ONE WRONG TURN

I recently watched The Glad Philanderer again, that penetrating 1959 film by Witold Khanken about the life of the Hungarian dramatist Tolbin Roth. When I first saw it in college I was puzzled by its grainy, poorly focused cinematography, mistaking this well-reasoned aesthetic choice for the rank incompetence of an amateur. Arguing through the night with my roommates, I reached the conclusion that Modern Art was a hoax - a snide, treacherous folly imposed upon us by a privileged class of well-connected powerful snobs.

Now, of course, I can fully appreciate Khanken's masterpiece for what it is but recalling my initial reaction to the film I am struck, once again by the tremendous personal risks great artists assume while communicating in a prophetic diction.

Still from The Glad Philanderer, Witold Khanken 1959

Like Khanken and his subject Tolbin Roth, my uncle Micah Carpentier was naturally and inevitably drawn to the visionary tropes of the solitary genius. He, like they, were scorned at first. Not only were they mocked and misunderstood but were regarded as downright fraudulent by a public too lazy and opaque to be receptive to revelation. And just as Roth went on to become a household name so too did Carpentier yet both paid a steep price for their success. 

Marel Szolnoky

The actor Marel Szolnoky who played Roth in Khanken's epic film was revered in his native Hungary. People of a certain age still  
speak solemnly of his portrayal of Lear in Szabó's stage adaptation of the Shakespeare classic. And like my uncle, Szolnoky came to the United States to widen his audience and to chase the American Dream. When Szolnoky came to Hollywood in the late 1960s his frustrated attempts to break into the business led him to the brink of despair. Aside from the few small roles given to him out of pity by Roman Polanski, he ended up working for a tailor in downtown Los Angeles. 

When Carpentier came to the States he wisely chose New York to stake his claim. He quickly fell in with a group of artists and writers that included the likes of Leland Bell, Ad Reinhardt, Kenneth Koch and Kenny Pauta. He regularly showed his work at the Green Gallery on 57th Street and received, for the most part, favorable reviews. Drawn to the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, Carpentier returned to Havana in 1968 on the same Air France flight as Eldridge Cleaver.

It is so easy in life to make the wrong decision. Some blame fate but I believe the truth is much colder than that. I have devoted myself to curating the legacy of my brilliant uncle because I feel duty-bound to rectify his failure of agency, his folly and his short-sighted infatuation with a corrupted ideology.

I also need to figure out what to do with all of these bags.

 

COMMODITY FETISHISM POR FAVOR

During auction season, the fate of the Latin American modernists has always been a marginal sideshow to the more glitzy mainstream marquee players like Rothko, Warhol and Bacon. Within the orgy of over-sexed, overpriced artworks, a painting fetching over 100 million dollars has become as commonplace as a Hong Kong after-party. 

 

Micah Carpentier

Well, to the astonishment of that jaded jet-set of gilded galleries and moneyed museum boardrooms, a few records were set last night for our impecunious cousins south of the border. Chilean sculptor Juan-Bolsa de Papel's 1954 Mondogo Sin Valor, formally the centerpiece of hedge fund executive Stu W. Fine's modest collection was sold for an impressive 7 million dollars. Hector Bobadas, known dismissively as the Caravaggio of Costa Rica had two pieces unexpectedly exceed their modest, pre-auction estimates of 1.2 million and 1.4 million successively.

 

But the spectacular event that sent dystonic tremors throughout the fine art arteries of mid-town Manhattan was the sale to an undisclosed telephone bidder of Micah Carpentier's seminal 1969 paper bag Yo Llevo la Cerveza en Este. Appraised only a few years ago in the low seven figures (full disclosure: I am the executor of the Micah Carpentier Trust), this early work from The Song of Degrees was always a sentimental favorite of the great Cuban master.

 

Micah Carpentier with Yo Llevo la Cerveza en Este, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba 1973 (courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Trust)

 

One hopes that the anonymous buyer will make the work accessible to the general public but if experience is any guide this will probably not be the case. Collectors of Carpentier become so smitten by the flimsy vulnerability of his feeble brittle bags that they become belligerently disobliging to scholars, curators and museum directors.

 

But then again, I too would be overly protective of a bag I bought for 101.2 million.

 

 

 

L'Incredulità di Tomaso

The standard narrative of the Micah Carpentier myth is one that describes a relentless artistic renegade whose prickly reconfiguration of the European avant-garde tradition single-handedly refitted Caribbean modernism for generations to come. From the 1963 exhibiton El Terror de los Lápices where Carpentier stunned the public with a series of mural-sized canvases depicting the Eucharist to his 1970 collaboration with the young, off-beat Frenchman Currado Malaspina to his final triumphant 1973 Song of Degrees, Carpentier has never been far from the vortex of Latin American innovation.

Micah Carpentier examining one of his 1677 paper bag drawings, Havana, 1973 (Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Madrid)

What is less well known is the fact that Carpentier was an avid traditionalist and a life long student of nature and light. Though publicly he maintained the strict unwavering demeanor of a radical subversive, privately he carried himself with a tender and graceful humility. In his native city of Baracoa not far from Guantanamo Bay, (Carpentier is 1/8 Taíno on his grandmother's side which may explain his deep crepuscular eyes),  my uncle would spend hours painting small, delicate watercolors of the surrounding area.

Untitled watercolor, Micah Carpentier 1968

He kept these works secret, not wishing to undermine his reputation as an unforgiving advocate for what was known in his day as El arte avanzada, or "the advanced art." And yet these recently discovered works have a unique charm, an almost confectionery delectablity that is unmistakably intimate, accessible and unpretentious.

And so in spite of the fact that I am supposed to prefer the tawdry insolence of the paper bags my sentimental conventional heart leans toward these light lovely scherzi, these colorful impressions of the provinces that so profoundly evoke the rooted ancestral life of common people doing ordinary things.

So while I defer to the experts and recognize, at least intellectually, that my uncle Micah was an important innovator and an influential regional figure, I have to confess that I find the whole paper bag thing to be a steaming toad stool of paparruchas.

from The Song of Degrees, mixed media on paper bag, Micah Carpentier, 1971

 

POSTHUMOUS PETTINESS

Last March, after the death of my grandmother Bülbül Solitreo Lectionis, né Carpentier, I, together with 23 cousins and assorted aunts and uncles gathered in Barcelona for a memorial ceremony. Held at the baronial Paraninfo Posquières, the event was a bittersweet reminder of our family's glorious past. I would be dishonest if I did not add that the ceremony was also an expression of our promiscuous present for we have been scattered and dismembered to the four corners of the earth by the ambiguous advantages of our prosperity.

Bülbül Solitreo Lectionis, artist and year unknown.

 After the speeches and prayers and giant platters of carciofi alla giudia we made our way to the splendidly imposing Casa Lectionis on Via Laeitana, just a few blocks from Ciutadela Park. It was there where my grandmother lived for over sixty years, forty-five of which as an embittered widow.

Rummaging through the crawl space beneath the attic, a room the Spaniards call the cucaracha aseo, I found an old cardboard box covered with cobwebs and ash. I was astonished by it's contents.

When last inventoried in 2002 by Dr. Alphonse Kurth, associate curator of prints and drawings at  the Museo de las Cosas Sin Peso, Micah Carpentier's Song of Degrees, the famous series of hand-drawn paper sacks, numbered precisely 1,673 bags. Since then seven bags were discovered in a private collection in Buenos Aires though three have since been discredited as fakes. One thousand six-hundred and seventy-seven has therefore been the accepted number for almost a decade.

I was sure then and I am sure now that the box I discovered at Casa Lectionis contained genuine, previously unknown Carpentier bags. It has been an uphill battle trying to convince the vested interests within academia to accept my conclusion. The museum world has been equally obtuse and recalcitrant. Too many people have too much at stake to challenge the sacred sum of 1,677. 

from The Song of Degrees, number 1,678, Micah Carpentier, date unknown

 The auction record for a Carpentier bag was set in 2009 when the last bag was placed on the market. The work was sold to an anonymous collector (most people suspect it was the Pardishah of Mirkānu) for $365,000. In other words, within that ratty, mildewed box were bags worth over two million dollars.

I really don't care about the money. I simply resent being taken for a swindling greedy knave cashing in on the fame of a long dead relative.

   
Micah Carpentier discussing the work of Los Angeles artist, David Schoffman 

IMPUTE ME RIGHTEOUS

I've always thought that in matters of sexual proclivity, over-interpretation leads toward the unfortunate path of confusion and misdirection.  Priapic Picasso is not, I believe, a serious point of intellectual departure. Buggering Francis Bacon is an equally one-dimensional caricature that is both hopelessly parochial and depressingly puerile. My uncle Micah Carpentier was similarly reduced by his copulatory curriculum vitae into a gay rights warrior at the expense of his importance as a highly original 20th century Latin American modernist.

Calamus no. 12, Micah Carpentier, 1965

True, his 1965 series Calamus which boldly depicted "the manly love of comrades," shattered many taboos and breached a myriad of forbidden boundaries. And yet, I insist that these works stand strongly on their own regardless of their loaded and explicit subject matter.

What the tenure trackers fail to grasp is that in the first decade of post-revolutionary Cuba overt expressions of homosexuality was neither a cause for concealment nor a pretext for approbation. It's true that Che Guevara's bisexuality was not at the time an open secret as some scholars claim, but that's only because secrecy was deemed wholly unnecessary.

And not only did my uncle's work deal explicitly with homoeroticism, he was equally at home in the lusty, sweaty straight world as well.  

In The Song Of Degrees, Carpentier's five-hundred paper bag magnum opus, he drew countless images of the dancer BeBe Tumbao who appears to be in an incessant state of peakless climax. And yet, despite this, no scholar to date has linked these works with anything remotely related to the narrative of sexuality. Rather, it is uniformly understood that Carpentier's compulsive series of scribbled bags deal directly with the rituals of Santería as seen through a post-war neo-Kantian lens. (See Micah Carpentier, Transcendental Idealism and the Cuban Revolution by Minu Induad, Periódica de la Razón Contemporánea, Vol XXII No 3)

I am rather exhausted rehearsing what by now should be nakedly obvious. Yet with each new batch of recently minted PhD's I find myself, once again, defending by uncle's work against innocent yet persistent misunderstanding.

As the Cult of Carpentier continues to expand I suppose I must concede that meaning is inherently unstable and that insignificant speculation is sewn into the fabric of fame.

At least no one claims that Carpentier was a Zionist.

 

CONDEMNED INTO THE CHAOS

Among the many myths surrounding the life and work of the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier is the one that has him laboring in noble squalor, deprived of the perquisites of fame and renown. People imagine my uncle in his baggy short-sleeved guayabera pacing the floor of a leaky Havana studio the approximate size of a New York City efficiency apartment.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years Micah Carpentier flourished in Castro's Cuba, enjoying all the benefits as befitting a luminary of the Caribbean socialist paradise. 

Oil painting of Micah Carpentier's  Casa Migadalia studio, Micah Carpentier, 1963 (courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Barcelona)

His enormous atelier in the old Casa Migadalia el Cobre on Calle Lamparilla was a glorious space that could easily rival any of today's lower Manhattan beauty lofts. Tall, skylit ceilings, mahogany hardwood floors, 14 foot windows with northeastern exposure and a small, air conditioned alcove with a desk and a day bed. 

Micah Carpentier was the darling of El Tropical Izquierda, the fashionable left wing circles of mid-1960's Latin America.

Until, of course, he wasn't.

Carpentier in his tiny Las Piedras studio in east Havana, 1971

In the now famous 1970 interview with the recently defunct French arts journal Les Nouvelles Idées Crues Carpentier indiscreetly confessed to a grudging admiration of North American Pop Art, a style that was seen by the Left as flagrantly reactionary, hopelessly bourgeois and the quintessential expression of regressive consumer capitalism.

After that Micah's luminous star plummeted like a punctured bladder. His beautiful studio was requisitioned for a national ballet academy, his right to foreign travel was summarily revoked and his work was no longer collected by the well-heeled, intellectual disciples of Sartre, Russell and Marcuse.

Micah Carpentier spent his last lonely years in a cramped east Havana studio making watercolors of his two small fish tanks full of gliding guppies psychedelic loaches.

His fortunes may have faded but his visions remained grand and noble and exquisite to the very end.

Micah Carpentier Vive!!!

KUNG PO POLITICS

To the legendary Cuban artist Micah Carpentier, death was a matter of indifference. Bearing witness to what was arguably civilization's most violent century, to Carpentier personal agency, mortality and fate were at best peripheral to his avid and engaged imagination.

Micah Carpentier, Santiago de Cuba, 1971

What interested Carpentier above all else was poetry. A close confidante of Nicolás Guillén whose literary experiments with wordplay and collage closely paralleled his own explorations of pastiche and appropriation, Carpentier's stoic impassivity was a premeditated posture obviating his involvement with political controversy.

From Notebook 134.67, Micah Carpentier. (Courtesy of Universidad Combray, Las Palmas)

In an ironic twist of fate, it was precisely this lack of public engagement that brought his work to the attention of the Cuban political bureaucracy. 

In 1971, after returning to Havana after a short lecture tour in southern Spain, Carpentier was visited by the notorious Illyés twins, László and Guillermo. These justly feared functionaries of the Ministerio de la Cultura Cubano could ruin one's life with one quick phone call. They had never before taken an interest in Carpentier whose rarified aesthetics and conceptual convolutions were hardly seen as threatening to the Party apparatus and its interests. 

They came to warn him against publishing a European edition of his Diario de un Soñador sin Pagar, a collection of intimate pensées that were appearing regularly in the Cuban literary journal El Correo and had recently been anthologized by Prensa Revolucionaria.  

On the face of it, the demand seemed absurd since most of the columns were clever set pieces on subjects ranging from caring for house plants in tropical climates to interfamilial recipe disputes regarding dishes like trajaditas dulces de platano and boliche.

It turned out that he had run afoul of the State censors with a couple of essays included in a chapter called "Paucities" (Escasez). In them Carpentier made hilarious observations on the island's lack of operable door bells, the Cuban preference for Russian over Spanish baptismal names, and the coarse textures of the homeland's national toilet paper.   

It was said that Fidel himself, goosed into spasms of violent laughter would soil his fatigues and drool like an St. Bernard while reading Carperntier's work.

The twins put it to him this way:

"You write about our scarcities without complaint or gravitas. You accept our flaws and our shortcomings with gracious good humor. You who are an international intellectual celebrity and a glittering luminary among the educated elites. You travel widely and you live in a spacious flat. We would be much happier if you could pose as a degenerate dissident malcontent. If you wrote with greater bitterness and a stronger sense of grievance you would gain greater credibility among our enemies and we in turn could boast of our benevolence, our tolerance and our abundant personal freedoms." 

Maldito comunismo!

No wonder Carpentier spent the last decade of his life making simple sketches on Chinese take-out boxes.

 

A MISSION I OWE TO MY FAMILY

Micah Carpentier spent the better part of his life "groping after meaning," or so I was told my old aunt Gisella. My aunt claims that she knew the great Cuban artist quite intimately, especially during the last decade of his life. This is a remarkable claim since as a family we are not particularly close seeing as history, calamity and subsequent migration have dispersed our clan into the farthest tributaries of the planet.

Micah Carpentier, 1964. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

The Cuban Carpentiers were originally from L'viv having emigrated well before the Soviets, with characteristic amnesia, snatched the city from the Poles and renamed it Lvov. Upon arriving in Latin America the family quickly rechristened themselves as Catholics and discarded their racially tainted cognomen (Mandelbrojt) for something they considered more neutral. That the Carpentiers exchanged one form of tragedy for another was a cruel irony that was rarely, if ever, discussed openly.

"We appear to possess a rare talent for violent death," my aunt Gisella once quipped while we sat together in her sun-drenched Caracas flat sipping strong Persian coffee and nibbling on her delicious pastelitos de guayaba. "I won't say Micah had it coming, but destiny is destiny and aché is aché." Gisella was fond of using the lexicon of Santería which she typically empowered to explain just about everything, both good and bad.  

And in fact upon looking back, the common thread of Micah Carpentier's oeuvre seems to be that of mortality. There is a gloomy, bereaved quality that hovers over the fugitive materials used in The Song of Degrees, Carpentier's capacious series of drawings on discarded paper bags. 

Details from The Song of Degrees, 1962 - 1973. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

Likewise the hauntingly obsessive Enteros Nómadas, a rough grid of integers crudely drawn on a 40 foot long sheet of laminated fiberglass.

detail from Enteros Nómadas, Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, another emblematic work whose chief virtue lies in its menacing title,  was famously described by the historian Orestia Shestov as "a fatalistic ballad of bleating pessimism and vanquished faith." Very loosely based on the bizzarre and defensive musings of 17th century mystic Jacopo di Candia, Carpentier tried to connect what he saw as the "universal death-wish"( la pulsión de muerte) common to music, painting and metaphysics.

Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, Micah Carpentier, 1971.

 Most would agree that the work, though highly ambitious, comically falls flat.

I have been spending the past two years researching the life and work of this singular artist. His short-lived marriage to my grandmother's half-sister makes our familial connection too convoluted to affix a stable term. This by no means diminishes the very real and visceral kinship that draws me toward him.

I am grateful to the Micah Carpentier Foundation in Mexico City for having made their archive available to me. I am especially indebted to Isak Chuetas, principle librarian of the archive for his tireless help, guidance and inspiration.

I PITTORI SONO FILOSFI E POETI (Giordano Bruno)

In addition to a vast catalog of paintings, drawings and sculptures, the great Cuban modernist, Micah Carpentier has left us with reams of unpublished experimental poetry. Post-revolutionary Cuba had little appetite for neither the typographical minimalism of the Concrete poets nor the syntactically evasiveness of the so-called Nueva Vanguardia and so Carpentier's far from insignificant linguistic ventures have gone virtually unnoticed. 

 

 

A corrective of sorts is underway in the form of a small exhibition at the Gran Salón de la Depravación Social in Camagüey. The fact that such an exhibition, sanctioned by the Ministry of Culture, is taking place in Cuba's third largest city is yet another sign of the political thaw that is slowly yet palpably evolving.

Carpentier would be pleased by this as well as some new legislation aimed at relaxing earlier prohibitions against ribald metaphor, double entendre and unmodified pronouns. He was a great champion of limited free speech, even among his rivals and it has been speculated that when he ran afoul of the authorities it was precisely because of his principled stance.

LATE DECLINE

The late work of the late Cuban master Micah Carpentier is a wasp's nest of puzzles and contradictions. Desiccated drivel mingles uneasily with the lashes of pure brilliance. Boundless intellectual energy coexists with the cloying lassitude of old age. Sometimes, even within the same work, the supple, subtle and the lyrical are conjoined to the bulky cumbrousness of cliché.

Such is the case with Nido de la Víbora, Carpentier's final, solemn unfinished drawing.

Nido de la Víbora, Micah Carpentier 1969 - 1973

 Long after the harps of heaven have greeted the martyred maestro and longer still after the name Carpentier has became synonymous with the Latin American avant-garde, the discovery of Nido de la Víbora has forced us to reappraise the legacy of this legendary artist.  

The work was discovered in a small warehouse connected to the Gran Teatro de La Habana by the art historian Robinho Sephora.  Impeccably restored by Daphne Vhrozhinska of the State Russian Museum in St.Petersburg, the drawing is a document of a great artist's tragic decline.

Robinho Sephora

In her forthcoming book on the subject, Sephora speculates on the probability of some sort of retinal debility that caused a radical erosion of the artist's technical skills. She goes on to assert that the penultimate panel represents a panoply of demons and hobgoblins - evidence of Carpentier's late life obsession with the spells and rituals of Afro-Cuban santería.

Perhaps, but maybe Carpentier's lifelong appetite for Havana Club Blanco and counterfeit Cohibas has something to do with it as well  .

  

GOADED INTO GREATNESS

As unlikely as it seems, there has been a rekindling of interest in the life and work of my mother's uncle, the great Cuban artist, Micah Carpentier. 

Born in Riga in the winter of 1926, the family moved to Havana in 1929 following Nikolai Bukharin's expulsion from the Politburo.

Micah Carpentier, Havana, 1977

Humble by nature, Carpentier lived his entire Latin American life in his childhood home on Calle Jorge Colomé 17.

Calle Jorge Colomé 17

Known primarily for his monumental "Song of Degrees," - his massive collection of drawings on discarded paper bags - Carpentier was a seminal figure within the Caribbean avant-garde. Referred to by his peers as "el dibujante grande," Micah was loved and admired by that stubborn fragment of Cuban society that struggled to remain vibrant and independent both under Batista and later under Castro.

detail from The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier, 1969

Ironically, it was his work as a third-rate, second generation abstract expressionist that first provoked the ire of the government. Seeing so-called "imported action painting" as a thinly veiled call to anarchism and dissent, Arturo 'Bebe' Mendes, Batista's Ministro de la Cultura y Diseño Industrial warned Carpentier that to continue that type of work would be to subject himself and his family to grave, existential uncertainty. "There is no place in Cuba for derivative, non-objective, shallow-spaced drivel," Mendes was reported as saying.

An Itinerary of Reasoning, Micah Carpentier, oil on canvas, 1957

 Humiliated and depressed, my great-uncle began doodling on grocery bags from Union Double Discount, a south Florida supermarket chain that had recently opened a few pathetic stores just outside Havana. (Did they really think cubanos would buy sliced turkey and twinkies?!)

Early prototype for The Song of Degrees, Micah Carpentier, 1959

 He really didn't consider these pieces part of his oeuvre, (we use to use them to carry our wet bathing suits home from the beach on our summer holidays). In a weird way, I think he always felt a greater kinship with fellow Russian refugee, Mark Rothko than with Rodrigo Perec, Emmanuel Silva and Moisés de Leon with whom he is more generally linked.

I suppose it's another case of 'thank goodness for repression.'