 | |
| 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.
