Lecture d'Été

In the extensive journals that Currado Malaspina kept from the winter of 1983 through the fall of 2003, no detail, no matter how inappurtenant was deemed too trivial for inclusion. This impressive catalog of events and emotions was recently published in an abridged form and in limited edition by Éditions Rénale. Plushly illuminated with the peculiar drawings that were interleaved throughout the original, this rare volume is essential to the understanding of Currado's peripatetic imagination. Aptly titled Saisons de l'Impiété et Incrédulité should be on everyone's summer reading list.

INACCESSIBLE BLISS

The ravishments of romance are routine in the work and life of Currado Malaspina.  Night's plush reflections, ecstatic transformation, the supple female figure ... paint.

A series of casual oil paintings, void of precious ornament, piously attentive to the ambiance of fulsome, perhaps even obsessive affection was recently exhibited at the Museu de Detalhes Poéticos in Belém do Pará.

The catalog essay by Danita Marcil is a rhapsody of luminous albeit superficial analysis. Much is made of the mysterious identity of the model, a fretful exercise in pedantic speculation.

The woman in question, whose unmistakably honeyed flesh is an ardent hymn to erotic iridescence is none other than Andreja Bogatyrchuk.

Andreja is the genesis of every impulse in Currado's life. She is his hallucination, his Circe, his fragrant field of easy passion and the source of his vehement despondency.

GIBBLETS FOR AN AGING MASTER

"Tous mes anciens amants ont des moustaches"

Admittedly, it was tactless.


The comment that got Currado Malaspina fired from the Universiteit van Poperinge was fortuitous, for my good friend has no real talent for teaching. He lacks the patience and generosity required for such a task. (the event was witnessed by his then student Dahlia Danton).


Truth be told, Currado is rather worshipful of women and when married, tends to err on the side of uxoriousness. The fact that for the past 22 years he has worked exclusively with the female form is evidence enough of his extreme devotion and respect.


His current exhibition at Galerie Bourrer , which despite it repetitive nature and almost stubborn lack of invention received glowing reviews. Amalie Locdu went so far as to describe the new work as "a choir and song of visual stimulation the likes of which have not been seen in Paris since the days of Balthus, Matisse and Meremaquerelle!"


With all due respect to my good friend Currado, I think he's out of gas ...

DREAMING IN THE CAVE WHERE THE SIREN SWIMS

PROUD POSILIPO

 

On a recent trip to Paris, I dropped in on my dear friend Currado Malaspina.

I reached him on the telephone and we agreed that I would come to his studio at 7:30 in the evening on Friday the 8th of January. I remember the date vividly because I had tickets for the opera the following night to see Anna Nerval as Salome.

I climbed the five flights of stairs at the appointed hour on the designated day only to find the following note tacked to his door: "Ne m'attends pas ce soir, car la nuit sera noire et blanche"

Typical Malaspina - rude, cryptic and irresistible - I broke into the studio, mostly out of frustration, though I told myself at the time it was in order to go to the bathroom.

On the walls of his studio were a dozen 10 foot high drawings all configured in the shape of a cross.

It was a staggering sight! 

Knowing that there was a strong likelihood that I would force my way in, Currado left another note  tacked to the wall near the light switch. 

"Mon front est rouge encore du baiser de la reine"

I suppose he had a decent excuse.

MISSIVES FROM MALASPINA

Most people familiar with Currado Malaspina's epistolary excesses suspect that to some degree this wonderfully gifted artist is slightly unhinged. His notes and scribbles are the subject of deep analysis from both experts in the arts and specialists in psychology. He has been likened both to Rilke and to Arthur Schnitzler. He has been compared to Balthus and to Franz Schreker. Even the names Adolf Wölfli and Jean-Baptiste de Boyer have come up from time to time.

 

  To me he's a cross between Paul Éluard and Elmer Gantry. 

 

IL FOCO LI ABBRUSCIA

A minor scandal has erupted in the Marais! Pepo Cendrars' recent short film,  Le Frisson Abattu included a raw shade of the Malaspina legend. It is well known that Currado holds the conventional decorum surrounding artist/model interaction in a heavy grief of disdain. He strongly feels that nature binds us to life by inclining us toward acts of sensual gratification. His provocative imagery is a tireless search for the appropriate metaphor for that bond. His demands on his models are famously punishing.


An "out-take" from Cendrars' film has been circulating and has divided Paris between the Malaspinusards and the anti-Malaspinusards. Some see it as a hostile breach in tradition. Others see it as a balletic shadow-play of Amour-Fou.


You decide.

THE WOOLEN LOVERS

A string of dreams where pieces of God scattered like snowflakes within the narrow halls of memory carrying with them the fragrance of olive and clove yielded a strange series of drawings by Currado Malaspina known as Les Amants de Laine. Born to be a mandarin, Malaspina's flirtation with transgression is never fully persuasive yet with this particular suite of drawings, I think he stammers toward a certain level of success. 

Brothers in Epicurus concur in this for the work appeals to those who cultivate indifference. It is a canticle to the senses and our eyes delight in its heedless, voluptuary abandon. 

In a lecture delivered to a conference of art historians in Carcassonne I heard Malaspina intone what was taken at the time as an irrational jeremiad: "The sky is heavy with dishonored sensation" ("Le ciel est lourd avec sensation déshonoré ") His work and his life can be seen as both a reprimand and a correction. To Malaspina the 'rules' simply don't apply.

IN THE ABSENCE OF GRIEF

Currado Malaspina & Zoe Bat-Leytzan
Malaspina seems to relish in the
the precarious. His unstable public and private conduct always capers on the crag of scandal. From his well-documented addiction to morphine to his gloomy obsession with fashion models and starlettes, Malaspina is a shattered cough of unhurried self-destruction.

That his career has flourished in the process says more of our societal fetish for frail celebrity than about his genuine contribution to the artistic discourse. One would have assumed that the publicity surrounding the horrific suicide of Zoe Bat-Leytzan would have been his undoing, but alas, Currado, the plaster manikin 0f monstrous unfeeling soldiers on.

MALASPINA MISSIVES

THE MALASPINA CONFERENCE

SHEDDING THE LUSTER

Swiss director, Pepo Cendrars has rinsed the pollen of hagiography from the Currado Malaspina myth machine. His brave new film will be released this coming spring and it promises to unravel the largely unexamined connection between Currado's chestnut charm his tactical priapic meanderings and his under-merited renown.

ENVERGURE

Hard to believe but at one time Currado Malaspina was known simply as un homme de beaucoup mérite. His first foray into the international art scene was the 1979 Belarus Biennial where he shared the small French pavillion with six other artists. The show was an incoherent mishmash of parched academic miscellany and fortunately, lacking the prestige of other planetary art fairs, the event was scarcely noticed beyond the borders of Minsk.

He was happy at the time to be included in any exhibition and he showed the commensurate gratitude and grace. He impressed his peers by his humility and his professional generosity.

To pinpoint the exact date when Currado Malaspina became the petulant, egomaniacal narcissist bent on advancing his career while destabilizing the reputations of his colleagues is hard to do with any degree of certainty. Some contend that it was about the time he published the Pointed Plunder Manifesto. Others insist it was shortly after the tragic death of his second wife Celeste.

One thing all agree on is that this flawed genius has drifted light years away from that homme de beaucoup mérite. But allow me to indulge in a brief hallucination as I post above one of the drawings Currado exhibited in Minsk. This lovely piece is inscribed to me on the back and has been in my collection for nearly 30 years.

THE WORLD IS A MIRROR OF MYSELF DYING

In the late 1970’s Currado Malaspina initiated an unlikely friendship with Henry Miller that lasted until the great writer’s death. Miller showed the young Malaspina great tenderness and took a keen interest in his work. A few of his early monotypes remain in the Miller estate and are only made available to researchers and scholars.

A few weeks ago Currado shared a few reminiscences with me while we had a wonderful lunch of rein et foie de veau at Bateau Calife on Quai Malaquais:

“’The whores of Montmartre were as cute as buttonholes’, Miller would exhale when the ravishing mists of memory would claw him away from his middle-class present. Seized by an irresistible urge to prevaricate, Miller’s eloquence was most gripping the more ignoble the myth. In a voice as raspy as a tailpipe he would rattle off names like Durrell and Cendrars and recount with excruciating detail episodes of inspired dissipation. To Henri, life was a book and the only pretext to living was to find something to write about.”

I’m not so sure I trust Currado’s account.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF CURRADO MALASPINA

"Desire," Currado wrote to me in a letter dated March 21st, 1993, "is both blind and brief and I'd best vanquish this impulse early and decisively."

The graceful dignity in Currado Malaspina's youthful correspondences shows a young man struggling with a tempestuous spirit. Calming what were then unutterable impulses took a heroic and ultimately hopeless discipline of self-denial. He taught himself a soft, perfect pitch in which to frame the daily crucible of his deferred raptures.


Malaspina continues to be a devoted epistolarian and his collected letters are soon to be published by Caillot Press. Clotted with vivid imagery, artful prose and philosophical insight, rarely has such a painful document of moral frailty been such a pleasure to read. Lustily illuminated with casual pen and ink jottings, this new volume will add much to the already rich catalog of Malaspina's oeuvre.

Lautréamont

Foundation Domy Morgane, The Zurich based organization founded by the Swiss collector Pierre Hertzberg, has recently announced the publication of Lautréamont, a folio of prints by my dear friend Currado Malaspina. Dizzying in its range, the works are subtle reflections on the encyclopedic reservoir of erotic French literature.

In the United States, Malaspina has seen armaments of prudential cultural gatekeepers raining blows upon his reputation. In the eyes of one American academic, Malaspina is "... a sinking barge of ossified European libertinism." This new publication is being viewed in France as a gallant slap at the shrieking mice of political correctness.

I salute you Monsieur Hertzberg!

עבודה קיץ

Micah Carpentier, 1968

To tour the Louvre with Currado Malaspina is to be subjected to an erratic and idiosyncratic reading of art history that can be in turn both illuminating and annoying.

Take for example his description of Cimabue’s “Maestà”


“The first credible depiction of Hebraic pain from the world’s most famous yiddishe mama”.

Or Poussin’s “Saint Frances of Rome Announcing the End of the Plague in Rome”


“Cirque de Soleil on 17th century quaaludes”

This summer, Malaspina was given by the Louvre the distinct honor of curating an exhibition that to my mind was long overdue. Micah Carpentier: Les Autoportraits explores an under-appreciated aspect of the Cuban master’s capacious oeuvre. Including painting, drawing, film, photography and printmaking, the show delves deeply into the epic narcissism of this deeply flawed genius. The work is stunning in its scope and in its subtlety. Never has shameless self-aggrandizement seemed so lyrical.

The catalog is equal to the task as well. Written and designed by Malaspina, his pithy annotations are true to the characters of both the author and the subject. The caption under the photo reproduced above reads:

“The famously tone-deaf Carpentier photographed as a norteño balladeer in a straw (Le Bon Marché) cowgirl hat”

LE VIOLON D'INGRES

Like Hans Hoffmann, whom he knew quite well, Currado Malaspina likes to work in the studio naked. Unencumbered by cloth, ungartered of the smocks and aprons and all the other protective garments of the trade, Currado functions best within the lightness of his flesh. In fact, all who dare visit him at his capacious rue Gassendi studio must equally repair to the sheerness of skin.

Such was the occasion for the now famous mural-sized painting, Dix-sept which proudly hangs in the Elysée Palace’s Salle de Clairvoyance in the northeast Coeur de Tremblement wing. Composed of 17 separate panels, the painting depicts the unmistakable Malaspina in various postures of vitality and repose interspersed within a rascal’s gallery of several unidentified women.

At a recent reception for the foreign minister of Israel, Delphine Frizot, sous-préfet of the famously verdant Mésange-sur-Seine was overheard sneering “il semble que la pornographie est le nouveau passe-temps de l'état.”

THE ATELIER

"The hideous work of painting offers grace to those who greet its drudgery, not with groans but with gratitude." Thus wrote Gayland Fix in his preface to the catalogue raisonné of Currado Malaspina's work, "Malaspina: The Complete Oils" (Gallimard 2002).

To pay a visit to Currado Malaspina's Rue Gassendi studio is to perform a haj to a time-hallowed glade of unguarded passion. Jealously unkempt, the space is an unseemly spring of anarchy. It swells with the stuff of art in an ungainly stillness that haunts even days after one's departure.

Yet it is here where Adona's Motto, was painted and here where The Milky Garment series was nursed to perfection. For thirty years Malaspina toiled on such masterworks as Rightous Guild, Lightly Come The Babes, Don Juan Of Jerusalem, and Une Belle Une Moche. It was here where he and Lita Abruzzi foiled the arc of reason with their savage and accursed love affair.

I am now in Paris, visiting with my good friend Malaspina and we are sharing our painterly thoughts on the significance of flesh, the shape time and the rudded soil of the South.

SATORI IN PARIS

For years Currado Malaspina imagined to himself how he might die. He preferred the prospect of dying peacefully in his sleep but was certain that it would not be the case. Skin hemorrhages and progressive liver failure were much more in keeping with his personality.

His fears mingled so seamlessly with his obsessions that it was hard for him to discern with any clarity which of his fantasies were grounded in rationality and which were symptoms of a neurosis.

At the time it seemed to him that the only possible solution was to become a Buddhist. He had no real understanding of Buddhism, but sensed an equanimity would follow the assertion of faith.

MIDNIGHT'S PROMISE

Portrait of Currado Malaspina, 2009
Drawn by Dahlia Danton

“I was inflamed by him.”

It’s well known that the great love of Currado Malaspina’s life was Dahlia Danton. He would not be spared from the anxious agonies of his longings. To call her a cruel mistress would be to miss the point completely. Malaspina was complicit in the immaculate imperfection of their union.

She visited him at his new atelier on rue Gassendi, a small, intimate space that looks out on the Bibliotheque Georges Brassens. It was their first meeting in 15 years.

“I was inflamed by him,” is what Danton said to me when I asked her why she would subject Currado to such a savage reunion.

“And how did he look?” I asked