The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  A few moments later, Salman Rushdie amplified on this theme. “I think with Akumal there is a sort of desperation in part of his makeup,” he said. “To describe him as a teacher of English at an agricultural college is gravely to diminish him—but that is his status in Bangalore. It is a terrible thing when someone’s picture of himself does not coincide with the world’s. You have to realize that the gulf between the classes is much greater in India, and for Akumal to have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, as he has done, has all along required the continuous projection of the kind of frenetic energy he’s now been demonstrating in this affair.”

  I asked Rushdie how Akumal had gotten access to him in the first place.

  “Well, I was in Bangalore briefly during a lecture tour a few years ago,” Rushdie said. “My hosts had escorted me to my hotel and had just left the room when there was an immediate knocking on the door. I figured that it was my hosts returning with one last bit of instruction, or something; when I opened the door, I was instead confronted by the hugest garland of flowers I’d ever seen, deep inside which, barely visible, stood Akumal. He barged into the room in this overwhelming, unstoppable frenzy of vast smiles and flashing eyes, proclaiming that he was my ‘number one fan in Bangalore,’ and describing how he’d been pestering the editors of all the local papers for weeks, demanding that they include features and supplements on my coming visit, so that now, here, this was the result—whereupon he thrust a bunch of newspapers at me, all with big photographs and long stories. It was a unique and fairly winning sort of approach. I would then see him occasionally on his visits to Europe, although I must say I was a bit incredulous when he launched into this story about his discovery of an American painter. I mean, Akumal sometimes strikes one as a bit of an operator. But it’s impossible not to warm to his evident enthusiasm for life, his disarming openness, and his obviously genuine devotion to the arts. And he’s pulled it off. Well, I hope that maybe this success will bring him a measure of peace.”

  A few minutes later, I was talking with Tariq Ali, an expansive and friendly man, with none of the archness of his occasionally polemical prose. “When Akumal first told Salman the story about Shapinsky, Salman says, he thought Akumal was making this artist up,” Ali reported. “Well, when Salman subsequently told me about Akumal, I thought he was making Akumal up—I mean, I figured he’d gone a bit over the top. Akumal sounded so much like a character in one of his own fictions. But I eventually saw the slides and met the man. It was all true, and the story seemed a natural for Bandung.”

  We watched for a few minutes as Akumal buzzed about the room, bringing his contingents over to meet James Mayor or Ronald Alley or Salman Rushdie. “The thing about India,” Ali continued, “is that this synthesis of almost two hundred years of British rule and native tradition means that there are a lot of people like Akumal—people with this very wide range of worldly, cosmopolitan interests who are condemned to live fairly narrow, constricted, provincial lives. I think part of his nervous energy comes from this being between classes, between cultures. It was a very moving experience going to Bangalore with the film crew to shoot that part of the documentary. People would come up to us and ask what we were doing. We’d tell the story, and they’d be quite dumbfounded. ‘Are you serious?’ they would ask. ‘All this is happening because of our Akumal?’ Or his students in the English class: ‘Our Professor Ramachander has accomplished this?’ I mean, Bangalore is a large and growing city, but in many ways it’s like a Chekhovian small town, with Akumal as the village eccentric, the character from the local coffeehouse scene who suddenly makes good in the world. I mean, he’s been doing this sort of thing all along in Bangalore, but everybody there is just amazed by the scale this time around.”

  Akumal had gone over to talk with Shapinsky. “A character from Naipaul meets a character from Bellow,” Ali said.

  On the evening the Shapinsky show was opening at the Mayor Gallery, a couple of miles away, at the Aldwych Theatre, Paul Eddington was starring in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s metaphysical farce Jumpers, About halfway through the first act, Eddington, playing the role of a second-rate philosophy professor, delivers himself of the following contention: “Of the five proofs of God’s existence put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas, three depended on the simple idea that if an apparently endless line of dominoes is knocking itself over one by one then somewhere there is a domino which was nudged.” It occurred to me on several occasions during the next few days, as I kept returning for visits to a teeming Mayor Gallery, that in the case of Akumal’s discovery of Shapinsky two lines of dominoes had needed to be nudged. For this was a story of how the lifelines of two individuals—marginal, utterly peripheral figures in their own societies—had, most improbably, managed to intersect, and then of the entirely improbable chain reaction that their intersection had subsequently set off. Actually, three coincidental factors were playing themselves out in this story: Akumal, Shapinsky, and the specific, highly peculiar (one might use the word “marginal” here as well) situation of the art world itself in 1985. To shift metaphors, Akumal and Shapinsky were like two stray crystals dropped into a flask: it was only because of the special conditions obtaining inside the flask—the specific momentary chemical dynamics of the supersaturated medium—that these two crystals were able to conjoin and blossom in such a surprising way. I am convinced that had Akumal met Shapinsky in 1975, say, or even 1980, his quest would have gone nowhere.

  There are two major reasons for this. The first involves a sea change that has been occurring in the dominant aesthetic sensibility over the last decade. Fifteen years ago, Minimalism was at its height. The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in both figurative and expressive imagery. This has proved true both retrospectively (witness the sudden rediscovery of the late Picasso at the Guggenheim in 1984, a phase of the Master’s career that had been almost entirely dismissed until just a couple of years before; and the considerable popularity of the de Kooning retrospective that was up at the Whitney at about the same time) and with regard to the most up-to-date in gallery fashions as well (witness the proliferation of neo-Expressionist imagery throughout the world over the past five years). It is hardly surprising that the time was ripe for a comprehensive reconsideration of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, and, indeed, precisely that was beginning to happen: completely unbeknownst to Akumal during that afternoon in September 1984, when he was first being exposed to Shapinsky’s work via those primitive slides in David Shapinsky’s apartment, a major traveling exhibition entitled “Action/Precision” and featuring work from the fifties by six of the second-generation luminaries—Norman Bluhm, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Al Held, Alfred Leslie, and Joan Mitchell—was touring the country. (The exhibition was organized by the Newport Harbor Art Museum.) The show’s unusually lovely catalogue features several excellent essays touching on this sea change in aesthetic sensibility—a change that, of course, has had a bearing on Shapinsky’s reception as well. Robert Rosenblum, for example, recalls what it was like in the midfifties, as the tide began pulling out for interest in that sort of work: “For me and many of my contemporaries, Rauschenberg, Johns, Stella swiftly became the Holy Trinity that led us from the Old Testament to the New, liberating us from the burden of living under the oppressive yoke of the coarse and sweaty rhetoric of Action painting, whose supreme deity, de Kooning, suddenly loomed large for many younger spectators and artists as a conservative force, a tyrant of past authority who demanded the instant embalming of any youthful, liberated spirit . . . a suffocating father image.” Paul Schimmel notes how “the rich and diverse paintings of [the six artists in this show] were relegated to obscurity because they embraced and expanded upon the revolutions of their predecessors rather than reacting against them.” Rosenblum talks about how at the time he thought he could “write off most of the work by the six artists in this show as irritating anachronisms, the product of loyal but growingly irrelevant satellites.” This “temporary blackou
t of visibility” for the second-generation Abstract Expressionists lasted almost thirty years. But suddenly they were back. “And now how do they look?” Rosenblum asks. “For one thing, they look surprisingly up-to-date, riding in unexpectedly as ancestral figures behind the latest neo-Expressionist wave from Germany, Italy, or our own shores, a wave that once more permits us to wallow and frolic in the primordial ooze of oil paint. Seen as a whole, these pictures have the tonic quality of sheer sensuous enjoyment. . . . For anyone who was getting chilled by the laboratory calibrations of so much Minimal and Conceptual art and by the puritanical ban on color and palpable textures, this is the perfect antidote, a drunkenly deep breath of visual oxygen.”

  Akumal was thus going to find himself hawking just the right sort of elixir for 1985: the atmosphere in which he would be moving stood a good chance of welcoming Shapinsky’s sort of oxygen. But the previous decade had also seen a second transformation in the art world—one that would have an even more dramatic impact on Akumal’s and Shapinsky’s fortunes. This had to do with the changing character of the art market. Prices across the board, as I suggested earlier, had shot completely out of sight.

  The explanation for this is extremely simple: the market for art had exploded in size—the number of players (collectors) in the game had multiplied many times over. The explanation for that is more complex. For one thing, the baby-boom generation had come of age, gone to college in record numbers, and been exposed to the humanities and, in particular, the contemporary arts; and now many of its members were becoming professionals and earning substantial incomes, with the result that collecting seemed worthwhile to them both as an avocation and, increasingly, as an investment. Sidney Janis recently observed, “More money is being spent these days because more money is being made.” Around the same time, corporations began to enter the art market, building up vast company collections as exercises both in good public relations and in shrewd investment. There was a tremendous increase in the number of museums and a tremendous upsurge in museum attendance. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, West Germany will witness the launching of thirty new museums by 1990; another article in Progressive Architecture cites similar figures for the United States. Japan is involved in a parallel frenzy. Each of these new museum projects features dozens of empty walls, a board of trustees, and a carefully tended hive of supporting collectors. The infrastructure of art commerce—the network of galleries, art journals, and auction houses—has developed great sophistication, including extremely supple engines of publicity. Literally tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of potential consumers are being funneled into the system. At recent contemporary-art auctions of the sort that just five years ago were being attended by only a few hundred collectors, well over a thousand people are jammed into auditoriums filled to standing-room-only capacity—and that’s not even counting many of the highest bidders who choose to avoid the crush by phoning in their entries.

  A friend of mine, the director of one of Europe’s finest small museums, recently told me, “There’s simply not enough work of superior quality anymore to go around—work, that is, by the grands maîtres—so the prices, of course, go way up, and prices for the next layer of artists, the petits maîtres, rise up in turn, to answer the demand. Paintings by artists I had barely even heard of until a few months before are going for fifty thousand dollars at auction.”

  This situation was recently encapsulated in a succinct formula by the Paris-based art critic Souren Melikian. In an article entitled “The Ten-Percent Law,” which appeared in Art & Auction, he wrote, “Over the last twelve months a new law has been verified with increasing frequency in the Impressionist and Modern masters field. Artists regarded rightly or (not infrequently) wrongly as second fiddles to famous artists are worth one-tenth of those from whom they supposedly took their cue.” This assertion might at first appear to knock the wind out of any enthusiasms the petits maîtres could have been expected to arouse; but, on second glance, when one recognizes that individual works by grands maîtres are now selling for many millions of dollars, 10 percent looms back up as a figure worth reckoning with, or for. Melikian cited several examples in his article. A work by Charles Angrand (1854-1910), a neo-Impressionist artist who “greatly admired van Gogh, who returned the compliment,” recently sold for two hundred thousand dollars—one-tenth of what a van Gogh with a similar composition would fetch. This ratio also obtains between the works of Roger de La Fresnaye (1855- 1925) and those of Braque, as it does between the works of Paul Sérusier (1863-1927) and those of Gauguin.

  Lucy Havelock-Allan, the director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s auction house in New York, recently confirmed for me that a similar trend was beginning to be noticeable in the contemporary market—though not yet at quite the same percentage rate. She noted that artists like Esteban Vícente, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Joan Mitchell are all getting personal record prices for their works these days. “One reason people are looking at works by artists like these is that they can’t afford de Kooning, especially the de Kooning of the late forties and the fifties, and they know they never will be able to,” she explained. “Theodoros Stamos, for example, languished at around twenty thousand dollars for years, then last year a painting of his sold for forty thousand, and this year we saw a fine one go for over ninety thousand—this for a work that ten years ago would have been lucky to bring five thousand.”

  Almost in passing, Melikian includes the interesting observation that the 10-percent law “has nothing to do with beauty, as nonspecialists would call it, or ‘quality,’ as the sophisticated professionals like to put it.” He cites the example of a “stunning” 1892 landscape by Maurice Denis (1870-1943) that recently sold for $25,400, or roughly “one-tenth of any Neo-Impressionist painting of similar size, even of third-rate quality, by Monet, of which the great man committed more than a few.” Melikian concluded, “In art-market thinking, there is no such thing as a masterpiece by a painter who is not currently dubbed a great master.”

  This last proviso would not have bothered James Mayor, if he read the article. With the prices of de Koonings what they had come to be, he still had a lot of room to maneuver. I spoke earlier of the Rorschach responses that Shapinsky’s story seemed to summon. To these must be added Mayor’s own calculations. Mayor may well have been—indeed, no doubt he was—authentically taken with Shapinsky’s work. But he must also have realized that if he could just get Shapinsky included in the lists of the petits maîtres working in de Kooning’s wake, his prices would have a vast horizon. This was especially the case in Europe, for when Europeans began collecting American art in a serious fashion, in the sixties, they initially went after Warhol, Oldenburg, Stella, Rauschenberg, and Johns, and later, Pollock, but not so much after de Kooning, because, ironically, they saw him more as a transitional European figure, and Americans were what they wanted. By the time they realized their mistake, de Kooning’s prices were out of reach for all but the wealthiest among them. Collectors with a speculative turn of mind would realize this, too: as long as the current bubble in all art prices lasted (and there was no particular reason to believe that it would burst anytime soon), and assuming Mayor was going to be successful in establishing Shapinsky’s status as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Shapinsky’s paintings at twenty thousand dollars each might prove a good investment. As Ronald Alley explained to me while we huddled together at the opening, “There’s a tremendous interest in Abstract Expressionism now, and the prices of the famous names have gone straight through the ceiling. Here’s a chap who’s been producing work of enormous quality, and his prices are starting from scratch. I mean, it seems to me it’s a dealer’s dream, and a collector’s dream.”

  I wasn’t the least bit surprised, therefore, a few days later (I’d returned to New York in the meantime) to be awakened—at 8:00 a.m.—by a phone call from Akumal telling me, “Wonderful news! The show has already sold completely out.” The review in the London Times by the redoubtabl
e John Russell Taylor had been a rave. (“An extremely good and original abstract expressionist . . . his forms have an extraordinary interior energy . . . exquisitely subtle harmonies.”) A few days afterward, however, the Shapinsky juggernaut had received a bit of a jolt when the Guardian published a scathing review by its critic, Waldemar Januszczak, not so much on Shapinsky (whose paintings apparently left the critic fairly unmoved either way) as on Akumal and Tariq Ali and Salman Rushdie, and all their hype. All three of them immediately dispatched letters to the editor, and all three letters were published two days later, along with a cartoon. “It didn’t really bother us,” Akumal told me. “I was a little surprised, the fellow being of Polish stock and all, but even the Poles once in a while . . . And, anyway, it just doubled the ratings for the documentary on Channel 4 the next evening. The folks there were very pleased. And the BBC have invited the Guardian critic and Tariq to square off in a live televised debate next Sunday, and that should be interesting.” The screening of the documentary had gone extremely well, and now Akumal was being stopped on the street, at bus stops, and so forth—especially by fellow Indians who were eager to congratulate him on his discovery.