIER AND THE SONG OF DEGREES

I wept when I saw this short, lovely tribute to my dear friend, the legendary artist, Micah Carpentier

DYSLEXIA

The 1992 Micah Carpentier exhibition at the historic Grand Theater in central Havana was one of those shapeless events that inadvertently spin fortune’s wheel toward adversity. Carpentier filled the theatre’s vaulted antechamber with over seven-hundred of his hand-drawn bags, calling the show The Song of Degrees, invoking William Blake.

It was a time of artistic repression in Cuba’s capital and the work was greeted with bouquets of vitriolic scorn. “Formalist self-indulgence”, sniveled El Habanero’s Mariano Bayo, himself a formidable though overly competitive painter. Carlida Piñera, the bleating apologist of socialist kitsch called the show “… a salty cup of bourgeois pessimism.” Even the Minister of Agrarian Well-Being, Mike Guillén weighed in, saying the work “carried the fetid stench of northern winds’, a common refrain for anything remotely evoking the European pictorial tradition.

Carpentier was crushed.

The original poster advertising the exhibition was recently sold in New York’s Diomeda Gallery for an undisclosed five-figure sum. The famously misspelled “November” was the consequence of having the unschooled David Schoffman scrawl out the text.

GRACE

Lizhi Jin, Paying Men to Talk Peace, 2008

Lizhi Jin's monumental paintings are creating a Cretan maze of hyperbole in the French press. Many critics have noted the zigzag crackle of his liquid lines suspiciously resemble those of David Schoffman.

I called David the other day and asked for his reaction.

"I could sound like a drooling, drifting, whitehaired mole rat and say that the guy is a silverheeled thief ... but I won't. Jin is a legitimate artist who can pack all of his ideas into two small suitcases. He's likeable and plays a wicked game of table tennis but a Sardanapalus he ain't."

I thought that was generous, considering the circumstances.

Schoffman is a classy bloke.

I WHIMPER THE BODY ECLECTIC

Lizhi Jin, Peasants Wrestling and at Rest, 2008

Lizhi Ji, the young, celebrated painter from Tianjin was recently in Paris attending the opening of La Nouvelle Dialectique Chinoise, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at Gallerie Claude Beaudoin. I’ve known Ji for the past few years, ever since I started performing at the biennial Gu Gung Arts Festival in Beijing. I’ve always admired his work.

His new series of monumental paintings (the largest measures 5 x 6 metres) combining encaustic, tar and white chalk are truly dazzling. Though they share a suspicious affinity to David Schoffman’s Annunciation pieces, both artists claim complete ignorance of each other's work.

Dr. Sonya Hesse, Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory at UNLV and author of the definitive Lizhi Ji and the Captive Mind (Dobrus Press, 2007), insists that while Schoffman shares many of the new Chinese artistic sensibilities, he does so merely to capitalize on its recent commercial currency. Ji’s biting depictions of political displacement are authentically rooted in his family history during the Cultural Revolution, while Schoffman is merely rehashing tired expressionistic idioms and outdated formalism.

LITA ABRUZZI

Annunciation 112, 1998

David Schoffman and I have many mutual friends and a few shared enemies. Our flames both burn without wood, our passions can be devouring. Captive to the enchantments of Lita Abruzzi, we both obstinately claimed her as an abiding afflatus.

In 1998, when Lita was working as a contortionist with the Cirque Roman à Clef in Paris, I would meet her after every performance. I think we sampled every bar à vin in the city. Late one night over smoked duck and a bottle of Château Guiot Costière de Nîmes rosé at Willy’s in the 1er arrondissement, I was so bewitched by the sorcery of her gentle mouth that I stole her spoon and kept it as an amulet to this day.

Not to be outdone, Schoffman appropriated my muse for his infamous Annunciation drawings. That same year David, in a frenzy of pious sacrilege, completed 260 small works that were described at the time by Liberation critic Anselme Bellegarrigue as “the untongued supplications of monastic pain.”

THE GOOD MOUTH SMILES

TRENCH CONFESSIONS IV, 1998

Arteries of her granite will were dried and drained the day Dahlia Danton entered my class at the Abruzzo Art Institute in the summer of ’84. For her it was a junior year abroad. For me it was a few months in Sulmona, doing research on Ovid and teaching a course in egg tempera.

I punished her with work and wit and made her treat her talent with greater leniency. I told her to look up my good friend David Schoffman upon her return to Los Angeles and to continue her apprenticeship under someone even nastier than myself.

I did not tell her to fall in love. That she did on her own.

The Danton retrospective, currently up at the Kunstmuseum in Stassen, shows a shameless debt to Schoffman’s 1979 Battered Books paintings, a debt made more obvious by the title of the work featured above.

Love prompts David to turn a blind eye toward the lack of anxiety Dahlia finds in his influence. Or has he been weakened by her censure?

PAPER TIGER

There is a solemn, incorruptible naïveté that belies David Schoffman’s reputation as a knife-grinding harbinger of artistic indecency. Universally recognized as a coarsened, embittered intellectual, to his friends, David is closer to what Dreiser called “a waif amid forces.” His heart is a trickle of pain that is softly expressed in his voluminous correspondences.

In a letter that I received just a few days ago, David wrote:

Emerging late one night from a darkened tavern in downtown Los Angeles, I glanced at the hidden peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains and saw an apparition of Saint Matthew the Evangelist cloaked in his publican robes. I saw a basin of tears shimmering like blue sapphires and the brilliant tail of slow moving rain clouds slithering through the tree line like a winged serpent. I was touched to tears but could not cry.

I drew a picture instead.

Though his prose is typically an arpeggio of near nonsense, the sentiment is authentic, pathetic and sweet.

Schoffman’s sensitive soul is unfit for these overly muscular times.

VACANCE

The month of August, as my readers all know, is the month that my countrymen retreat to the south and idle away under a sun that favors France.

I too am on vacation and have little inclination to be bogged with blogging or even painting for that matter.

My dear, overworked, North American friends: I will leave you with a part of David Schoffman's juvenilia, a drawing he made when he was fifteen that was given to me by his darling mother.

Please take this opportunity to read the many posts you have missed.
I will return in a few weeks

À Bientôt
Currado

PUBLIC RELATIONS

The word résumé is suitably French and fits handily with our classist past. The American obsession with credentials however, seems vaguely inappropriate in the land of the “self-made man.”

A painter receiving an advanced degree is a comic notion here in Europe where the authority of the academy was soundly defeated about a hundred years ago. The American art community's quaint nostalgia for diplomas is one more example of its robust quest for self-confidence.

My good friend David Schoffman has been tapped by the American Association of Fine Arts Graduate Studies to participate in a series recruitment videos designed to encourage college students to pursue Masters Degrees in the visual arts. They are being aired around the country with mixed results.

See below for one of the most popular examples:


Courtesy of the American Association of Fine Arts Graduate Studies. All rights reserved 2008

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.