Micah Carpentier

Fantasma Solitario Award 1970
N.E.P. Foundation Fellowship 1969
The Stan Getz Curator's Citation 1966
Hispanic Society 1965
Epidermis Llorando New Artist of the Year 1954

Though dead for the past 30 years, the work of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier remains fresh, provocative, unusual and sublime. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1924 to a Nigerian mother and a Russian Jewish father, Carpentier spent his early childhood loitering around the lively literary salon of his aunt, the writer Yvette Martinez. Before he was a teenager, he had already met the likes of Neruda, Rilke, Svevo and Joyce. Educated at the University of Turin, Carpentier returned to Cuba before the outbreak of World War II and settled in Havana. Jailed in the sixties after curating the now famous “After Dada” exhibition at the State Theatre for the Performing Arts, Carpentier moved to New York in 1968, having no stomach for the politics of dissidence. An aesthete and master draghtsman, his was a world of sensuality and delight. His luminous color, strong vivid line and his oddly peripatetic imagination all conspire to make Carpentier one of the most unclassifiable of our 20th Century masters.

Wrongfully accused of being overly facile,libeled as hollow and impossibly vain, Carpentier destroyed warehouses of work with the appointed sureness of a monarch. He would violently defenestrate huge unfinished canvases and litter his studio with the crumpled pulp of rejected works on paper. In the spring of 1960, enraged and defeated, Carpentier had an epiphany.

The work he destroyed had a hideous form of majesty. In their disheveled state they retained an impossible dignity. Through injury his work was finally redeemed.

He developed a hunger for detritus. He fastened on decay like a zealot. To him, the brackish, the orphaned and the shabby were suddenly the splendid and the serious. Elated that he had finally learned to lure junk to perfection, he began work on his series of bags that to this day have a strange and enduring beauty.