Can Carpentier Be Rehabilitated?

The 20th century Cuban artist Micah Carpentier is loved but rarely admired. Gregarious and playful, his company was sought by his colleagues, his students, foreign visitors, journalists, and even political elites. His work, however, found little favor among the critics. Though he enjoyed a favorable international reputation, it was mostly due to the novelty of his curriculum vitae.

One of his most ridiculous projects, one he took on when he was already in his eighth decade, was to master enough biblical Hebrew to read and appreciate the Old Testament anomaly "The Canticle of Canticles." Drawn to its erotic imagery, Carpentier obsessed over the intricacies of the poem's prosodic innovations. Mocked at the time for what critics saw as mawkish sentimentality, today the work is derided for it's outdated celebration of heterosexual, male virility. 

SPARE US THE ROMANCE

 

 Micah Carpentier never gave a moment's thought to immortality. He was a pragmatist impersonating a dreamer. His love of the Hebrew Bible reflected a love of literature and nothing more.

Dahlia Danton's latest book offers a different viewpoint. Her far-flung speculations veer more toward fantasy fiction than serious art historical scholarship.

When in 1963 he began illustrating The Song of Solomon (שיר השירים), it was merely to facilitate a close reading of the text.

The only saving grace of Danton's misleading book is the lovely preface provided by the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman. Schoffman, a genius in his own right, has a perspective on Carpentier that is both revelatory and emotionally complex.

Micah Carpentier's Shir Ha Shirim

AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 2022!

A facsimile of this remarkable book, edited and annotated by Dahlia Danton is soon to be published!

LATIN AMERICAN MODERNISM AND THE LEGACY OF MICAH CARPENTIER

Ever since the Cuban government opened access to the Carpentier Archive, we have learned so much about this incredible figure in the history of Latin American Modernism.

 

WHIMPER AGAINST THE MACHINE

My dear uncle, the great Cuban artist, Micah Carpentier, is the subject of this extremely moving portrait by the young Los Angeles filmmaker, Maxwell Gray.

INHALE

Narcissistic personality disorder is a cognitive affliction where people experience a bloated sense of their own significance, an urgent appetite for admiration and a deplorable deficit of empathy for others. But beneath this cloak of ultra-confidence lies a pathetically flimsy sense of self-esteem that's easily triggered by the slightest membrane of criticism.

My grandfather, the "great" Micah Carpentier,  suffered profoundly from this irksome indisposition. And though he made some beautiful art, as a human being he was an insufferable brute.

Carpentier's narcissism made it impossible for him to sustain a healthy, loving relationship. Wherever he worked - Carpentier taught drawing and design at about a dozen prestigious art schools and universities throughout Latin America - he ran into difficulties because he was tone-deaf to the needs of his students and the expectations of his colleagues. He felt entitled to a kind of special treatment and whenever he wasn't granted the special favors or admiration he felt he deserved he fell into a funk of bitterness and disappointment. 

People simply didn't enjoy being around him which created a self-defeating cycle where he complained that his relationships were empty and unfulfilling.

He called it his "fear of intimacy" - a consequence of his genius and a necessary wage of his artistic election.

The truth is that he was in desperate need of some serious psychoanalysis but he was terrified of the demons this type of introspection might arouse.

Toward the end of his life he joined a small sect of evangelical pot smokers, a tawdry collection of equally damaged souls who made getting high into a childish theology. It was the ring of hell that Dante himself would never dare to imagine. A cult of inebriated narcissists forever coughing up the virtues of collective self-absorption.

Micah Carpentier was a fool with a gift. He had every chance to live a life punctuated with gratification and contentment but instead opted for the lesser pleasures of self-righteous insecurity.

May his blessed memory become a cautionary tale ...

PASSIVE POLITICS AND THE ORIGINS OF MYTH

The decline was fast.

In 1964 Micah Carpentier joined the surprised and clandestine Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado, a brutish, throwback cult of hollow social strivers who found Fidel’s form of communism difficult to compete with. The group, made up almost entirely of informers, would meet secretly once a week at the Gran Club de Dominó José Martí. The pastor who was on the direct payroll of both the CIA and the KGB was known for his deadpan sermons made up mostly of non sequiturs and puns. 

Carpentier, a man prone to easy submission, felt very much at home among this ragtag group of black marketeers, social misfits, religious fanatics and snitches. His once colorful personality flattened into a caricature as soon as he started attending their meetings. He would start referring to fuzzy concepts like la génesis de ser, ya siempre escuchando and hablando en el avance and became increasingly incoherent to his family and to his friends. Attending the church’s meetings incurred great risk but it was worth it to Carpentier because it was the only place in Cuba where he felt somewhat appreciated.

The conventional scholarship points to my uncle’s putative commitment to political dissidence that led to his demise. The harsher truth was that Carpentier was a joiner - a person more prone to follow than to lead and his involvement with the illegal Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado was a therapeutic decision rather than a political one. Ironically, it was the Church that ultimately restored my uncle’s reputation. In the 1990’s when the Soviet Union abandoned Cuba like a waif among the gales the noose of repression momentarily relaxed and the Church was able to carry out a yard sale. 

La Venta de Noventa y Tres, the somewhat risky and short-lived open air market in Havana’s Plaza Vieja was an early Cuban experiment with free enterprise. It was there amidst the waterlogged paperbacks, transistor radios, and old vinyl recordings of Don Azpiazu and Orquesta de Tata Alfonso that the Iglesia del Pasado es el Pasado displayed in public for the first time the odd gum wrapper sketches of Micah Carpentier.

Most of this work is dispersed around the globe and I am extremely grateful to Armando Masuero and Valerie Paes, graduate fellows at the Institue de la Inteligencia Útil in Quito for compiling and editing a definitive catalogue raisonné of these important drawings.