FROMMER'S FOR FREELOADERS

For a very brief period in the late 1960's my uncle, the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier, was an official cultural emissary of the Castro regime. As part of his mandate, Carpentier traveled to what was then referred to as 'third-world countries' and extolled the virtues of socialist aesthetics.

Micah Carpentier in Pyongyang, North Korea, 1968

From Luanda to Tirana Carpentier spread the gospel of utility and pedagogy while mocking the Western bourgeois ideals of beauty and form. That his own work at the time was perfectly at home within the European avant-garde was of little consequence since the one thing Communism had in common with the art world was that intellectual consistency was totally optional.

The Song of Degrees,(detail), Micah Carpentier, 1968

The way my uncle saw things, he was given a rare opportunity to travel and although most of the places he visited were rather bleak at least he was able to extend his diet beyond frijoles negros and fried plantains.

Things came to a head in the spring of 1970 when the small French periodical Texte Obscur included Carpentier among the world's 100 most influential contemporary artists. (He came in at 77, right after Barnett Newman and just before Currado Malaspina). This quickly disqualified him from any future diplomatic postings.

The remaining three years of his life were a living hell. Under constant governmental surveillance and suffering from chronic gastrointestinal discomfort, Carpentier fell into a bottomless morass of melancholic listlessness.  

He longed for the casinos of Cairo, the racetracks of Tallin, the whores of Hanoi and the poets of Pyongyang. He missed the perfumed aroma of sweet Cantonese hairy gourd, the exotic spices of Yemeni mutton fahsa and the flaming fir tree moonshine of northern Estonia.

He had become the consummate communist flâneur, a non-aligned bon-vivant who was just as at home among the smokestacks of Yakutsk as he was on the breadlines of Bulgaria and Benin.

I still carry around his dogeared copy of Moldova on 5 Rubles a Day with all his notes and markings. On a fold-out street map of Chișinău he wrote the following jewel of timeless wisdom:

"Better to live like a cockroach in Bessarabia than like a shah in an East-Prussian Schönberg shithole dreaming of rum, rhumba and summer nights in La Palma."

THE THREADS OF FAME WOVEN THROUGH MY PAST

Micah Carpentier, 1972

In 1973 my uncle, the great Cuban visionary Micah Carpentier was killed under mysterious circumstances. I was nineteen at the time and I petitioned the United States Department of the Treasury for an embargo waiver in order to travel to Havana and set my uncle's affairs in order. (And to attempt to rescue as much of his work as I could from the indifferent clutches of the Castro cultural claque).

Roberto Carpentier-Katz at the Malecón, 1979

To my great astonishment, permission was granted and reciprocated in Cuba (with the proviso that I bring hard currency and agree to spend at least one-hundred dollars in cash a day - no small feat for a nineteen year-old college drop-out).

Emboldened with righteous consanguineal zeal the probity of the mission all but quashed my well-founded fears.

In my uncle's studio, Havana 1979

Micah Carpentier's studio was a vast (by Cuban Communist standards) airy space a few blocks south of Avenida de Maceo. A fastidious man, his work was stacked neatly in racks and rows built to his precise specifications. I was totally unprepared for both the quantity and the range of what I found.

Para Llevar a Cabo IV, Micah Carpentier, 1967

The family in North America, like the rest of the world, knew my uncle exclusively for his paper bag and Chinese take-out drawings. I had no idea that in addition to this he made large paintings, massive sculptures, elaborate theatrical sets and subliminally ironic propaganda posters. 

Sofia Abulafia-Carpentier

Carpentier's ex-wife, Sofia Abulafia, was the biggest surprise of my trip. After my uncle's death she promptly claimed his Miramar apartment (where she lives to this day). Over fresh minty mojitos and purple onion plantains she regaled me with stories of their storied courtship and their dramatically acrimonious rupture. 

Tutu Daddah

Her published memoirs (De las Bolsas a la Riqueza, Libros Andrajos, Madrid) has recently been made into a twelve-part docudrama for Spanish cable TV with the role of Carpentier played by  the famous Mauritanian hearthrob Tutu Daddah. 

My dear, glorious uncle Micah Carpentier lives on!

 

ITALICS MINE

My dear departed uncle, the Cuban artist Micah Carpentier had a great talent for idleness.

Dolce far niente was his cris de coeur lourd and he insisted that his inactivity should never be confused with listless indifference.

As the jóvenes say, whatever ...

 

The fact is that despite an oeuvre that boasts over four-thousand paper bag drawings, old-man Carpentier loved nothing better than to play dominoes.

 

 

For 35 years he lived in a cramped two-bedroom flat in a nondescript housing project at 23 Puerta Cerrada. Most days he would position himself on a beige canvas beach chair in the vacant lot in front of his building and listen to broadcasts from North Korea on his tinny transistor radio. As a Cuban cultural treasure he was always flush with Mexican cigarettes and even the more severely rationed Russian Korkunov chocolates that my aunt Adelgonda loved so much. 

As an artist, what he did would never be considered by today's standards as anything resembling a practice much less a praxis. Yet he mastered the art of living well and living slowly and up until the day he died I believe he was a contented man.

 

He never wished to emigrate and always felt fortunate to be an artist living in a place that was far, both geographically and temperamentally, from Paris or New York.

 

"My work is my life and not my profesión," was how he used to put it. Beach chair, chocolate and the customary paper cup of his Havana Club not withstanding no one would ever accuse my uncle of being an amateur. 

 

 

Plus ça change

Around the same time Fidel launched his fateful attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 my uncle Micah Carpentier boarded a Pan Am World Airways DC-6 from Jose Marti Airport on his way to visit his brother Isak in a place called Ingelwood. Untouched by ideology it was the bright southern California sunshine and not the forbidding slopes of the Sierra Madre that captivated the young adventurer's imagination.

He had only vaguely heard of Central Avenue and though Buddy Collette and Big Jay McNeely were far from the clave rhythms he was accustomed to, upon arriving in L.A. he made a B-line for the Dunbar Hotel.

It is no small irony that half a century later and barely three miles due north on the same but radically different Central Avenue my uncle's work would be prominently displayed in what in 1953 was the Union Hardware building and what is now the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Another landmark of my uncle's California sojourn was 741 S Grand Ave, the original site of the Chouinard Art Institute. It was there that he attended lectures by the painter Emerson Woelffer and was first exposed to the exotic ideas of Abstract Expressionism (albeit of a west coast variety). Completely unpersuaded, Carpentier was drawn toward making small botanical renderings of the region's various succulents.

La Planta Carnosa, watercolor, Micah Carpentier, 1953

All told Micah Carpentier spent six months in Los Angeles before returning to Havana. Though he loved the music he hated the food and he desperately missed his beloved mother Beatriz.

It's hard to say how his experiences in Los Angeles influenced the development of his work but if he was like most visitors at the time he probably left disappointed that he never managed to meet an actual movie star.