MOSES NEVER ENTERED THE PROMISED LAND

No one ever accused David Schoffman of possessing any undo discretion. To call him edgy would be to discredit whatever precipice is suggested by this hackneyed designation. His is not a world of academic transgression, commodified misbehavior or aesthetic misdemeanor safely enacted under the jaundiced jurisdiction of critical analysis.

David Schoffman is the unimpeachably uncompliant artistic insurgent, the proud solitary, scrupulously authentic subversive whose place in the artworld is as galling as it is secure.

I was reminded of this on my recent visit to his Los Angeles studio where the pains of unidle drudgery are evident in his obsessive refinement of his 100 Paintings series. What he is doing has simply never been done before. Not even Tintoretto’s San Rocco paintings reach Schoffman’s level of manic indifference to moderation.

A 100 paneled polyptych! What a stunt!

My competitive nature is tranquilized by the soothing confidence that he will never finish!

TEST CASE

The impregnable bliss of drawing was the subject of a recent study conducted by the New England Conference of Cognitive Orthography. Though laborious and broadly infuriating to most artists, the assembled scientists concluded that the wreckage incurred from the gruesome task of rendering illusions two-dimensionally were abnormally though not unfavorably effecting electrolyte rhythms.

The panel of researchers wired six artists to a systole displacer in order to track the impulse vectors of the sinoatrial node. They found that the brain, though disdaining most pains rather welcomed the atypical discomforts accompanying drawing.

David Schoffman was one of the participating artists and chose as his subject the traditional practice of drawing the nude. Though his QT levels were consistent with the other artists, his augmented limb leads, based on the standard European hexaxial reference system, were way off the charts.

The scientists reached the conclusion that the drawing of the unclothed resulted in an “inarticulate pleasure” unique, singular and myocardially unquiet.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The San Francisco Bay Area art-collecting consortium Lysidas is one of the west coast’s most vigorous supporters of contemporary art. Chaired by Milton Edward of Goldman Sachs, this group of discerning visionaries has pooled their considerable fortunes in support of some of the best young California artists working today.

Having recently opened a Los Angeles office in Century City, Lysidas wasted no time raking through reams of unsolicited disks and slides, acquainting themselves with the local lay of the land. Iris Tehila, CEO of Herodotus Systems and the longest sitting member of the Lysidas board was quoted in the Art Newspaper, remarking on the “…wealth of untapped talent, the nascent brilliance, the dauntless dexterous intelligence” she found in particular among Los Angeles painters.

They recently hired my scrupulously mercenary friend David Schoffman to guide them on May 30th through the galaxy of Culver City galleries during its annual ArtWalk. He will undoubtedly begin his trek in the back room of DCA Fine Art at 5797 Washington Blvd where a cache of his very own works on paper will be prominently displayed.

Quel malfrat!

FLAGITIOUS TIMES

The life of many painters is buried in unease. Repairing daily to the devotions of the studio, tending the bitter, artisanal trade in solitude, the painter’s fatal meeting with self is a ritual of terror.

How David Schoffman remains so vacuously superficial is one of life’s great mysteries. A flashy, spry bon-vivant whose handmade shirts from Astor & Black and suits from Warwick Hall betray a clawing refinement and a Galilean lake’s-worth of thin-skinned vanity.

His character does not square with his painting.

The same beaked promontory from where he clasps his cuffs come the most complex, poetic and moral pictures of our century. The image above from his “Body Is His Book” series is a miraculous excavation from the unplowed grit of our contemporary discourse. Its high seriousness is unembarrassed and unapologetic.

Will the real David Schoffman please be revealed!

ACADEMIC RIVALRIES

The faculty at L’Institute d’Art Chronique du Havre includes such luminaries as Zeno Peter, Frank Lazarelli, Claudine McAuliffe, David Shaar Yashuv and Monique Manet. David Schoffman and I have lectured there on several occasions, both together and individually. I think we both agree that as art schools go, L’Institute is better than most.

They recently staged a most novel and unique exhibition. While hosting the cumbersomely titled Fourth Annual Symposium on Contemporary Commentary and Dialectic, they asked all the invitees to spend 20 minutes drawing their colleagues. The results were an eccentric compendium of radically divergent notions of both drawing and portraiture. Each of the 284 participants submitted a work that was ultimately hung at the Institute’s Goddard Gallery.

The show was called Non Possono Disegnare from the Jacko Barbu song of the same name.

Schoffman’s rendering of critical theory professor Louis Versuchend and me is posted above.

INFLATION

Humphrey Delmore, theatre critic for the Sussux Mail recently quipped: “Good drawing is like bad sex. Both are unconsummated exertions.” He went on to name his three favorite contemporary draftsmen.

Terry Bodoya, known for her mural sized watermelons rendered in tar, Alfred Leslie whose portraits en grisaille stirred a skeptical generation weaned on abstraction and David Schoffman.

Reviewing the recent survey of 21st century works on paper at Ribald & Tiles, Delmore described Schoffman as a “peripatetic visionary whose nomadic aesthetic defies classification.”

Personally, I find it relatively easy to describe Schoffman’s drawings:

“Comme Ci, Comme Ça.”

Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis

At the risk of appearing to be a hair-splitting contrarian, a feisty old effigy desperate to animate the embers of a lost eminence, I take issue with Dahlia Danton’s recent revelation concerning Micah Carpentier’s 48 Stations of Ecstasy.

With briny assurance she claims to have happened upon the original copy of Carpentier’s famous chapbook. What she saw in Havana was most certainly a specious facsimile.

The original, handmade copy of Las Cuarenta y Ocho Estaciones de ´Extasis is nesting in a flatfile in David Schoffman’s incorrigibly lambent Los Angeles studio. It was given to him as a gift shortly before Carpentier’s death and has been available to scholars for years.

THE STONES OF MAHAVIRA

Dispersed throughout the icy floor stones of the Mahavira Monastery in Ko Kong, Cambodia, lay the most peculiar images of the Buddha in all of Southeast Asia. This 10th Century architectural puzzle, situated on the western bank of the Kah Bpow River narrowly survived both the relentless American bombings as well as the bloodletting purges of the Khmer Rouge.

To walk thorough the dim halls of the monastery, lit only by the rusty glow of scented handmade candles, is to walk through an enchanted and innocent past. The serene, almost otherworldly atmosphere is transforming.

After half a dozen visits and countless hours of interviews and documentation, David Schoffman has completed his film about the Buddhas of Mahavira. Recently screened at the Boina Film Festival, it was awarded the Égout d’Or.

Below is a short clip.

SOAP OPERA

An unusual call to duty forced David Schoffman to suddenly drop everything and hop on a plane to Davos, where, waiting for him on the tarmac were Ambassador Terentius and his improbably fetching bride Nita. Whispers, suppositions and scuttlebutt have always provided a tattling basso continuo whenever Nita Terentius and David Schoffman were linked, the ligaments of lechery follow Schoffman like a late evening shadow no matter who his accomplice might be, but in this particular case the prattle was especially scurrilous. The Grand Opera Company of Davos’ production of Handel’s Tamerlano was scheduled to open on February 28th. The Terentius’ were heavily invested in the success of the production, in part because they were secretly backing it under the cover of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches and in larger part because Nita had been commissioned to design the sets.

The day was approaching and Nita was clearly over her head.

Remembering that years back Schoffman had done a torpidly received series of drawings based on the theme of famous suicides, he was summoned to offer his input. Rendering Bajazet’s demise with greater tact was of particular importance.

He saved the day and received no credit but when photographed at the opening gala sharing a toast with Terentius whose copious décolletage was exquisitely governed in a charcoal Monique Lhuilier, the International Herald Tribune ran the picture with the caption “Life Imitates Art As Cosi Fan Tutte Outshines Tamerlano At Davos Premiere.”

Tamerlano Study No. 27
2009

CHEBSHI OR SCHOFFMAN

On most nights from a small fishing village nested on the southern spine of Turkey, half way between Antalya and Mersin, a lighthouse can be seen with a faint flicker of yellow light illuminating the small room cupped beneath its aging crest. With grave indifference, Sevket Serbes sits hunched over a weather beaten oak worktable painting meticulous patterns on stiff muslin sheets.

He calls these patterns “chebshi,” an Eteocypriot word that roughly translates as “spent seed.” Over the course of forty years as keeper of the Acik Kapi Lighthouse, Serbes has painted over seven hundred chebshi paintings. They cover the rounded walls of his priapic home like an hallucinogenic gauze of unperturbed madness. The effect, upon seeing this riot of color and detail, is that one is in the presence of something frighteningly strange and urgently important.

David Schoffman, in a recent BBC interview mentioned in passing that he had once seen a black and white reproduction of the Serbes Chebshi and that it may have informed his work in some oblique way.

David Schoffman is a liar.

In 1981, Schoffman and I were on our way from Tibilisi to Ephesus in an asthmatic two-door, Zastava Koral when we stopped in Tarsus to join some Italian college students on a Mediterranean day cruise. We docked at the Acik Kapi Lighthouse for a light lunch and a tour of Serbes’ paintings, a common destination for tourists at that time. Schoffman was mesmerized by the works and whispered to me (we were in our 20’s at the time), “Malaspina, je volerai ceci tient des idées et il me fera célèbre.”

LITERATURE

The publication of Melissa DeTourney's recent critical tour de force David Schoffman: Subverter of Grave Horizons represents a significant contribution to the already bloated sub-catagory now known in our graduate programs as Schoffman Studies.




In her new book, DeTourney, associate professor of semiotics at Coglihn University in Newgrange, argues that Schoffman’s early close reading of Becarrie’s Amoureuses Volcaniques marked a decisive realignment of his aesthetic objectives. She further insists, and here she differs with both Obé and Castel, that Schoffman’s Body Is His Book: 100 Paintings is a shill for an occult and far more complex body of work based on Duchamp’s Étant donnés.

At a recent signing at Seattle’s Tall Order Books, DeTourney was physically assaulted by a disturbed young painter and puppeteer who strenuously objected to what he called “the cultish clique of Schoffmanerites.”

SCANDALO

Marina Samuela Carati, one of Italy’s most respected art collectors, recently commissioned David Schoffman to paint her portrait.

David Schoffman never paints portraits and never works on commission.

Last month, David Schoffman made a spectacular exception.

For twenty-one consecutive days, Schoffman, working from his suite at the Hotel Zurigo, just a few blocks from the Duomo di Milano, drew 250 preparatory studies of his courtly and statuesque subject. Patiently, for 10 to 12 hours a day, Carati submitted to David’s exacting demands. She stood, twisted like a ribbon in classic contrapposto; she sat like Agatha of Normandy, regal and serene, trundled in silks and small fluffy cushions; she reclined with the half-smile of a pliant maja wearing nothing but a garland of gaudy counterfeit pearls; she leaned chastely against a full-length mirror, her eyes cast downward, staring blankly at her open-toed velvet slippers; she tied ropes around her ankles and dangled gently from a towel-rack; she posed in all the available postures and when those were exhausted, she drew deeply from her native carnal melancholy and assumed an ingenious array of unconventional positions with the precision of a seasoned Bhangra dancer.

Marina Samuela Carati has never been known for her spontaneity. To friends and colleagues alike she is thought of as a decorous, dignified, even stiff grande dame, despite only being in her mid-forties. After her month as the hapless prop for David Schoffman’s lurid pencil, Carati has suddenly discovered her pulse. At a recent early evening cocktail party at her nine thousand square foot Sardinian summerhouse and to the utter astonishment of her assembled guests, Carati exhibited all 250 drawings.

The Italian press is still picking the bones of this most delicious scandal.

BREAKING FAITH

More photographs, stealthfully snapped in David's studio are surfacing in Europe. The Italian magazine L'Animo Mio published the pictures above with a caption that read: "Under-appreciated in his native country, David Schoffman is something of an icon here in this part of the world. His series of 100 paintings, The Body Is His Book, remains incomplete, mysterious and inaccessible."

I wasn't at all aware that David was under-appreciated in the United States. To listen to him one would think they minted a coin with his image on it, named boulevards and hospitals after him, made his studio into a shrine and closed the banks on his birthday.

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.

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.