AN OPEN (AND ILLUSTRATED) LETTER TO RELIGIOUS PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

My insane friend Currado Malaspina has taken on a new cause. In keeping with the French anti-clerical tradition he has taken it upon himself to militantly address the global religious community. 

"Ca me fait chier," is how he put it to me in a recent phone call. "I've had it ... aaa hijo puta de mierda capullo gilipollas imbecil ... I'm simply fed up!" (As some of you may already know, Currado can be fluently profane in about a dozen languages).

He recently published this open letter in the French weekly La Langue Inquiet. The clumsy translation is mine.

To whom it may so urgently concern,

Shut up! Faites taire! Siete zitto!

For once, try to be still and listen!

Had it ever occurred to you that you may be in error? (Who am I kidding? Of course not). Has it crossed your collective minds that maybe, just maybe, your understanding of the universe is to a certain degree flawed? Could it be conceivable that God has a somewhat different take on things than you do?

For instance, let's assume, just for fun, that there is a god (and by the way, how did such a half-baked notion such as monotheism gain such traction?) and that this god is all-knowing and all ... hell, I don't know ... all .... uhm ... merde!!! ... let's just say that he is really really nice and understanding, sort of like the math teacher you had in high school who wasn't married and who took a keen interest in you and made you feel special even though your other teachers thought you were a wise-ass. And this all-knowing, really really nice god watches over everything and loves everybody.

Tell me this, religious people: Why does he love some people more than others? Why does he play favorites and grants the French a 35 hour work week and a full month paid vacation each year but every so often he decides to flood the Ganges, the last time in 1998 where 1000 people were killed and over 30 million (yes, I said million!) were left homeless.

And what's up with all this gay bashing. Literally. As in "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)

 Oh, and can I get an apology for the Crusades, yes, all of them, I - IX, but with special emphasis on Number Two which was particularly brutal on the Jews of my native France.

Listen up religious people, nothing good has ever originated with faith. 

The Ten Commandments you say?
 Really!? 

Like I need a document to tell me that killing is wrong? I think I figured that one out on my own. And how about the first, most famous commandment, "Do not have any gods before Me?" Hey god ... why so insecure? And #2, "Thou shalt not make any graven images?" As you know, I am Currado Malaspina, one of The Republic's most famous artists and for me Commandment number 2 is just plain BAD FOR BUSINESS!

And let's not even get into the Middle East, after all, if I say the wrong thing or for that matter even if I say the right thing but in the wrong way I may invite one of those lovely fatwas and frankly, I can't afford a bodyguard.

But while I'm in the neighborhood, explain to me how that wonderful epic poem known as the Old Testament doubles as a real estate document?  Its like replacing your GPS with a copy of Homer's Odyssey!

 And to my good friends across the ocean: de Tocqueville wouldn't recognize the place! The prideful ignorance of your religious right wing would be funny if not for its dire implications on the future health of our shared planet. How does a country which prides itself on its great colleges and universities produce political leaders with such contempt for science? Not since the days of Giordano Bruno has reason and empiricism been under such siege. I wish you luck, America.

I was standing beside a soft spoken and frail Henri Matisse when the art historian Jack Flam asked him if he believed in god. "Yes" he answered, "when I work ... I sense myself helped immensely by someone who makes me do things that surpass myself."

Some people, when they speak to god, go out into the world strapped in a suicide vest.

Others do this.

Best regards,

Currado Malaspina

LESBIA

Currado Malaspina"s work table, Rue Bernoulli studio, 2012

My aging friend Currado Malaspina is the perpetual student. Works left derelict for years are constantly being retrieved from moldy flat files and subjected to relentless reworkings, innovative re-imaginings and contemporary re-contextualization.

Revisiting the prior ports of personal embarkation is a dangerous game rife with regret, recrimination and cruel self-mocking melancholy. Currado, working within the silent womb of his Rue Bernoulli studio suffers none of these afflictions. To his great credit Malaspina sees the atelier as nothing but a provincial parish, a forgotten artery of urban artistic intercourse. In this way he can indulge in his work without the classic fatigue that his younger contemporaries suffer from with their self-imposed pressure to constantly provoke the "shock of the new." Currado has already picked the public's pocket and he did so without the neurotic dread that hampers so many emerging artists today.

He has recently discovered the work of American expatriate artist, Faun Roberts. In his words her volatile works from the 1920's and 30's are "a veritable dark Sabbath of frenzied, over-sexed witches (un sabbat noir, plein de sorcières frénétiques et lubriques), an absolute, untamed struggle with the angels and gargoyles of European history."

Appassionato, Oil on burlap, Faun Roberts, 1923

His encounter with Roberts has rubbed Currado's muzzle in ways I have never seen before. It's like he fell through a chimney and is now soiled with a new, uncomfortable disquiet. 

"Formerly I thought that my whole life was a swollen open sore of transgression and grievance," he told me over the phone not too long ago, "now I see that I was just another fondling of le père Sevin."*

And so my good friend Currado is once again turning inward. He is trying to perfect his knowledge of artistic anatomy and is studying sumi-e brush painting with the Korean master Kim Hong-do. Time will tell what his new passionate research will yield.

He is also struggling to translate Catullus' Clodia poems into contemporary French.

*Father Jacques Sevin is the founder of the French Scouting Association

 

LIBIDINAL INTENSITIES

Currado Malaspina, Paris, 2012

My old friend, the jarringly impetuous Parisian artist Currado Malaspina has an infernal temper. Like a drummer's brush, he skirts the surface of civility until neither prayer nor plea can prevent his rage from crashing violently down.

I remember one episode in particular where a capricious remark from a young critic made the long dead dance and the musty crypts quake from the crush of Currado's reaction.

Spark Boon, a recent survivor of the CalArts graduate program was in Paris on a research grant looking for meta-narratives in Lyotard's bank statements and laundry lists. Malaspina, as a young member of the Collège international de philosophie in the 1970's knew the great French theorist and Boon contacted him to ask a few questions. 

It should be noted that Lyotard and Malaspina shared a deep and abiding mutual distrust, but young Spark Boon had no way of knowing this in advance. When he innocently inquired about Currado's thoughts on Adorno's "negative dialectics" the fine timbers of reason collapsed and an untrimmed tirade exploded like Mauna Loa.

Spark Boon, Rome, 2012

I have to say that beneath the weight of Currado's wrath, young Spark Boon handled himself admirably. He is a promising scholar and a thoughtful and original critic. I am impressed by his character and his wit.

Though I am not too impressed with his French.

Dommage ...

A TATTERED COAT UPON A STICK

My good friend Currado Malaspina is consumed by the constant cadence of his ebbing vitality. While still well within the feckless youth of old age, his certitude is less certain and his dominion considerably less dominant.

Finding neither joy nor comfort nor love in the fleeting liaisons that still furiously fill his clock, Currado marinates his misery in long, doleful letters to his few remaining friends.

His chief correspondent is the irresistibly exquisite Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.

Currado Malaspina and Dahlia Danton at the Tigres Library, Madrid, 2004

"My heart is a heretical bar fly showing little deference and less remorse. I am greedy for forgetfulness," he recently wrote from Tangiers where he still owns a villa overlooking Cape Spartel. "I long for honeyed conversation curved with lies and false hopes."
(Ms Danton has given me access to most of the letters exchanged by her and Malaspina, apparently unconcerned about betraying a confidence)

I have to say, I have little compassion for my old furtive friend. Most men his age are consigned to a life of bearish nostalgia, a sad phantom of imagined recollections of heroic lechery. Currado by contrast seems to be perpetually incanting a libidinous libretto of voluptuous celebration grounded in fact.

Currado Malaspina, 2012

 "Heaving hips and gamboling breasts," ("hanches lancinante et les seins gambadant) "are the secrets to a perfumed longevity," was how Rodin put it in his 1902 letter to Constance LeVrai. Although it is an uncertain wager reading an artist's work for biographical clues, Malaspina's recent drawings may provide a window into his mid-life preoccupations.

Could they possibly be meant as monuments of a self-professed magnificence? Or are they noiseless lamentations of impending impotence?

SOME AREA!

For all the years that I've known Currado Malaspina, I have never heard him express any interest in politics. He has never, to my knowledge, voted in any French election; never participated in any maniféstation publique; never signed his name to a petition: never boycotted, expressed solidarity, sat-in, walked-out, struck, work-stopped or stood behind a barricade. Currado is so single-mindedly devoted to his artistic enterprise that any social or political involvement requiring even the slightest commitment would be unthinkable.

Until now.

Currado Malaspina is now an active, vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

 Why?

Two reasons:

 Reason One: For European artists, it is both de rigueur and professionally advantagous to be critical of Zionism. (see Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Annie Lennox and Bosco Maretto).

Reason Two: He is dating the beautiful Dutch soprano, Nanoek Nabil, niece of Rayan Algosaubi, former information liaison of the PLHPC.

Nanoek Nabil in front of Sonji Operagebouw, Spaanshuisken, Netherlands

As an expression of his malcontent (as well as a vivid illustration of his underlying ambivalence, after all, what could possibly be more harmless than art), Currado has embarked on a new series of works addressing the thorny problems of the Middle East.

God is my Realtor ("Dieu est mon agent immobilier") is a series of portraits of Israeli members of the settler movement. Street prophets, messianists, religious fanatics, Russian immigrants, ideologues and soccer Moms looking for three-car garages in a country known for its cramped apartments and high rents are all the subjects of his wide-ranging sketches.

Portrait of Yocheved Har-Or Flieshman, Currado Malaspina, 2012


"I've come to love these people," Currado told me the other day on the phone from Tel Aviv, "unlike the French, their zealotry is an irresistible expression of magic and fatalism. They are probably the world's greatest performance artists."

I asked him if Nanoek felt the same way. "I have no idea," he said, "she spends all her time shopping on Sheinken Street, I barely see her."

Visages des damnés

The Windward Correctional Center, fourteen miles east of Blieblerville, Texas on Highway 159 is a long way from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques where my dear friend Currado Malaspina usually spends the month of August. He is there suffering the cauterizing swelter to pay homage to a man he grew to love.

Malaspina standing in front of one of his portraits of Lanier Christian Smith, 2012

Lanier Christian Smith was a drifter, a drunk and an inveterate liar but one thing he was not was a cold-blooded murderer. And yet on March 21st, 2012, strapped to a pale grey gurney he was treated to an intravenous cocktail of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride and paid the ultimate price.

Currado got to know Smith the same way he became acquainted with half a dozen other convicted murders - drawing his portrait. 

Some people have described Portraits of the Damned as the most odious, rank and repugnant exercise in artistic exploitation since King Ferdinand II of Aragon hired Antonio Dufréy to paint heretics burning at the stake. Others see Malaspina as a modern day Goya, giving visual voice to the silent horrors of state sponsored violence and corruption.

I see it as a pretentious hustle but in this day and age the margin between stunt and the sublime is narrowly ambiguous. 

Between May of 2007 and April 2012 Currado Malaspina went to South Dakota, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania visiting over twenty maximum security prisons in order to draw condemned men and women.  The works were ultimately exhibited in Paris at the Musée de la Peine on Rue St.-Louis en l’Île under the Dantesque title "Visages des damnés."

He is back in Texas for a memorial service for L. C. Smith, as well as for a book signing promoting a small art house publication about the works called The Faces of Fate.

A FINAL FLINT OF FEELING

Currado Malaspina has turned the monkey-jump of misery into an expression of full-throated agony. Leafy fables and grand parables of tragic undoing fill the grave-gray sheets of Currado's newest work. He has encrypted reservoirs of confession, contrition and regret within the stunted script that pack the margins of his recent drawings. Lanes and labyrinths of runty writing course through the thirty-six grief filled pages that comprise the Palimpseste series - completed in secret over the past fifteen years. Recently published by Litografia Fica, a limited edition of prints has recently been made available by Currado's Milanese dealer Athanasius Lafréry.

Tales of thievery, cruelty, adultery, vanity, lechery, jealousy, heresy and false witness are wretchedly woven into painful professions of lassitude, collapse and grief. The bleak elegiac tone of the text is so heartbreaking that even Currado's many detractors have looked upon this new work with sympathy.

Like most of Malaspina's work, the focus is on the female form but in this instance, the figures are no longer anonymous objects of desire but rather specific human beings. Each work is a sackclothed summery of love, lust and betrayal, complete with names and places and dates. It is a roving, ripe, diaristic prattle, completely devoid of all discretion.

But even within this humble darkness, Currado has still managed to vulgarize what could have been seen as an aging ode to innocence. He has been recently working with a team of Italian screenwriters turning his ponderous, heartfelt atonement into a toothless tendril for daytime television.

L'effondrement de la catégorie

My dear friend Currado Malaspina has always dabbled in the occult. Whether it's Justi Bremmer's The Tangy Scent of Angel Wings - the book-length epic poem that inspired the Franco-Celtic cult of Strophic Meditation - Babba Dar-Tag's Ice-Yoga or Ragout Kästner's improbably popular Institute of Volitional Metemphsychosis (Institut für Vorprogrammierte Metemphsychosis), Currado has given just about every metaphysical crackpot equal purchase on his guileless naïveté.

There has been, however, a very disturbing turn of events. For the first time, Currado Malaspina, the grand eminence of the Parisian avant-garde, the hard-nosed sophisticate, the urbane flaneur and citadin raffiné has decided to overtly translate his childish enthusiasms into silly, slight and intellectually bereft paintings.

Binah e Hizzayon, Currado Malaspina 2012 (Courtesy of Galerie Tollhaus, Berlin)

And the public adores them!

Whether it's images of astrological charts, speculative maps of the Lost City of Ubar, meticulous renderings of haunted amulets or reconfigured Ouija Boards, the city of Paris is aflame with Currado's improbable artistic reincarnation. 

One skeptic called it "the shock of the rehash." Another non-believer described it as "a road to Damascus rest stop," expressing the hope that Malaspina will snap out of it as soon as his market dries up.

I, for one, am not so sanguine. I recently met up with Currado in Berlin and he was clearly not himself. Aside from the fact that he was wearing a  red-string bracelet and a magic lotus necklace he was also in the company of the beautiful South Asian supermodel Veena Shabobob.

Veena Shabobob in Cannes, 2012

 Shabobob, whose eyes are milky and mysterious  wields an almost mystical control over her many romantic interests. She's as delicate as paper and the men in her life feel obliged to sustain her by silence and obedience. She is considered by her admirers as an Apauruseya  - "not of human agency" - and as an adept rustic Tantrik she combines sexual ingenuity with a robust agricultural fortitude.

In short, if she told Currado to shoplift from the Vatican Library he would do it. Shabobob consults the stars the way others check their email and her complete submission to the supernatural makes Nancy Reagan look like a physicist. Sad to say, she's got Currado hooked.

So keep looking for trifling, superstitious baubles from that once formidable French artist ... at least as long as his moon continues to rise over Veena.

     

Boys Will Be Boys

Some see the artistic vocation as the inevitable offspring of rock-ribbed affinities and singular, idiosyncratic conviction. Artists, it is generally assumed, are drawn toward their passions like flies to a rotting cadaver. Born to their métier, they appear to have no choice. Artists themselves refer to it as "a calling", implying destiny and an occult sense of virtue. 

My dear friend Currado Malaspina does not share this conventional reading - in fact he is repulsed by it - and sees the artistic enterprise rather as the consequence of chance and as a shallow reflection of our baser instincts .

Currado Malaspina, Auvers-sur-Oise, 2012

Since childhood Currado Malaspina dreamed of becoming a pilot. When he entered the French military in the late 60's he was determined to serve in the Armée de l'Air. After attending the academy at Salon-de-Provence he was transferred to Châteaubernard where he flew the Mirage F1-CR on training missions in the Sahel. When his plane malfunctioned in 1968, forcing him to crash land on the Ghadem salt flats he sustained severe head and spine injuries and almost didn't survive.

He was found unconscious by a family of Tuareg nomads who nursed him back to health by stabilizing his fractures with tightly bound fox skins and sustaining him on a diet of black tea and lentils. It was during his convalescence that Currado began to draw.

One of his first efforts was a quick sepia rendering of the 11th century Dormition of the Mother of God Monastery in Taghirt.

Currado Malaspina, conté crayon on cardboard, 1969

The locals were extremely impressed by these early efforts and Currado quickly gained an unusual status within the hermetic hierarchy of the indigenous tribes. When they offered him a young beautiful bride, three camels and a milk goat he realized that it was time to return to France. 

His hopes for a career as a pilot were summarily dashed but the connection between art and Eros became for Currado a talisman signifying both hope and magic. Terror, coincidence, migration and sex   continue to be guiding principles and aesthetic touchstones for Malaspina's very strange and singular work.

False Claims and Vaporous Assertions

Unbending in his vehemence the Cuban master Micah Carpentier remains the unrivaled virtuoso of the Latin American avant-garde. People still talk about his hoarse,orphic voice and how it conveyed such authority and melody and grace.

So much of his work is the stuff of legend considering how after a brief embrace by Castro he was shunned and reviled by the official Communist commissars of art and culture. Some of his works were successfully smuggled out of the country, some were hidden or stored in remote corners of his beloved Havana and some were destroyed either inadvertently or out of malice.

For years I had heard rumors about a lost grand mural. People talked about a strange, cryptically encoded, autobiographical masterpiece. They spoke of a furiously painted carnival of lusty flesh, an ironic homage to early Etruscan erotica. Others spoke of an overtly seditious critique of totalitarianism and compared it to Guernica and Los Desastres de la Guerra.

 It appears that the lost mural has been found!

Los Amantes de la Partida Entre los Polos de Competencia del Deseo, Micah Carpentier, 1968

Recent renovations at the Palacio de Aldama uncovered a previously unknown wine cellar that still bares the inscription "Libaciones Almacenan Aquí Miguel de Aldama." Inside this crypt, rolled like a carpet and encrusted with mold, Micah Carpentier's lost masterwork Los Amantes de la Partida Entre los Polos de Competencia del Deseo was discovered. Three meters high and over five and a half meters long, the work was in desperate need of restoration. In a unique arrangement with the Península Ibérica Instituto de Conservación y el Revisionismo, the work left Cuba for eighteen months and was subjected to the most scrupulous and comprehensive process of repair and research.

I was among a privileged group of scholars and specialists who were invited to participate in this amazing endeavor.

David Schoffman at the Península Ibérica Instituto de Conservación y el Revisionismo, 2011

One piece of disturbing but not altogether surprising scholarship emerged from the study of the mural. It seems that Carpentier had at his disposal at least half a dozen assistants helping him complete the work. Among his team, two names stood out. One was Sidhartha De Corazon who today is considered one of Mexico's great political cartoonists and was instrumental in preparing the glassy oil gessoed surface that was critical for the painting's resilient pigmentation. The other was my good friend Currado Malaspina whose contribution to the work still remains vague.

What has been made absolutely clear by this enterprise is that Malaspina's much heralded series Palimpsest, a work of unquestionable quality, is for all intents and purposes a direct, naked and shameless derivative of Carpentier's Los Amantes.

Palimpsest #3, Currado Malaspina 2011

 What a stinking disappointment!

Désir

Currado Malaspina woke up on the morning of his 50th birthday with the terrifying realization that he had yet to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This was no idle daydream nor a further weakening of an already tenuous grasp on rationality. He had already won just about every significant prize the Republic of France bestows upon its artists, including the Grand'croix du Mérite, the Chevalier d'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the coveted Prix Laval for artistic collaboration. It only seemed just that he also win a Nobel and since there is no category specific to the visual arts he presumed that the Peace Prize was the only realistic option.

His scheme was as simple as it was absurd and the odd thing is, he almost pulled it off.


Malaspina never really took an active interest in politics - he is far too narcissistic - and despite the French fashion for detached anti-Zionism he never presumed to take sides in the Mideast. It is precisely for this reason that he hatched a plan to settle the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews once and for all.


He called it Désir - the first Palestinain/Israeli dating service!

With one office in Jericho and another in Ramat Aviv Malaspina's staff of twelve tireless love brokers tried to package and promote the idea of reconciliatory miscegenation. Never losing sight of his real goal, Currado hired the wily publicists of Heugot SMT to spread his quixotic gospel of peace through love.

He was prominently featured on Quattordici,  the popular French television news magazine that's a cross between TMZ and Sixty Minutes. He was interviewed in The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement and the International Herald Tribune. There were stories about Désir on Al Jazeera, CNN, CBC and the BBC. He was profiled in The Forward, Le Nouvel Observateur, The New York Times Magazine and the Huffington Post. For months, the Israeli press became obsessed with him eclipsing stories about both Iran and Eurovision.

His client list included Palestinian soccer star Ibrahim Koolatim-Utim, the West Bank writer and socialite Sooha Chazava and Niri Gas-Ruah, the star of Israel's top reality program Metachat Ha-Talit. But alas, fatwas and death threats proved far too incompatible with concupiscence. Wife swaps proved even harder than land swaps and religious taboos didn't mix well with aphrodisia. Currado's plan was short-lived.

Niri Gas-Ruah on her way to a "love-connection"

For now the Peace Prize is still on hold.

SUDDEN EXPOSURE

The Ci'sponto Art Fair is part spectacle and part high-minded cultural subversion. Serious collectors make it a point to avoid this biennial event. Very serious collectors never miss it.

My good friend Currado Malaspina was stirred from his convalescence in order to curate the booth of his Swiss art dealer, Johann Gier. His approach was rather unique.

Just outside Ci'sponto is the small fishing village of San Viscere di Testa, an idyllic untamed paradise in the Cinque Terre. Aside from the occasional mudslide that typically tears several of the small travertine casolari off their foundations, life in San Viscere is as close to perfect as one can imagine. Malaspina descended upon this shangra-la with an unusual proposition.

He offered the local fishermen 500 euro to draw or paint a portrait of their wives - naked! (Silvio Berlusconi owns a villa in the neighboring Anobuco al Mare so the denizens of San Viscere are not easily scandalized). He received over four-hundred pictures and some were rather well done. 

Ritratto di mia moglie, Luana-Maria Pistoi, 2012 Benno Pistoi

 He installed these eccentric works salon style in Gier's 200 square meter space. 

The wives were not amused.

THE LACK OF ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

 

Felicità Raggiunta #1, Currado Malaspina,  2009

The fine filament between appropriation and larceny is an irrelevant luxury residing uniquely within the quaint precincts of the ever dwindling class of what was formally known as "the serious." 

Nowadays, who really cares where artists find their precedents, their permissions and their aesthetic jurisdictions? What matters, plain and simple, is market value and in that department my old friend Currado Malaspina suffers no notable deficit.

However ...

Noted art historian Orestia Shestov is currently researching a new study on the roll of women in early 20th century European modernism. (Full disclosure: Ms. Shestov is a very close friend and colleague of mine.) Among her discoveries is the hitherto undocumented importance of the American expatriate artist, Faun Roberts.

Another Night in Clichy, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1937 (Private collection)

 Roberts was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1898. After studying with Arther Wesley Dow and George Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York, Roberts sailed to Paris in 1921 and assimilated comfortably within the artistic community in Montparnasse. She briefly lived with the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo and it was through him that she became familiar with the artists and writers affiliated with the French Communist Party.

Her politics and her sexuality - her brief affair with Vallejo not withstanding, Roberts led an openly homosexual lifestyle - contributed, among other factors, to her subsequent omission from most narratives of the era. It is thanks to Shestov that soon that careless breach will be corrected.

Perhaps the big loser in all this will be the reputation of Currado. So much of Malaspina's work can be traced to Roberts. In fact, the more one sees of Roberts' work the more one realizes how overrated Currado Malaspina has been. In this light he seems practically void of any originality, ingenuity or invention whatsoever. 

I'm sure he'll find some way to deny this and I hear that he is already assembling an army of academic allies in order to discredit Shestov's methods and credentials. 

Look soon for an article in Artforum or Documenti di Calunnia by some hack ally of the 'eclectic' Mr. Malaspina. I have a feeling that the war of words is just beginning.

The Connoisseur Class

Among the noble allies of alchemy and accomplices of high art there lay in parasitical wait a coterie of unsavory swindlers. These poisonous peddlers of creative cozenage foul the rarified troposphere of our sublime culture. For every Lionel Trilling there's at least half a dozen Vissarion Belinskys and each Fairfield Porter comes with the value added tax of a boatload of Horace Ben Davenports. (Davenport, for those who have forgotten, was, together with Franck and Pissolle the three resident art critics for the 1940's French collaborationist periodical "Notre Culture Pur") 

One notable exception to this cruel principle of diminishing returns was the illustrious and now lamentably defunct Parisian monthly, Taide.

 Never before nor since has there been such a fine collection of scholars, critics, historians and artists working in such close collaboration toward the goal of discussing the world of ideas. The Partisan Review with its political infighting and petty rivalries pales in comparison to Taide. Bazin's macho band of bullies in Cahier du cinéma are a waxen shroud of recycled orthodoxies when stacked up against the intrepid intellectuals of Taide.


Between the magazine's inception in 1976 until its last issue in 2004, writers like Barney Aleksić, Gavriel Carrá, Nadya Bugaud-Tzvi, Loie Garaudy, just to name a few, were highly revered household names throughout the French speaking world. 

Soaring above the pact in both his intellectual range and in his grace as a human being was the late British philologist, Richard Ypres. Though he spoke and wrote in the most eloquently mellifluous French, when he published his work in Taide he always worked in close collaboration with his translator wife, Martine Poplout. 

When they visited Currado Malaspina's studio in the winter of 2003, they spent a full week researching, interviewing, reflecting, inquiring and speculating in order to compose a thorough rendering of his oeuvre and his place in the canon of 20th century modernism. 

Featured in the February 2003 issue, the sixteen page essay, "Suit d'un etat d'ivresse," (loosely, "Following a Bender") was a highly critical close reading of Malaspina's entire career. Beautifully written - Martine is also a well known writer of fiction, most notably the best seller "Théorie Rudimentaire" (Totou Presse 1999) -  "Suit d'un etat" quickly became a classic in its genre. 

Unlike his late friend Perec, Malaspina's disdain for critics is not an all consuming dismissal of the "leeching ancillary fringes of artistic invention."

As he wrote to me several years ago in a letter filled with uncharacteristic grace, "I salute and applaud our intrepid illuminators, our expert annotators, our pundits and expositors and I invite and encourage them to shed their lucent wisdom on my work."

TOO RACY FOR REHAB

In the dim light of the day-room my dear friend Currado Malaspina lies motionless on a weathered Louis IV canapé. The long lost elegance of the tattered divan echos the condition of the ailing artist. The deep creases of his still stunningly handsome face are a rugged topography of his strange and eventful life.

 

He will pull through but his convalescence will be long. 

Together with two Abyssinian petroglyphs and an 18th distemper on wood of St Michael, Currado brought back from a recent trip to Axum a eukaryotic parasite that has diminished him beyond recognition. He hasn't been able to work and is even too weak to read. Friends come and go bringing rare bottles of La Clarté de Haut-Brion and  DVD's of vintage episodes of Apostrophe.

His spirits were briefly lifted last week after a visit from Manon Olivier and Dahlia Danton. They sat by his bed, Manon softly stroking his hand while Dahlia read aloud from Barthes' classic Sade/Fourier/Loyola and Cendrars' Moravagine, two of Malaspina's favorites. 

He also loves Yona Wallach, especially Deux Jardins, but most people are too embarrassed to read it while Currado's elderly housekeeper and nurse are standing nearby.

MALASPINA INFOMERCIAL

My odd ailing friend Currado Malaspina frequently admonished me for what he discerned as a luxurious ambivalence to commerce (or in his words  "une ambivalence princière pour le bénéfice"). He claimed I had a patronizing disdain for the economic realities of the artworld and dismissively called me "uno fantasticatore" - a dreamer.

Perhaps.

And yet, in this last bit of self-promotion, I believe Currado Malaspina has gone a bit too far.

CHI ME L'HA FATTO FARE???

"How did I get myself roped into this?!"

The normally mellifluent voice of Eulalia Capillas was inflected with rage. She had just found out what everyone west of the Loire already knew. Currado Malaspina had published the Aquarelle Noirci - the fifteen notorious watercolors depicting what he calls "la béatitude de l'esclavage et la soumission."

L'Origine du Monde, Currado Malaspina 2003

As works of art, they are at best rather weak, but as a document of a louche look back at a more fervid, frenzied time in his life, these small pictures are nothing short of monumental. As most of my readers know, in the not too distant past my good friend Currado Malaspina collected mistresses and concubines with an avidity bordering on manic. To those who believe in a vengeful God, his current physical ailments and limitations would represent a fitting comeuppance. The Auquarelle Noirci seem to serve as a surrogate for a more corporeal fulfillment and as such deserve our indulgence if not our outright forgiveness.

Eulalia Capillas understandingly feels otherwise.

In the English language edition of this wonderfully designed folio (Salone Nuovo Press, Boston), Currado included half a dozen photographs that are both directly and indirectly connected to the drawings. 

I suppose the one below hit a nerve.

Eulalia étendu, Currado Malaspina, 2002