Art stories

A Painter and an Art Critic

Once I knew a celebrated painter who had a hole in his head. Even from a distance one could see that the hole was roughly the width and depth of a rifle cartridge. Although nobody ever proved it, some spiteful people put about that the hole got bigger from year to year. I might mention, by the way, that there was also an art critic who, like the painter, also had a hole in his head, in very the same place and have about the same size. Whenever the two of them met, their holes would, for no apparent reason, as if responding to some secret order and at the same time, start to whistle all by themselves. The painter would prick up his ears, the art critic likewise, and the two of them would hold hands and derive endless pleasure from listening to the whistling of their holes.

A True Story That In Particular Circumstances Could Boost Sales of Sunglasses

A fattened, honest and personable Yorkshire hog decided to repress his prejudices with a decisive move of his will, to restrain his merry nature and realise the impossible; the hog intended to become a policeman.

However, considering his noble English pedigree but also very conspicuous characteristics of his swinish shape, the chances that he will become a servant of the law were movingly miserable.  Pig, like pig, a gifted specimen of an honoured race, was not capable of mastering the skill of the bipedal walk nor able to procure Italian sunglasses.

Perhaps it will sound insane, or at least incredible, if I say that I personally know a policeman whose daydream is to simply cast away his impersonal police uniform one day, when his desolate and monotonous life becomes unbearable - and become an obnoxious pig. Furthermore, in secrecy, far from the eyes of malicious crowd, with the persistence and zeal of unrestrained fanatic, he is learning to grunt the nuances of the swinish dialects. He already self-confidently walks on all fours, easily gobbles gallons of bland slops, burrows wherever he can, and mounts another's sows without any inhibition and merrily wallows in stinking mire.

But, similar to the story of the Yorkshire hog, neither he is able to spare some paltry sums from his pay and buy him ordinary sunglasses. Whenever he would meet another policeman, a cop hiding behind dark sunglasses, the murky mirror of his soul - his swinish eyes - he would bashfully and sadly bow his head, harden his dispirited heart, ever more decided in his intention to spit on senseless human scruples and to acquire, at any price, the miraculous sunglasses which open the narrow gates of the kingdom of true swinish liberties.

* * *

Adam Bèlàne, brother of Shirley Bèlàne, starting on a long and uncertain journey, asked his good friend to take care of his crocodile until he returned from his travels.

After several years full of trials and self-denial, having a crocodile in the house became unbearable for Bèlàne's friend. One night, while out on his usual walk, he threw the poor animal down a drain.

Moral: Never trust and art critic!

Bald Truth

Only a satiated man can write a good essay on hunger. Those who think that a satiated man cannot discuss depths he has not seen and touched with his own fingers – are wrong. The starved exaggerate. Out of hunger, that lean weasel, they make a monster, a Leviathan.

Regardless of its enormous success and historically proven greatness, hunger is not a competent expert. It is an amateur and a bungler. It acts as the painter of Holy Heart, as a jack-of-all-trades who does not decide, does not choose, does not compare, does not connect on the basis of affinity and does not behave systematically. Hunger is more of an astrologer that an astronomer. This must be taken into account as the justification when demolishing the enrolled opinions on hunger. As any amateur, hunger is enigmatically subjective: holes in education, wide and disordered knowledge are the key to this pled manner – anything and everything. It is an eclectic who disregards time and space. Hunger emphasizes pain, bodily experience of its own presence. Expressionism, accident, bares fervor, unconstructive striving confuses the picture of real state of things.

Spiritual hunger, hunger for the knowledge of hunger, is bullshit - a sloppy eclogue. You push your nose into another’s broth and proclaim it the philosophical curiosity, and impetus of reflective gluttony, the primeval wonderment. I’d smack such types upon the head with a fist and let them then wonder in front of their plate, turn Logos around in their own mashed potatoes. Those are pudding existentialists, the drawing room scum. There is no professional starveling. No educated glutton.

There is no chair for the advancement of hunger. Not to speak about immortal starveling, a member of the Academy, even a corresponding member. Where are veterans of hunger? Who has ever erected a monument to the unknown glutton? Who has ever met a man for whom hunger is a profession or a conviction? Who made a career out of his own hunger, made a fortune, acquired prestige, people’s trust, a pile of money or a Senate seat? Van Gogh? Modigliani? Who has ever heard of a hungry king, a queen emaciated form hunger, or at least a starving President of the Republic? No one. Naturally!

Take Wimpy as an example. He is a classical figure: An ancient problem. The glutton is an insignificant, marginal creature, an anti-hero.

Movies are full of starving people. They are mostly extras, small change in mass scenes. Occasionally a bit player appears; a good supporting part – very rarely. The protagonist cannot be eternally hungry. At the beginning he is hungry, very hungry, but at the end he stuffs himself. Count Monte Cristo was starving, hunger tortured him like God tormented Job, but at the end he was amply repaid. Film is an invented thing, light, entertainment, popcorn, celluloid strip, a gesture, and an illusion. It is sheer nonsense to make out of a film or a fat novel – a moral landmark, a lighthouse, the national program or a counseling center.

Take for example my suffering, my case: yesterday I gorged myself on raw salmon. Exactly: I gorged myself! Color: bloody peach. The background: a silver tray, muted glimmer of casually maintained silverware. My principle is that silverware must not glisten, shine or glitter like fair-place tin. A bourgeois loves glitter, vulgar glamour, glow of the new. A noble man always prefers dark tones. Rubens. Caravaggio.

With my tiny teeth I crunched toast, letting crumbs fall on the carpet, while soft flesh of noble fish was melting in my mouth. Toast pricks and fish cools. I was drinking wine from long-stemmed glasses. Real wine, not champagne. Champagne is for the French – foamy sweet plonk for the mob. And bottles: blue, green, brown. Like juicy girls. You’re overcome with desire to grab one of these imported beauties and dance ecstatically a passionate tango with her.

I was feeding turkey drumsticks to the cats and, as usually, I loll about, sprawl, get bored and stare at TV. Time passes slowly, it does not hurry, it crawls like a snail, it snoozes. Around 8 p.m., in twilight, when the heat has relented a bit, an idiot, a retarded person, began to persuade me from the screen, that all I am just telling you is an ordinary lie. I turn around, glance at the overflowing table, I touch my golden fork, I rub my eyes and think: a cretin, a real true cretin, a person suffering from cretinism. A morose sufferer from ulcer in a tie, gray jacket, sour-hot serious, an overblown potbelly. This guy with conspicuously luxuriant wig was persistently repeating I feed myself badly. He expertly prattled that I am starving, that my teeth are rotting and loose due to starvation, that my face is sallow because of malnutrition, that I collect stale bread and dirty waste from garbage cans, that I am a carrier of diseases, a rag, a contagion, a future sufferer from typhus, and hundred similar scurvy stupidities on that subject. I gape at TV, I stare at that monkish bust, I hold my hand on the mouth, and I really do not know what to say. My God, who is this half-man? A nutritionist, a nationalist, a supporter of laissez-faire, a philosopher, a cosmopolite, an intellectual, a paid federalist, a political worm or an idle loudmouth? What will people say? Is this marvelous salmon a fruit of my imagination? Am I a naive victim of my own wayward imagination? Are these bottles, these green bottles full of first class wine, these glittering innocents – an illusion? A play of light shadow and? An invented tableau vivant! Where did I get all this wine? Where did I procure this noble grappa – the immaculate honor of Tuscan hills? I am neither a politician nor a smuggler. I am not a black marketer. I got no one to fawn, to stand at hind legs in from of me and to give me gifts of stolen goods. Are the tears of Jesus a lie? And the sauce? And quail pate? And Jordanian lamb? And Cato’s lobster? The sauce is a mirage? Fish – glue? A Space Odyssey? An illusion, a political frame-up, a Potemkin village, London Zoo? Newspaper and saw-dust spread with mayonnaise? And turkey? What about turkey? Is it also non-existent? It can’t be papier mache, Japanese plastic, Pop Art, Oldenburg, Gestalt. I reach with my hand to tear a roasted wing, and in the place of the turkey, my golden turkey on juicy baked sauerkraut, there stand an old, beaten pot full of yellowish sticky macaroni. Blue color, white polka dots, burnt bottom broken glaze. “Die Milch maht’s”, as famous late Schiller would say! Fiddle-sticks!

No, it’s not true. I know well what is truth and what are political propaganda, deceit, lies, drivel and dirty Balkan tricks.

According to him, it appears even my kitties remained hungry. I will never swallow that story.

However, if all this be so, and it isn’t, why does he wear a wig? If he really cares for truth and not aesthetics, if he is such a truth-lover, why doesn’t he show his big bald head? Why does he hide it? Why doesn’t he show his – so to say – bald truth?

Strindberg

This morning I met Strindberg at the Moscow Hotel. I met great and unhappy Strindberg.

I see him pacing hastily, weaving through the crowd; he stares at me, evidently wishing to see me. I raise my hand discretely, letting him know I had recognized him; I stop waiting for him to approach.

Strindberg fixes his tie, approaches, while I silently, just by a gesture, propose that we step aside, in the shadow, by a pharmacy shopwindow. In the window languishes a plaster Hygea, a broken Aesculapius and their white snakes eke their miserable life. Hygea studies her ragged chiton, and Aesculapius, a wise man with chalky eyes, a doctor without eye pupils, leaning on his knobby rod, watches the world with indifference. There are no medicines in the pharmacy, but it does not tarnish their ancient fame.

The great playwright, the brilliant August Strindberg extends his hand, saying:

Good morning, Mr. Strindberg, what are you doing in Belgrade? We are in the war, and you strut here like a real peacock.

I grasp his sweaty hand, with an indefinite grimace I welcome those crazy words but I do not know how to react.

Poor guy imagines I am Strindberg. He thinks now he has met famous Strindberg. He surely imagines he is shaking hands with a genius. I am convinced he is already spinning a witty anecdote about our encounter. My God, what I am to say? How to start the conversation when he knows about himself ten times more than any literary critic? He won’t be so mad to ask me about my health. I can see he is cautious. He pretends he does not pity me, as if all this was nothing, he doesn’t know... but his eyes, his warm writer’s eyes are saying much. Still, it would be tasteless to repeat here, in front of all these people, stale historical facts proving that I am not Strindberg and hat Harriet is not my wife. Perhaps he wants just that? Maybe he is tempting my shamelessness? If it is so, if I am up to neck in shit, and chance assigns me Strindberg’s fate, I’ll do my best that this encounter passes in pleasant charter, more like an artist’s talk with his own imagination, without Nordic tempests and perfidious rocks.

What will happen in his grieving soul, if I snap bluntly that he is Strindberg, a playwright, a jewel of European art, and anarchist, an alchemist, a poet, and that, to be truthful, that legend, that writer, a Swede, a man of the theatre, the spirit of the North, had passed away already in that distant May of 1912.

How will he act if he discovers I am no Strindberg? He will pop his astounded eyes when he finds out I am Rasa Todosijevic, a local great man, the South Slav Homer. Will he cry once he comprehends that all this is a mix-up and that it is blasphemous to make the circus out of another’s personality? My only wish is that he doesn’t whine in the street. Let this prominent citizen of Stockholm slobber in Paris, in London; let him parade his ass wherever he likes, but letting him leave me alone.

A foolish idea comes to my mind that our encounter is a unique example of double incarnation. Something like a double metempsychosis form a fundamentally split personality. After long quarrels and many unpleasant truths, each soul went its own way, among other people. I am deeply convinced that I myself was Strindberg, the writer! I am the brilliance of his genial profile: a melancholy dreamer, an anarchist and a womanizer. And this creature, this sweaty hand, those puffy fingers blathering nonsense, boring my ears, all that is doctor August, he is that castrated Strindberg, a house tutor and the state pen-pusher. You see, he has come again to slander me, to wave his arms and insist on some cosmic Justice.

I thought: it would be best to take him to the restaurant, here, at “Moscow”. We’ll sit at a small table, order beer; we’ll enjoy in the sun and talk about politics. Once he calms down and pulls himself together, and after he had a few drinks and relaxed, I’ll show him my verses, the new cantos, and by the way, jokingly, I’ll hit him with truth, right between eyes.

I’ll say: August, enough of that fooling around! You’re an ordinary Scandinavian toady, but also a big fool if you expect any money from me!

Perhaps Strindberg will grasp that my poems are not his literature, his elan, his style and problematic. The scoundrel will understand that my art belongs to the corpus of Serbian poetry and not to the Scandinavian literary tradition.

The Rabbit

Once upon a time, long ago, a big white rabbit lived on the Moon. He was the only creature of flesh and blood to live comfortably on the Moon and the only rabbit for which the lovely Luna was his native land, his home and pride, his permanent address, or, as people is wont to say, his existential milieu. He had three legs but he didn't feel like a rabbit that was short of a paw. Had he been able, by some chance, to meet another rabbit, say a rabbit with four legs, he would surely have thought he was looking at an apparition, at a cleverly devised ruse, at what was certainly an abnormal rabbit, a rabbit with four legs, obviously invented for the purpose of shaking his strong belief in three-legged ideals.

Two Historical Examples

I

Publius Terentius Afar, much better known as a comediographer than as a successful Roman banker, often imagined it would be nice if he could one day become an ox. In order to at least approach that ideal. Terentius rearranged his villa, that magnificent mansion next to Scipio’s gardens, into stables. Good Terentius bought many cows and a lot of oxen; the one of them, who seemed the wisest, he took for his companion and advisor.

To his clients, those shrewd toadies, Terentius ordered to address himself exclusively as a Roman ox. The clients like clients, being plebeians without prejudices, endlessly told the ox their personal troubles, whined for money, tried to persuade his genius of the advantages of a small loan or into the brilliant outcome of this or that business undertaking, while he would, with his ox’essence, instead of listening to their confessions, moot how could he with his too short tail manage to drive away several truly annoying flies.

II

In the crazy autumn fantasies of a hairy character, who for years sat in “Manege” restaurant drinking cold mixture of soda water and wine, grew fanciful idea he was the great German rhapsod and commander, Adolf Hitler. The guy was convinced that it will be enough that he should buy an Argentinean passport, a green bra, six old medals, sketchbook No. 3, a kilo of spicy sausages, half a loaf, a map of Europe, a military uniform and a largish pistol and then, with these Thalia’s props, awake people from their slumber and persuade them of some simple facts: that he is Adolf Hitler, “Manege” – Wolf Schanze, Belgrade – Berlin, and his, paramour, stunted and eternally soused Nataly – Eva Braun.

He would sit in “Manege”, stare at the map, whistle “Marseillaise”, pushing small flags into that colored paper, drink spritzers, gobble sausages, waiting for the moment when trumpets would blast, arms rattle, when his glum generals will march in or when some stupid leftist, a street jerk would approach and to whom he will offer historical opportunity to kill half a restaurant in an attempt to assassinate the beloved Führer.

***

A man, let us call him X; a rather short, stout bon vivant, neither prophet nor philosopher, still less a sentimental romantic, more a womanizer, gourmet and braggart, decided to buy a coat. He went to a shop and chose a coat according to his build, taste and wallet. And the coat was just like any other coat, straight from the shop: brand new. X wore his brand new coat for a good fifteen years. One day, as he was walking down the Champs Elysees, X realized that his coat was getting pretty threadbare. The lapels had become really too greasy, the pockets sagged, not to mention the frayed cuffs and missing buttons.

“If I go on wearing this coat”, thought X, “people will get the impression that I am not doing too well.” Horrified by the realization that he might appear poorer that he in fact was, he decided to rid himself of the old rag without delay. Thus the coat of a stout little bon vivant ended up sadly, very sadly, in a dustbin.

Moral: A healthy mind in a healthy body.

Churchill

If we assume there was no emperor Franz Joseph I, no two world wars and no arrivism of the communist leaders – the disease that transforms the powerful into shameless imitators of their dethroned predecessors – my friend Churchill would never have got that name.

As the ninth child in a proletarian family – father was a bootblack, mother, naturally, a housewife – poor thing by his birth acquired the attractive and intangible privilege that Josip Broz, the master of the Second Yugoslavia, be his godfather, to give him – as customs dictate – some valuable small gift and christen him as he wishes. For a child of the street bootblack such god fatherhood was not just a whim of willful fate, but also a sure passkey to the unknown landscapes of the future.

After a touching family celebration and a week of expectation – until the comrades in the Marshalcy arrange everything properly – the infant was finally granted the honor to be named; instead of a noble sign it got a cheap surrogate concocted out of bad taste, mockery and the surname of the British military commander, the statesman and the future Nobel Prize winner – sir Winston Churchill.

It will remain secret if this apparently senseless alchemical procedure, this transformation of an English surname into a homeless name, was influenced by the then reigning political circumstances, possibly by primaeval dialectics of the patrimonial concept of power, by holy egoism or by vindictive imitation of a long forgotten and mischievous goat, a Zagorje count, a great admirer of Franz Joseph.

Be it as it may, if in the sea of fatal causes and even more fatal consequences I have not recalled that small lively Gypsy, the Belgrade Churchill, a small grubby street urchin who would, after each frustrated thief’s undertaking, noisily, and not without certain effect, time and again appeal to the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia, and loudly threaten with that eminent godfatherhood, almost fatherhood, I really would not jump into murky waters of metaphysics nor would this pretentious story, truly written too late, in the twilight, exist at all.

The Story of Lemonade

(Variation on Machiavelli’s Theme)

The knack or art of making lemonade lies in creating a tasty mixture of lemon, water and sugar. Since you can’t have good lemonade if you haven’t got either lemons or sugar, I shall talk only about water.

The water you use to make lemonade is either your own water, water form your well or water borrowed from a neighbor.

I advise that you use your own water: life teaches us that a neighbor’s water can be dangerous. For instance, if your neighbor’s old tap breaks down, if his water-pipe bursts, if the chill of winter or if the radio reports of a pending water shortage, you can be sure your neighbor will stock his water in pots, in old jars, in beer bottles, in hygienically dubious pails and, not infrequently, in dirty chamber pots. If this does happen, that your lemonade, juicy lemons and English sugar notwithstanding, is bound to carry at least a whiff of his urine.

A host expecting a guest from abroad and making lemonade with the said neighbor’s water can never be certain how it will taste.

So, when discussing the art of making lemonade, it is advisable to say a few words about the neighbor.

If your neighbor is a man who stops at nothing to succeed in life, if he is insincere, a nitpicker, double-faced and prone to deceit, if he likes to argue, to steal flower-pots from the building, to beat his wife, to lie, to drink immoderately and then, using an alias, to act as an informer in return for some paltry perks, in short, if he works for the police out of spite or just pure malice, I advise you to stay away from the scum and not to borrow even ordinary water from him.

If, because of all this, your neighbor gets angry at you and takes some blunt object – a butcher’s knife, say, or the leg of the chair – to assault your foreign guest, the best thing for a tasty lemonade is to go to your nearest food store or, if you’ve got a gun handy, to simply do away with the lout right there and then.

My name is Pablo Picasso

(Motifs from Phaidon)

My name is Pablo Picasso. I am a painter, but many claim that I am also a gifted draftsman. The Picasso is after my mother. I know, there are not many Picassos in the Balkans. In Belgrade? I doubt it, I am not certain, I wouldn't know. There may be some Pikasovitchs or Pikasitchs, yes, but the surname Picasso is a rarity. The sly sniggering about my personality leaves me indifferent. I am proud of my name. It is true that I am not of Spanish origin. That is a complete misconception. I am one hundred percent Slav, South Slav if you insist on knowing the details. You say that my mother's maiden name was Ruzhitch and my father was Pikachevitch?! Well, that's a family matter. Does it lessen my greatness, hombre? No, on the contrary!