by Ira Glass
I called up the gallery to see how things were going there. Andrew Murray answered the phone in the gallery’s basement storeroom. “James and I are holed up down here, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s the only place where there’s any room. It’s like a railway station up there—all chockablock. The limousines are queued up around the corner!”
Mayor picked up another extension. “There’s a waiting list for Shapinsky! The last several purchases went to big world-class collectors, your household names. I’ve never seen anything like it. The press is all over Shapinsky. We had Greek television in here yesterday morning, Canadian national radio in the afternoon, the Jerusalem Post, two of the biggest German art periodicals. This morning, Shapinsky was being interviewed by a pair of Chinese reporters. Not Hong Kong—Beijing!”
I asked them how Shapinsky was holding up under all this. “He’s starting to talk,” Murray reported. “It’s bizarre—he’s turned positively loquacious.”
Mayor confirmed this improbable finding: “He seems to think he’s back in the Waldorf Cafeteria or something.”
The following week, I got another call from Akumal. “You’ll never guess what happened to me.” I didn’t even try. “I met a man from California who’d read about the controversy in the Guardian and went to see the show. He’d just been over to the gallery and the paintings had bowled him over, and now he wants me to fly to Hollywood to meet a producer friend of his, so we can talk about the possibility of making a movie.” Akumal seemed even more excited, however, by the fact that two of India’s leading weekly magazines were going to be doing major stories on the discovery. “And I have another important bit of news,” he added. “Norbert Lynton was in the gallery again yesterday, and he inscribed a copy of his book, The Story of Modern Art. Listen to the inscription. I have it right here: ‘All good wishes to Akumal, who is doing his best to force us all to rewrite our art histories.’ So, you see, I think it’s a good omen. I may yet win the second half of my bet with David.” It occurred to me that whether or not Akumal succeeded in forcing Shapinsky into the Encyclopedia Britannica, he himself stood a good chance of transmigrating one of these days straight into the Oxford English Dictionary. “Akumal: n. A genie, a fairy godfather, a doer of good deeds, esp. with regard to artists who regard him as a sort of patron saint, e.g., ‘Marcel had been slaving away at his easel for years, all to no avail; he was beginning to wonder if he’d ever meet his Akumal.’ ”
“You know what the moral of the story is?” Akumal asked me. All the others had given me theirs. I wondered what Akumal’s would be. “That sometimes the good can win,” he said.
“Yeats—the poet I admire much more than Eliot—he wrote a poem called ‘The Second Coming,’ and two lines of that poem go, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ There is pure motive and there is impure motive. I see it as my mission to give the best some passionate intensity. And, you see, this is a story that celebrates the unity of the human race. Think about it: there are Dutchmen, Americans, Englishmen, Poles, Germans, Indians, Pakistanis—all united by a karma to bring a little good into this world. Don’t you think it’s wonderful? No matter what happens now, Harold will have a few years to paint in peace. He’ll be having a big show at a gallery in Cologne—did I tell you? Fifteen paintings at increased prices, later this year—it’s all arranged. But it doesn’t matter anymore if not a single other one of his paintings sells, because now Harold and Kate will have a little comfort. They’re even talking about moving here to England.”
Akumal was silent for a moment, seeming to bask in the light of his good works. “With me, you see,” he concluded, finally, “it was always pure motive.”
POSTSCRIPT (1988)
Shortly after the events described in these pages, Akumal returned to India, to Bangalore, to his parents’ home, where he subsided into a sixteen-hour-a-day sleeping depression. I can picture him there, the talk of his neighborhood, children huddled in the shade outside the house gossiping about the guy inside who sleeps all day long and about the rumors of his earlier worldly adventures.
He slept for weeks on end, and then he roused himself, and a few months later my phone was ringing at 7:00 a.m. and it was of course Akumal, who had just arrived back in town—in fact, he was still at the airport.
“Gee, Akumal,” I said groggily. “You must be suffering from jet lag.”
“No,” Akumal replied, laughing. “Are you kidding? Me? The jet has lag. I never get lag.”
We arranged to meet a few days later at my office, and there he regaled me with a new saga, one that was barely more probable than the first. It turned out he’d made another discovery. He’d received dozens of calls and letters following the Shapinsky opening, he explained, young artists likewise eager to have themselves revealed to a thirsting world, but most of them he’d let slide. “This thing of discovering people is quite taxing,” he explained. One inquiry, however, had for some reason held his attention (for several reasons, actually, all of which he rehearsed at length for me and none of which I can any longer remember). This was the plea of another son on behalf of his painter-father—in this case, a father who’d been dead for some years. Patrick Carr invited Akumal out to his mother’s place to have a look at the paintings of his late father, David Carr.
Now, David Carr had been known in the British art world, but principally as a collector and an enthusiast—his own production (faux-naïf renditions of Irish peasants and fishmongers and more complex, neo-Cubist studies of factory workers and their machines) had been virtually private. Akumal was thunderstruck (“completely floored”) by these paintings, and he immediately set to work. By the time he returned to New York, he’d already managed to arrange for a major retrospective at the Mayor Gallery; the publication by the well-regarded firm of Quartet Books of a full-color, hardbound, coffee-table volume, with an introduction by Ronald Alley; and, of course, a full-length television documentary (this time with BBC-2 rather than Channel 4). All of these events have since come off flawlessly, and Carr’s revival seems well assured.
The Shapinskys, for their part, did indeed prosper following the success of Harold’s London show. They transposed themselves to England for about half a year but eventually returned to New York City, abandoning their East Side garret for somewhat more commodious circumstances in the Chelsea district. Somewhat nonplussed by his sudden success, Shapinsky himself seemed to retreat for a time into the fabrication of dozens and presently hundreds of miniature paper-and- tinfoil sculptures—this mad progeny came to occupy virtually all the shelves and then all the floor space as well in his new apartment. After a while, though, Shapinsky returned to his painting, which he now seemed to tackle with renewed vigor and zest.
Akumal and James Mayor, however, were still having trouble cracking the New York City gallery scene. Most dealers remained dubious (the eerie stasis of Shapinsky’s style, its proximity to de Kooning’s, etc.), and not a few of them continued to resent the London provenance of this whole Shapinsky renaissance (or, rather, naissance).
Following his triumph with Carr, Akumal therefore decided that it was time to give his Shapinsky discovery another push. Here I get a little foggy as to the exact chronology (and chutzpahlogy), but somehow Akumal managed to befriend Kathy Ford, the wife of automobile tycoon Henry Ford II, and to enlist her support in the cause. At one point he was even talking about the possibility of having a Shapinsky show in the living room of her own Palm Beach, Florida, mansion—so that they could display Shapinsky’s marvelous canvases directly to the potential buyers in that elite community, bypassing the hopelessly hidebound New York art scene altogether. As things actually developed, Shapinsky had a one-man show at Bruce Helander’s Palm Beach gallery, which is how it came to pass that on a January 1987 evening, Akumal and Harold Shapinsky found themselves being celebrated at the gala opening of their new show by over eight hundred of the upper crustiest of le tout Palm Beach, including the Fords, Peter and Sandy Brant (owners
of the White Birch Polo Farms and publisher of Art in America, respectively), and Hector and Susan Barrantes (the well-known Argentine polo player and his wife, the mother of Sarah Ferguson, the recently endowed Duchess of York). Another vision well worth conjuring.
By the time of the Helander show, Shapinsky canvases were fetching as much as thirty-four thousand dollars each—and once again the show proved a financial success (it had been half sold out before it even opened, partly on the strength of Mrs. Ford’s contacts). The reviews were mixed to good, but the most remarkable of all was a rave by Ken-worth Moffett, the former curator of contemporary art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who now publishes a newsletter of his own, entitled Moffett’s Artletter ($150 for ten issues, artists half price). In discussing Shapinsky with his subscribers, Moffett went way out on a limb. He characterized the objection of most New York dealers, the similarity between Shapinsky’s and de Kooning’s work, as “beside the main point, which is that Shapinsky is better than de Kooning. I think if a show were hung with alternating pairs of the best pictures of Shapinsky and de Kooning, Shapinsky would win every time. He is simply a much more talented artist. His pictures have more movement and intensity. They have better color and drawing: They have more life.” And then, further on: “Maybe Shapinsky’s presence will help people finally see de Kooning’s work for what it is. In any event, Shapinsky, despite his modesty, has been unusually good from the start and has been consistently good for forty years. He has known how to sustain his intensity. If de Kooning first invented the style, Shapinsky is the one who filled it up with feeling.”
Mr. and Mrs. Murry Robinson, who purchased a Shapinsky from Helander, proceeded to donate it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. On one of his subsequent visits to New York, Akumal handed me a copy of the letter with which the National Gallery’s director, the redoubtable J. Carter Brown, accepted the gift:I am happy to report that at today’s meeting, the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art accepted with pleasure your gift of Untitled, 1948, by Harold Shapinsky.
The story of the discovery of Shapinsky is fascinating and having now seen Untitled, I must say that the discovery is long overdue. In fact, this work will make an important addition to our twentieth-century holdings. The art of the Abstract Expressionists is a crucial strength of our collection, and Shapinsky’s splendid painting will fit in exceedingly well.
Thank you very much for your generous gift to the National Gallery. It is always a particular pleasure for us when collectors become involved with the Gallery, and I hope that in the coming months members of our curatorial staff can visit you either in Providence or in Palm Beach to view your collection and to discuss present and future projects.
To a skeptic this letter might reveal J. Carter Brown to be not only an erudite connoisseur but also a suave diplomat.
Helander now contacted his New York colleague Nathan Shippee, who runs a gallery in the prestigious Fuller Building at the corner of Madison and Fifty-seventh. Shippee, like many who read my piece when it first ran in the New Yorker in December 1985, had imagined the whole story to be an elaborate fiction. He was now pleased to discover otherwise, and after seeing some slides and canvases, he scheduled a New York opening for Shapinsky at his gallery in the fall of 1988. Ironically (although Akumal would surely begrudge the concept, he’d insist it had simply been fate, karma, all along), the opening will occur three stories directly below the room into which André Emmerich had earlier insisted to me that he’d have been able to fit Morris Louis’s entire life production.
Having righted and relaunched the Shapinsky juggernaut, Akumal set himself to other tasks. One day, a few months later, he barged in on me at my office, bearing a medium-smallish white cube carton that came flying out of his arms as he entered the room, smashing against my filing cabinet and then rolling onto the floor. “Oh dear,” he said, picking up the box, which he then proceeded to drop—indeed, almost to spike—all over again. After a few more elaborate stumbles and fumbles, Akumal triumphantly opened his little package: a package that turned out to contain in its hollow—otherwise utterly unprotected—a single, entirely undamaged, not even pockmarked, egg. I surmised that the egg must be hard-boiled. But Akumal proceeded to take a nearby coffee mug, crack the egg, and pour out its liquid (though completely scrambled) contents. “My newest discovery!” Akumal announced enthusiastically.
It turned out that Patrick Carr, the painter’s son, was some sort of inventor in his own right, and this particular product of his laboratory, a virtually weightless ingeniously molded polystyrene-like packing box that could be mass-produced and sold in flats “so easy to assemble that any grandmother could do it,” or so Akumal insisted, was going to “revolutionize the packaging industry.” This was going to be Akumal’s new project—this, and the career of that Polish graphic designer, Stasys Eidrigevicius, whose work Akumal had already been flogging when first we’d met. In fact, he was heading back to Warsaw to bring himself up-to-date on Eidrigevicius.
The next time he was back in New York, Akumal brought me up-to-date. He’d managed to secure a one-man show for Eidrigevicius in the very heart of New York’s Soho, something I had never for a minute doubted he would. I asked him how things were going with the box. “Superbly!” Akumal exulted. As karma would have it, his friend Shippee, before turning to art dealing, had been in the packaging business himself and retained all sorts of contacts. “So we’ve now been able to show the box to the president of one of the top companies in the country, and he was completely high on it, totally sold out!”
If the box takes off, I commented to Akumal, he’d be able to retire. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ll be even more busy.”
I’ve decided that “Akumal” would never work as a noun. It is going to have to be a verb.
POST-POSTSCRIPT (1998)
If I’m not sure what became of that box scheme, it’s only because, as the years passed, there were so many others. While the Shapinskys settled into a relatively comfortable life of middling late-career success (Kate herself even achieved a certain renown displaying her own abstract geometric miniature quilt tapestries), Akumal was hardly one to rest on his laurels. He discovered a young black American opera singer in Warsaw and promoted the living daylights out of the poor lucky man. He composed and had himself recorded singing a sort of jazz sutra. And he even created a book of his own—an improbable children’s story pitched somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and The Gulag Archipelago , the tale (lavishly illustrated by Stasys) of a little girl on a pig farm who rescues the runt of the litter, raises it to full thriving health, and then, under enormous pressure from her father, gives it up for transport to the slaughterhouse. That night, wracked by guilt, the girl dreams that she herself is turning into a pig, and by morning she has indeed become one, at which point, at story’s end, she’s being hauled off to the slaughterhouse. Good night and sweet dreams! Owing to the strength of Stasys’s startlingly vivid imagery and Akumal’s indefatigable promotions, the vegetarian tract eventually made it into numerous foreign editions. Akumal even turned it into a musical which achieved a full-fledged Warsaw production.
I haven’t heard from Akumal in a while, but the other day I received a flyer announcing a major Stasys retrospective in Bangalore, India. So I have to assume all’s right with the world.
THE AMERICAN MAN, AGE TEN
Susan Orlean
In her introduction to her collection The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Susan Orlean explains the origin of this story. Her editor at Esquire magazine asked her to write a profile of Macauley Culkin, who was then just ten years old.
“Then my editor told me that he was planning to use the headline ‘The American Man, Age Ten.’ On a whim, I told my editor that I would do the piece if I could find a typical American ten-year-old man to profile instead—someone who I thought was more deserving of that headline.”
Her editor said sure.
“I was completely dismayed. First of all, I had to
figure out what I’d had in mind when I made the suggestion. Obviously there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ boy or girl, and even if I could establish some very generous guidelines for what constitutes typicalness—say, a suburban kid from a middle-class family who went to public school and didn’t have an agent, a manager, or a chauffeur—there was the problem of choosing one such kid. I considered going to a shopping mall and just snatching the first ten-year-old I found, but instead I asked my friends to ask their friends if they knew anyone with a ten-year-old, and eventually I got the name of a boy who lived in the New Jersey suburbs. I liked Colin Duffy right away because he seemed unfazed by the prospect of my observing him for a couple of weeks. He was a wonderful kid, and I still marvel at how lucky I was to have stumbled on someone so endearing, but the truth is that if you set out to write about a ten-year-old boy, any boy would do.”
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.