by Ira Glass
This is where the story proper begins—a story that Akumal has now told hundreds of times, each time the same way, with the same formulaic cadences and ritualized digressions, except for the addition, at the end of each new telling, of the name and reaction of the person he told it to the immediately prior time. It’s like one of those Borges fictions, in which to hear the story is to become part of it. And the story always begins with Akumal’s fresh astonishment, his sheer amazement at the wondrous coincidence of it all. Because, as he points out, if he hadn’t been on his way to Kansas he would never have been in Chicago, and if he hadn’t been in Chicago he would never have accompanied his host, the distinguished Indian poet (and MacArthur Fellowship recipient) A. K. Ramanujan, to a retirement party for Maureen Patterson, the South Asia bibliographer at the University of Chicago, and in that case he would never have had an impulse “to befriend one young man who was standing somewhat shyly in the corner”—an impulse that arose “because the man had an interesting, kind face”—and then he would never have met one of Maureen Patterson’s graduate assistants, who proved to be David, the twenty-four-year-old son of Harold and Kate Shapinsky. “It could all easily never have happened,” Akumal invariably points out here. “It was all built on the most precarious of coincidences. But, then again, it had to happen, because it was my karma to discover Harold Shapinsky, and it was Shapinsky’s karma to be discovered by me.”
David Shapinsky was in Chicago doing graduate work in American diplomatic history, so their conversation initially revolved around international relations, alighting on the subject of Poland, and thence on to the subject of a young Polish artist whose work Akumal had taken to promoting since his most recent trip to Gdansk, and some of whose etchings he had back in his suitcase at Ramanujan’s. (He had bought them in Poland to assist the poor artist, and was now reselling them as he went along to finance his trip; beyond that, he was virtually without funds.)
“David didn’t mention anything about his father that night,” Akumal explained to me as we completed perhaps our twelfth lap of the block the afternoon he recounted the whole story to me for the first time. “That took another coincidence—the next day, we just happened to run into each other at the University of Chicago library, and he asked me if I’d mind going with him for coffee. Presently, he told me about his father and invited me up to his room to look at some slides of his father’s paintings and see if I might be willing to promote his father’s work as well. He is a loving son, and he was pained by the oblivion into which his father had fallen. I was interested, but I really didn’t know much about Abstract Expressionism—I mean, I of course had Alvarez’s anthology of twentieth-century English poetry, which has a Pollock on the cover, and I’d read a piece in The Economist for June 1978, a review of a book about ancient Indian popular painting in which the writer suggested that these artists must have unconsciously anticipated Pollock. So I knew about Pollock, though I’d never heard of de Kooning. And I had no idea how I would react to this work of David’s father. In David’s room, though, looking at the slides, I got butterflies—the butterflies of my Calcutta youth!
“Over the next few days, I got very excited. I told David to call his parents and tell them to sit tight just a big longer—that a crazy Indian from Bangalore was on his way to promote Harold’s paintings. And I made David a two-part bet. I bet him that within a year I would secure a show for his father’s paintings at a major world-class gallery—possibly not in America, possibly in Europe. I wasn’t sure about New York—they’re funny in New York, you can never tell. And, secondly, we would force the Encyclopedia Britannica to revise its entry on Abstract Expressionism to establish the name Shapinsky in its rightful place among de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and the others. We bet a dinner at the fanciest restaurant we could think of, and then I was off to Kansas.
“From Kansas, I called a friend of mine in New Jersey, an Indian fellow named Sudhir Vaikkattil. An exceptional photographer, he was an earlier discovery of mine. I told him not to ask any questions but to call the Shapinskys right away, go over there, and take new slides of the work and of them. I’d be joining up with him in a few weeks. I told him not to worry, that somehow I’d find money to pay for the materials—although at that moment I was, frankly, penniless. I called Harold—this was our first conversation—and told him about Sudhir and the need for the new slides. And—this was fantastic—you know what he said? He said, ‘Well, I hope he gets in touch with me.’ This was a wonderful omen. In India, we have a proverb—‘The thirsty man goes to the well, the well doesn’t go to the thirsty man.’ As I suspected, this confirmed that Shapinsky was a well, not a thirsty man. He is incredibly serene. He is siddhipurush—this is a Sanskrit expression meaning a wise man, self-actualized, unflappable, unfazed.”
Akumal soon completed his lectures in Kansas and flew on, for some reason (he told me why; I just got lost somewhere in here), to Los Angeles and then to Washington, D.C. There, as elsewhere, he managed to find some Indian patrons. “I sing for them,” Akumal explained to me matter-of-factly. “Oh, I didn’t tell you? Yes, I am a great fan of Indian semiclassical music, and I can sing unaccompanied. Homesick Indians all over the world love to have me stay with them in their homes as long as I sing for my keep.” He now launched his siege of the Smithsonian, armed with David’s slides. There was a whole series of coincidences here as well, including a fellow named Asman (“This was a wonderful omen, because, you see, asman in Hindustani means the sky, and, of course, I was reaching for the sky, and also, in Bangalore, I am known as Chander, the Moon, so the Asman-Chander—you get the idea”), whom Akumal encountered somewhere along the way toward Dean Anderson, “the number two man at the Smithsonian.” Anderson was impressed by the slides and dumbfounded that Shapinsky wasn’t listed in any of the reference books on his extensive shelf. He promised to pass the slides on to the curators over at the Hirshhorn and get back to Akumal with their response as quickly as possible. On one of the days in here, Akumal happened upon a copy of my book on Poland in a bookstore and noted, from the jacket copy, that I’d also occasionally written on art (“another wonderful omen”), which is why he called me later (very much later) that night. As he pointed out, admiring his own tactical acumen, he’d limited his conversation in that first phone call to the subject of Poland. This was partly, he now told me, because he’d spent much of the interim that afternoon calling New York galleries. “I must tell you I’ve made a major discovery,” he’d told one receptionist after another, “an extraordinary Abstract Expressionist of the generation of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning, and I would like to make an appointment to come in and show you some slides.” In a few cases, he managed to get past the flak-catchers, but it didn’t much help. “Harold who?” was a common response. One prominent dealer, Ivan Karp, went as far as to assert, “He couldn’t be very major if I’ve never heard of him.” Akumal called thirty-two galleries and got not one appointment. A few days later, on October thirtieth, undaunted, he boarded a bus for Manhattan. He immediately called on the Shapinskys. They became fast friends, and later that very afternoon he showed up in my office, making his subtle (as it developed, almost too subtle) pitch.
The next day, Akumal called Anderson at the Smithsonian. “The people here are amazed,” Akumal recalls Anderson’s telling him. “They say either Shapinsky is an outstanding genius of twentieth-century art or he is a first-class derivative artist. They want more time.” Akumal pointed out that all Western art was derivative of the East, if you wanted to get picky about things, and anyway art history was not a relay race. He asked whether Anderson would mind if he began showing the slides to art people in Europe. Anderson said of course not, and shortly thereafter Akumal boarded a flight to Amsterdam on the first leg of his pre-booked, prepaid return to Bangalore.
We’d now accomplished a half-dozen more laps of the block, and we decided to peer in and see how the TV shoot was going. It was going like most such things—at a snail’s pace—and Akumal would not be ne
eded for a bit longer, so we decided to head out for a few more rounds.
“The next coincidence occurred on the plane,” Akumal continued. “The KLM in-flight magazine happened to include an article about the Stedelijk Museum, mentioning a curator named Alexander van Gravenstein, so once I arrived in Holland I immediately took to calling him, and eventually obtained an appointment. When I arrived at his office, he invited me down to the museum cafeteria, and I was momentarily alarmed, because I literally didn’t have a cent in my pocket and, you know, there is this phrase ‘going Dutch,’ and, this being Amsterdam and everything, I figured I might be expected to pay for my own coffee. But he was very generous—another good omen—and he just picked up the tab. And after he looked at the slides, he said, ‘You have brought me the work of a great artist. The work of the late forties and fifties is especially original.’ He gave me the name of Xavier Fourcade, a dealer in New York City, but I decided not to tell him how I’d already called the thirty-two New York galleries, all to no avail.”
Buoyed by that exchange, Akumal borrowed money from some Dutch friends and took the boat to England, arriving in London early in the morning and being met by an Indian friend who was studying at Cambridge. Over dinner, their conversation turned to the Booker Prize for fiction and the fact that it had recently been won by Anita Brookner, who happened to be a professor of art. “I took this as an omen,” Akumal recounted. “And I excused myself momentarily from the table. I went over to the pay phone and looked up her number in the phone book. It was listed—another good omen. And since it wasn’t too late—before ten, anyway—I placed the call. She answered herself, and I quickly explained my situation and she was very gracious, at the end suggesting that the man to get in touch with was her friend Alan Bowness, the director of the Tate.” When Akumal returned to the dining table, his Cambridge friend was aghast that he’d actually called Miss Brookner, but “once in a while you just have to be bold.”
The next morning, Akumal presented himself at the reception desk at the Tate, insisting on seeing the director. No, he did not have an appointment, but he did have urgent business. Bowness, it turned out, was not in, but Akumal would not be budged. Finally, the receptionist managed to get Ronald Alley, the keeper of the modern art collection, to come down and attend to this immovable Indian. “I pulled out the slides, and as he looked through them he almost immediately said, ‘You have made a major discovery.’ I said yes. He suggested that what Shapinsky needed now was a first-class gallery, and asked if I’d like a refer ral. Of course, I said yes again. He went over to his phone and called James Mayor and told him he’d be sending over someone with some very interesting work. I thanked him, left the building, flagged a cab, and immediately proceeded to the Mayor Gallery.”
Salman Rushdie, the bestselling author of Midnight’s Children and Shame, who was to become another student and chronicler of this affair, has pointed out, correctly, that this was the turning point in Akumal’s Shapinsky quest. As Rushdie says, “Now, for the first time, Akumal had become that most pukka of persons, a man who has been properly introduced.” (Pukka is Hindustani for “complete,” “whole,” “together.”)
Mayor had hardly had time to put his phone back in its cradle when Akumal arrived at his door, pulling out his slides. And Mayor, too, was impressed. He asked for a couple of weeks to think it over, but a few days later, on December fourth, he told Akumal that he would like to schedule a Shapinsky retrospective for the spring. Akumal asked him to frame his request as a letter. Mayor did, and the next evening Akumal told the whole story to Salman Rushdie, whom he’d met a few years earlier when a lecture tour brought the writer to Bangalore.
Akumal now took a boat back to Holland, made his quick and highly successful side trip to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and then prepared to resume his flight back to Bangalore, again virtually out of funds. Dutch television had become interested in his story and wanted to scoop the world with news of the Shapinsky discovery. Unfortunately, the sole slot it had available was for a few days after Akumal’s prepaid and nonchangeable flight back. Akumal called Rushdie to ask what he should do.
Rushdie offered some tentative advice, but the real import of this call in terms of the saga was that it served to remind Rushdie of the whole affair. This was important, because that evening it just happened—“another incredible coincidence”—that Rushdie was going to be dining with his friend Tariq Ali. Ali, who comes from an area of pre-Partition India that is now in Pakistan, had been one of the foremost student activists in Europe during the Vietnam War period; he’d been instrumental in establishing the Bertrand Russell-Jean-Paul Sartre war-crimes tribunal in Stockholm; and he’d gone on to become a prolific and highly regarded political writer. Ali had also recently been named one of the executive producers of a documentary-film company named Bandung Productions, which was loosely affiliated with Britain’s new television network, Channel 4. One of Ali’s colleagues from Channel 4 was at the dinner, and Rushdie naturally regaled the group with his improbable tale of Akumal and Shapinsky. As he did so, he warmed to his subject, finally insisting that Bandung and Channel 4 commit themselves on the spot to doing a documentary on Akumal’s discovery—or else, he assured them, he’d go to the BBC with the tale the very next morning. He made one proviso—that whoever took the project should take on Akumal’s expenses for the interim as well. He was tired of seeing his friend ricocheting around the world so precariously close to bankruptcy. The dinner reconvened as an instant committee of the whole, they all agreed to Rushdie’s proposal and his terms, and Akumal was called the next morning.
And now, a scant three months later, here we were, Akumal and I, negotiating loops around the real-life set of the resultant movie. We decided to go back upstairs, and this time Akumal’s services were required. I spoke briefly with the Shapinskys, arranged for a meeting a few days later, when things would have quieted a bit, and took my leave.
Akumal telephoned me the next morning at my office to tell me that he and the film crew would be off to Chicago later that day to shoot a re-creation of the meeting with David (“We’re going to reassemble the entire party,” he said enthusiastically. “Miss Patterson is going to get to retire all over again”), but first he was going to the Museum of Modern Art to talk to William Rubin, the formidable director of the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture.
“Do you have an appointment?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Akumal shot back. “But, then, I haven’t had appointments most other places, either. I’ll drop by afterward to tell you how things went.”
Twenty minutes later, someone stepped into my office to tell me that there was a Mr. Ramachander asking for me in the lobby. “Well,” I said sympathetically as I guided Akumal back to my office a few moments later, “it must have been a short meeting.”
“Ah,” Akumal replied sheepishly. “It’s Wednesday. I forgot. The museum is closed on Wednesdays. But”—he brightened—“I’ve made a wonderful new discovery.” He reached into his satchel and pulled out a bag. “Croissants! Sort of like French flaky breakfast rolls. You can just go in and buy them at a place right around the corner. Very tasty. Here.” He offered me one and then reached again into his satchel, this time pulling out a folder.
“I wanted to show you all the letters,” he explained. He had apparently been collecting testimonials as he went along.
“Dear Mr. Akumal,” the one from Ronald Alley began, under the Tate Gallery letterhead. “Thank you for showing me the slides of Harold Shapinsky’s paintings. I am sorry to say he was completely unknown to me, but he is clearly an Abstract Expressionist artist of real interest whose work deserves to be widely known. His pictures have great freshness and beautiful colour, and I think people are going to be very surprised that an artist of this quality could have slipped into total obscurity.”
There was one from Dr. Partha Mitter, the eminent Asian Studies scholar from the University of Sussex: “I was deeply moved by [Shapinsky’s] immensely joyo
us paintings which appeared to celebrate life and its manifold creations. They exude power and dynamism, and their range of primary colours and sinuous lines evokes striking impressions of organic forms.”
It must have been by way of Mitter that Akumal was able to get to Norbert Lynton, the celebrated historian of twentieth-century art who is also a professor at Sussex. (Lynton’s The Story of Modern Art was conceived of, and is currently used in classrooms throughout the world, as an adjunct volume to E. H. Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art.) “I write to thank you for coming in and showing me your slides of the work of Shapinsky,” Lynton’s letter began. “Some days have passed since then: and though I had intended to write to you sooner the delay has not been without value, in that I find my recollection of many of Shapinsky’s works crystal clear, a sure sign (I know from past experience) of artistic significance. He is certainly a painter of outstanding quality. . . . The slides suggest a rare quality of fresh and vivid (as opposed to mournfully soulful) Abstract Expressionism, a marvelous sense of colour, and also a rare feel for positioning marks and areas of colour on the canvas or paper. When you see Shapinsky, please . . . bring him respectful, admiring greetings from me.”