by Ira Glass
He paused, and then said, “No, I really don’t see de Kooning’s having been that big an influence. Gorky, perhaps, a bit more. And several of the Europeans, definitely—Cézanne, Kandinsky, Miró. And above all Picasso. We were all of us drawing on the same sources, but Picasso was paramount. Everything you tried to do, Picasso had already done. It drove some people crazy, and they tried to reject Picasso. But I thought he was fantastic, and he was most important.”
I decided to leave things at that and asked him and Kate if they were getting excited about the coming weeks.
“Oh, yes,” Shapinsky said, with about as little excitement as I suspect it’s possible for a human being to muster. “It is all very gratifying.” He was silent for a moment. “The work will be seen.”
“I can’t get over it myself,” Kate said, with more than enough animation for both of them. “I find myself on the phone talking to London—me, London!—and I can’t believe this is really happening. At first, it was really scary—the prospect of life’s becoming a little easier came as quite a shock. I have a rich fantasy life. I wrote whole novels in my head about what was going on, entire scenarios of calamities playing themselves out. But it looks as if everything is going to be all right.”
I asked them how they’d imagined that things might go in the days before Akumal.
“I always had the feeling that something like this would occur sooner or later,” Shapinsky said. “That the work would someday be seen.”
Kate said, “I used to cry at night. I’d pray and pray to my grandfather, who was a minister. It was so unfair, so terrible to live with this man who was creating so much beauty, and not have anyone know about it. The worst came about a year ago. I heard about an old artist who died; all his lifework was just tossed out onto the street, stray people passing by were picking at it. . . . That really got to me. I prayed all the harder. Akumal was like the answer to my prayers. Seriously, I think he’s an angel.” She said that Akumal had at first refused to accept any reward for all his labors but that she and Harold had insisted, during his most recent trip, and he’d finally agreed to accept a percentage of whatever they would be realizing from Harold’s art from now on.
We made arrangements to meet in London. (This was going to be their first trip to Europe.) “Yes,” Shapinsky said in his monotone. “It should be a big event.”
“He’s not like this all the time,” Kate confided, smiling lovingly over at him. “Sometimes, lately, he just starts dancing. Sometimes he turns the radio to a disco station and suddenly he’s dancing.”
I had just arrived at my London hotel and was emptying the contents of my bags into the drawers and closets, and absentmindedly listening to a television program called The Antiques Road Show. It was apparently part of a series of such programs, and it essentially played out endless permutations on the same basic formula. Doughty plebian matrons of one sort or another would bring in examples of antique bric-a-brac, describe how they’d happened to come by them (“Oh, it were up in me attic, sir, just lying about for years”), and the supercilious experts, dressed to the nines in the most distinguished Bond Street finery, would then lavish their silken expertise upon the proffered objects—a tea set, a china bowl, a pewter jug, a dresser, a pocket watch—in ostentatious displays of virtuoso discernment. At first, I thought it was a Monty Python skit, but it was all in dead earnest—these were real people. The show generally proceeded as a sort of morality play: those who came on too confidently were obviously destined for a fall. One woman stood before a large early-nineteenth-century English landscape painting and smugly predicted that it was a Constable, offering as proof positive a letter of evaluation she’d procured from a putative expert named Thomas Keating. The television expert, however, was not impressed: he evaluated not only the painting but the prior expert’s letter as well. “Really, very typical late Keating letter, this. Because he goes on to conclude it to be ‘possibly a sketch by Constable’ and in fact he gives you every reason to believe that it is an extremely important painting. Now, you know, Tom Keating during his lifetime was a likeable rogue—really, frightfully sad about the heart attack and all—but I can tell you without the shadow of a doubt that this painting has nothing to do with John Constable. Were it a Constable—three million pounds plus. But no, madam, it’s not a Constable. It’s not an F. W. Watts. It’s not even a John Paul. Maybe it’s a Paul.” The most humble of all the petitioners—a squat farm woman who could barely mumble her own name, so awestruck did she seem in the presence of her tuxedoed expert—had somehow managed to cart in an antique chest of drawers the size of a prize bull. The expert was beside himself: “This is the most important piece of furniture we’ve had on the Road Show, and doubtless the most valuable. It’s a commode—that’s the official term, French term. French shape, English built. To begin with, note the exquisite construction, and how it’s been covered over with the most extraordinary collection of veneers. How ever did you come by it?” The woman’s tongue remained hopelessly tied. “This is—please, madam, pray, sit down here, yes—this is a piece of national, no of international stature. It was made between 1770 and 1785 by one of three or four people, maybe even by Pierre Langlois himself before he went back to France in 1773. Should you choose to put this commode up for sale—naturally very carefully, with a great deal of expert advice—you ought easily to realize forty thousand pounds, and soon it should be worth twice that.” The farm woman started to cry.
The phone rang. “Welcome! I’ve got wonderful news. The Observer Sunday magazine is going to be featuring a full-color spread on the discovery with an article by Salman Rushdie. In addition, Time Out will be running a major story by Tariq Ali. And that’s not all. Chatto and Windus, the top-class publishers, will be bringing out a big illustrated autobiography of Shapinsky.”
“Hi, Akumal,” I said. “I didn’t know Shapinsky could write.”
“No, no. I’m going to write it.”
“Well, sounds as if you’ve been keeping yourself busy and productive.”
“Yes, everybody’s talking about the discovery. I’d come over to visit with you right now, except that I’m afraid I must head over to the airport. I’ve got three friends coming in from India for the opening. It will be quite an international affair. There will also be six friends from Holland, three from West Germany, and one from America.”
A couple of days later, on May twenty-first, Shapinsky’s sixtieth birthday (and not even seven months since Akumal phoned me that first morning), I set out for Mayor’s. Cork Street is a short nub of a thoroughfare, teeming with fashionable art establishments. Leslie Waddington seems to own most of them—four or five bear his name—and this May they were showing, among other artists, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, David Hockney, Henry Moore, and Claes Oldenburg. John Kasmin runs another—the British outpost of Knoedler—right next door to Mayor’s, and his current fare consisted of recent ceramic-and-steel wall constructions by Frank Stella. When I got to Mayor’s, its large street window announced, in big white painted letters, Harold Shapinsky. Inside, Mayor and his partner, Andrew Murray, were making subtle adjustments to the lighting, and waiting for Akumal and the Shapinskys, who were going to drop by and give their final approval. The front two rooms contained the twenty-two Shapinsky paintings, framed and displayed to full advantage. Beyond the second room, a large, vaultlike space opened out and down (with a corkscrew stairway curling to the floor below), and that space was filled with Rauschenbergs, Lichtensteins, Twomblys, Rosenquists, and Warhols—remaining evidence of the preceding show, “A Tribute to Leo Castelli.” Before long, Akumal and the Shapinskys arrived. This was the first time the Shapinskys had seen the show, and Kate was thrilled. Harold took it all in calmly, puffing contemplatively on his pipe, admiring the work. “Very good painting, that one,” he ventured, in his flat monotone, before moving on to the next. “This one, too—fine painting. Nice sense of swell.”
Akumal came over to me, flushed with freshly building excitement. “I brough
t you advance copies of the texts of Salman’s and Tariq’s articles,” he said. “And here.” He reached over and pulled a catalogue of the show out of a bulging box. “You’ll want to have a look at this, too. And, oh!” He riffled quickly through his folder. “Look at this.” He produced another letter from Ronald Alley, this one handwritten on Tate Gallery stationery. “Now that I have actually seen some originals of Harold Shapinsky’s work I feel I must congratulate you again on your discovery,” Alley had written Akumal some weeks earlier. “Colour slides can be very misleading, and I had expected to find lyrical work with glowing colours. Instead his pictures turn out to be much more thickly painted—definitely paintings rather than drawings—and, above all, much tougher and more dramatic. One senses a real drama and tension, even anguish, behind the works, which though small are very highly charged.” As if in harmony with my reading, Shapinsky, on the other side of the room, was commenting, “Nice tension in this one here. Very gratifying.”
David Shapinsky now entered the gallery, a surprisingly young man with delicate features, blondish hair, wire-rim glasses, and, yes, a very kind face. Kate greeted him warmly, and Harold came over as well. I could see that in this slightly offbeat, mildly daft family, David plays the role of the steady anchor, the responsible center, and had probably been doing so for some time.
Akumal, Kate, Harold, and David presently set out to find a suit for Harold for the opening; he didn’t seem to own one. After they’d left, James Mayor and I found ourselves talking about Akumal and his mania for letters. “Did he have you write them, too?” Mayor asked me. “Most extraordinary; every time we have a conversation, he seems to want me to write it up as a letter—on the spot. I’ve got a title for your piece. You should call it ‘The Man of Few Words and the Man of Many Letters.’”
I left the gallery, intending to return to my hotel where I could look through the various texts Akumal had gathered for me in preparation for the evening’s opening. But first I dropped in on the Stella exhibition next door. Kasmin was sitting the desk himself. “So,” he asked, “what exactly is going on over there? Who is this Shapinsky fellow?” I gave him the quick capsule version: Shapinsky, forty years, Akumal, no interest in New York, the Tate, and now a big show. “How remarkable,” Kasmin interjected. “That’s the sort of thing that usually just happens to the widow. I’ve got a title for you. You should call your piece ‘The Man Who Became His Own Widow.’”
Back at the hotel, I flipped through the various texts Akumal had gathered, beginning with the catalogue—a handsome, thirty-two-page booklet in square format with an elegant plain gray cover, twenty-two illustrations, four of them in color, a preface by Ronald Alley, and an extended essay by Marta Jakimowicz-Shah, a Polish artist friend of Akumal’s who now lives in India. Alley’s preface was laudatory in a careful, measured sort of way, concluding, “I am delighted that Shapinsky is at last beginning to get the recognition that he greatly deserves. Such a shame he has had to wait so long. As for Akumal, he amazes me more and more. Speaking for myself, it has usually been my experience when I try to help someone that the outcome is total disaster; but at least this time everything seems to have come out right.” Well, not quite everything, I soon realized. Ms. Jakimowicz-Shah’s catalogue essay, anyway, was, well, problematic: absolutely without any critical distance as it celebrated Shapinsky’s virtually unparalleled importance.
Rushdie’s and Ali’s articles likewise tended to go a bit overboard in proclaiming Shapinsky’s significance, but neither of them claimed any expertise in art. Both were mainly enthralled by the saga of the discovery itself. The circumstance of the discovery, the character of Shapinsky’s art, his reticent nature—all seemed to act as a sort of Rorschach inkblot, with each of the various writers projecting his own rich themes of signification upon the material. For example, Tariq Ali, a formidable political pamphleteer, discerned a moral in the Marxist tradition: “It is almost a truism these days to suggest that Art is big business. Late capitalism has completed the transformation of works of art into commodities. Most art galleries in the West function as ruthless business enterprises.” Shapinsky in this version came off as a sort of martyr to the vagaries of art capitalism who through Akumal’s fluky intervention may yet receive some measure of justice at the last moment. “One can safely assert,” Ali concludes, “that there are many Shapinskys in different parts of the world (including Britain), most of whom will never be ‘discovered’! It is only when the priorities of the existing social order are irreversibly altered that they will ever stand a chance.”
Salman Rushdie, for his part, found a different moral in the story. He had recently been involved in a fairly heated exchange with, among others, Conor Cruise O‘Brien, growing out of an article Rushdie published in the British literary quarterly Granta. In that article, entitled “Outside the Whale,” he’d attacked the current spate of Raj fictions—the television serializations of The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, and the films of Gandhi and A Passage to India—describing them as “only the latest in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East.” It was not surprising, therefore, that the aspect of the Akumal-Shapinsky story that seemed to appeal most to Salman Rushdie was the theme of The Tables Turned. “For centuries now,” he wrote in the last paragraph of his Observer piece, “it has been the fate of the peoples of the East to be ‘discovered’ by the West, with dramatic and usually unpleasant consequences. The story of Akumal and Shapinsky is one small instance in which the East has been able to repay the compliment, and with a happy ending, too.”
Ronald Alley, in his catalogue preface, glancingly hinted at another Rorschach reading. He recounted how, early in the saga, Akumal had been taking his slides around to show to people. “He even telephoned about thirty galleries in New York and asked if he could bring the slides round, but not one said yes,” Alley wrote. “I suppose they thought that the chances of a visiting Indian finding an unknown Abstract Expressionist painter in New York who was any good at all were so remote as to be not worth thinking about.” His next paragraph began, “When I saw the slides I was amazed,” and from the silent interstice between those two sentences welled up the theme of The Smug, Closed, and Self-Satisfied New York Art Scene, with its subtheme of Europe Still Open and Curious. Ironically, this theme received its fullest exposition in Rushdie’s piece, his rage at the smugness of the Empire notwithstanding. “There has been a certain amount of gleeful hand-rubbing going on, because the Shapinsky case reflects so badly on the New York art scene,” he reported. “New York has been ruling the roost for so long that this piece of European revenge must taste sweet indeed.”
The shopping expedition had been a success: Shapinsky was decked out in a smart new suit when I finally caught sight of him in the midst of the throng at the Mayor opening—a debonair gray flannel outfit with sleek, fresh creases tapering down to a pair of blue canvas deck shoes. The cherry aroma from his pipe wafted about the assembly throughout the evening, which Shapinsky spent quietly enduring the sometimes effusive adulation of his new admirers. In the face of this onslaught, his composure attained almost epic proportions. As for Kate, she was wearing one of her patchwork vests, a lovely medley of black-and-white rectangles with an occasional highlight of bright, bright red. Toward the end of the evening, when the crowd had thinned, she pulled out a ball of wool and resumed her knitting. All the careful work that Mayor and Murray had put into modulating the lighting on the paintings went more or less unnoticed; in fact, this was one of those openings so crowded that the paintings themselves are virtually unseeable. In any case, this particular evening the lighting was drowned out by the roving television kliegs of the crew from Bandung Productions, capturing a few last shots for their documentary, which would be broadcast in a week.
“This is really more of a literary crowd than an art one,” one of the guests told me. “But, then again, there really isn’t much of an art scene here in London. The English like to look at words, not pictures.”
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“The whole thing is quite romantic in a shaggy-dog sort of way,” I overheard one woman saying. “Aladdin’s lamp and that sort of thing.”
“But where has this fellow Shapinsky been?” her companion replied. “It all reminds me of those blind white fish swimming about deep in those underground caverns in Kentucky or wherever it is they do all that.”
“Yes, look at him! He even looks like Rip Van Winkle, newly emerged from his sleep, his eyes still blinking in the glaring daylight.”
“The Japanese soldier on that island outpost who’s only just found out the war is over—say, what?”
At one point, I met Ronald Alley, who turned out to be a tall man in his late fifties, with a gentle, dignified bearing. “Originally,” he recalled for me, “I went downstairs that morning simply to try and rescue my colleague from the siege of what she was describing to me as a very persistent Indian caller. I mean, you get people turning up like that from time to time, and I do try to go down and see them whenever I can, partly out of courtesy but partly in the hope that something like this might happen. It almost never does, but this”—he included the whole thronged room in his gesture—“sort of justifies the whole enterprise, doesn’t it?”
For me, the opening provided an occasion to speak with several Indians who were able to offer me a much deeper understanding of Akumal’s passion. (That passion appeared all the more remarkable to me when I learned, as I did in passing, that Akumal was suddenly deep in debt again, pending the eventual success of the show, because he had paid for part of the travel fares and lodging for several members of his Indian, Dutch, German, and American contingents.) Up to that evening, I’d seen Akumal’s quest as by turns comic, resourceful, vaguely frenzied, but always inspired. Through these new conversations, I began to get a sense of some of the darker imperatives underlying his intensity. One of his group from Bangalore, a beautiful woman draped in a luminous blue-and-green sari, noted that Akumal had always been like this, that it was sometimes exhausting to be with him for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, but that to understand him “one has to realize how stultifying, for example, is his daily regimen at the school where he teaches, as is the case in most Indian academic settings.” She continued, “You also must try to imagine how incredibly hard it is in India for someone from the lower middle class just to survive, let alone rise. I think Akumal derives a lot of his energy from this being betwixt and between.”
