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!!!