Arnold Sharrad
Two new friends on their way to New York were having a small talk in a relaxing atmosphere of the waiting area in Charles De Gaulle airport. The name of one of them was Arnold Sharrad. His companion asked him casually: “I suspect you are heading to California?” “No. Why?” “Because two Arnolds with the same initials as yours made it big there. I mean Arnold Schoenberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both from Austria.” Sharrad posed for a few seconds and responded with a faint smile: “I am not from Austria… I am from Lviv. But wait! This is funny! Does it count, if before 1918 it was Lemberg, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?”
All things considered, Arnold Sharrad settled in Brooklyn. He lived on Court Street, a busy and somewhat messy thoroughfare. It was in the middle of 70-ies, when the art scene in New York was thriving with new galleries opening, new names emerging. For a new immigrant it was an inspiring and encouraging climate. Arnold seemed to have a lot to look forward to.
Now, when he is no longer with us, looking back at what he has left behind, we realize, that he was not about “making it big”. He cared more about being big on his work regardless its applicability in the world outside of his own. With his total incompetence in social climbing, zero talent for self-promotion and lack of any other qualities needed for a standard success story, he was nevertheless a happy man at peace with himself. Everybody remembers him as always cheerful, sociable, and friendly smiling person. Once he was asked “If you could arrange the ideal way of life for you as a painter what would it be?” — “I would have gone to the desert. To fast, pray and paint.” And he was as much a hermit as he could afford. Isn’t it a paradox, a hermit in a metropolis, in the middle of the crowd? Indeed, an oxymoronically sociable hermit, ready to strike up a conversation. But he would never go out and meet people if he was feeling down. He’d rather stay in his hermitage with a view on the tarred roof, where the urban birds, still bearing St. Francis in their collective memory, were ready to hear out his sermon as they used to a few centuries ago. But Arnold’s preaching was silent and he kept it to himself. On occasions, he would commit it to paper in a form of a short verse, sort of haikus, although with no formal prosody rules observed:
Oh my god!
The sparrow, where from?
Have you bathed in flour?
Or just turned grey?
He was keen on nature, and being a truly urban dweller, loved to make outings in the woods whenever possible.
Keep me in mind, the forest
Till next spring,
And you, the feral turtle,
Forget me not.
He always thought of himself as a person endowed with an ability of being lucky. He had a knack for finding things. As if he had a metal detector built-in in his body, he would pick up a golden trinket from the sidewalk where no one else could have seen it lying there for days. There were other curious cases of finding things as if sent by a divine force to help him out in a particular situation, but I can’t disclose it here without Arnold’s permission, which I can’t obtain as yet.
Was it a gift of prescience that allowed Arnold to have predictive dreams? Back in Lviv, at the time when going to America was unimaginable, he walked under the Brooklyn Bridge in his dream. This bridge was well known in USSR thanks to the propagandist poem of Vladimir Mayakovski describing a suicidal plunge of a jobless American in the Hudson (very few people outside of NY know that it is East River under that bridge). He recalled this vision many years later, right there, walking under that ubiquitous bridge. In another of his Lviv dreams he had seen Salvador Dali drawing a sketch. One day, already in New York, when working in a painting restoration company, a new customer came in, an imposing individual in a leopard coat. He turned out to be Dali himself, who, after Arnold was introduced to him, approved his work and generously left his big sprawling autograph on Arnold’s palette.
In one of his rare interviews Sharrad said he had nothing of his life in Lviv worthy of recalling. Hearing this from a person in sound mind who didn’t show or claim any history of amnesia, we can rationally interpret this sentence as a sign of utter denial, of his unwillingness to have any association with his former geographical whereabouts. Contrary to this statement, in his conversations with friends he would share many detailed stories of his experiences in Lviv. It seemed like an indication of his understandable intention to make a clear-cut break with his former life in order to start from a new American zero. Nevertheless, Lviv, as a cultural entity, contributed a lot in the formation of Sharrad’s artistic identity. It can be confirmed by one noteworthy remark he made in a conversation: “I always felt that there was some force to watch me, evaluate my actions, thoughts, approve or disapprove them. And I began to relate my life with this force. In Lviv, there are a lot of kościółs [Polish catholic churches], and I often visited them, always feeling there a warm kind of vibration.” When he was asked if he could feel the same warmth in a synagogue (Arnold was Jewish) he said: “Yes, there is no difference: a synagogue, a catholic or an Orthodox church”. Not only religious, however ecumenical, inspiration nurtured Arnold’s artistic endeavors, the city itself was full of historical references in its architecture dating back to the Middle Ages. In Lviv we can find buildings of gothic, renaissance, baroque and the classic styles. There are works by architects and artists of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Lviv, Civitatis Lemburgensis has a unique history of being part of several different States, all of them contributed to its rich cultural make-up. The legacies of Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland are especially prominent in Lviv; demographically speaking, between the wars Lviv had been home, roughly in equal parts, for Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, each group making their impact on the cultural scene of the city. This multiethnic, multireligious background of the city couldn’t but make a serious impact on the life of a young aspiring and impressionable artist who grew up there. In spite of his claim of “not remembering” anything about Lviv, he, as an artist was actually educated there not so much in an art school, but mostly by the very walls of that city. His early drawings show cityscapes in a very expressive manner, drawn in a distorted perspective almost like in movie set of Dr. Caligari Cabinet. The local art establishment noticed these works and promptly labeled Sharrad’s work ideologically alien, being outside of socialist realism confines. As they pointed out, in all Arnold’s pictures, in addition to their inadmissible expressionism “the streets are empty, which indicates the artist’s contempt to our people, our cheerful present full of confidence in our march toward the bright communist future”. Thus, very early in his artistic career Arnold Sharrad was given a notice that he was a stranger among truly Soviet artists professing socialist realism as one and only admissible method in art. In fact, it was not Lviv he refused to recall in his careless statement, but the Soviet reality with its rigid rules and regulations in art. At that time art was not really a trade, a craft or an individual pursuit of beauty and happiness, as many people still believe it is supposed to be. In Soviet times an artist was only technically required to have certain skills in creating an artwork, but the main purpose of this profession was servicing the communist ideology; all the activities in this field were strictly supervised, controlled and guided by viciously vigilant apparatchiks, who were quick in suppression of any signs of divergence from the so called “general line”. In the very beginning of his self-awareness as a painter Sharrad realized his incompatibility in the system. And those cityscapes devoid of human presence were eloquent testimonies of his deeply felt alienation. Having no inclination to remake himself in order to fit the government-approved mold, he followed his own path adhering to western modernist tradition. When he finally decided to leave the USSR on the formal pretext of reunification with the family in Israel, the authorities, letting him go, forbade him to take his works with him on the account of their “distortion of Soviet reality resulting in the imagery that can play into the hands of our enemies”. To get around the ban Arnold painted his canvases over in realistic manner with innocuous images using gouache, only to wash it off later.
In the USSR, the government seriously valued artists. It was an exclusive sponsor of the arts. The appreciation of creative people was so high anyone of them could land in jail for an unfortunate choice of words or an image offensive to the officially authorized interpretation of the reality. One Russian poet, being disappointed by the indifference to his writing in America, expressed an odd kind of nostalgia for his former Soviet life: “How can you not be proud of yourself, feeling your importance, if just for a mere stanza in your poem you could be sent to Gulag! The strongest verification of your creative power is when the powerful ones are afraid of your words!” A curious case of a perverted thirst for fame: here in America the maximum penalty for the same “stanza” is limited just to nonpayment for it.
Arnold went across the Atlantic to find the vast territory of freedom, where nobody cares about what you care about. It’s up to you to prove the validity of your values. There is no mandatory requirement “to fit the mold”. Instead of governmental ones, there are too many molds on the market… You are welcome to go to the fitting rooms free of charge, no purchase necessary, no obligations. However, to be honest, the “mold mentality” is not an exclusively patented attribute of a totalitarian society. Arnold recalled an American gallery owner who friendly and sympathetically rejected his paintings. She said, “You have to be flamboyant or homosexual”. The “or” in this statement was the most remarkable: it showed her disbelief in Arnold’s ability to have both of these qualities. One way or another, Arnold saw all kinds of marriages of convenience totally incompatible with his nature. For him, to pledge allegiance to Communist party or convert to a different way of sexual conduct could be an equally unnatural act.
In the final analysis the choice of punishments for being what you are was between being ostracized or unnoticed. He never thought of making himself a matter of choice, he just changed the territory under his feet. And the territory was the whole Western world. The civilization on the other side of the Iron Curtain was full of unrestricted cultural phenomena, creative ideas, experimentations and unbridled individual explorations. A wide range of subject matters unavailable and/or forbidden to be touched upon back in the USSR, a whole rainbow of artistic concepts, methods and approaches open to try out. Rediscovering his Jewish heritage was one of the first preoccupations in paintings he generated in the initial years in America. It was a series of canvases, which can be summarily called “Judaica”. They are rendered in an emblematic, even heraldic compositions painted in a scrupulously, painstakingly decorative manner. Holding back his former expressionistic passion, Sharrad takes up a position of a disciplined devotee of timeless imagery of the Jewish tradition, which he adopts not as a manifestation of ghettoized exclusivity, but on the contrary, in an inclusive way, as a fundamentally universal basics of Western civilization, as a kind of retroactive right of passage into the new world he already entered. In these canvases the eternal biblical visual vocabulary are subtly interwoven with images of today’s reality: a Moses-like character holding a Torah scroll looks away, as if unaware that the thing in his hands is also an electronic keyboard. The Old Testament Susanna comes to life in flesh spotlighted with a halogen lamp in artist’s studio; the Elders are not allowed to share the spectacle.
Many artists who, finding their specific mine to explore, would persistently keep on digging in it deeper and deeper, hoping to make it eventually a gold mine, not necessarily in a pecuniary way, but as an incessant source of inspiration and spiritual support. Some of them limit themselves to one particular subject or motive for intensive study believing that the laws of the universe are contained in a drop of water are the same as in the whole ocean. It’s a case described in Kafka’s parable about a philosopher, who limited himself to exploration of spinning tops since he believed that the tiniest part of any phenomenon reveals the totality of universal design. There are many examples of great artists who created masterpieces not in spite, but by virtue of limitations: Morandi and Mondrian come to mind…
In practical sense, there is a good-naturedly cynical notion adopted as an instrumental modus operandi among artists: “stick to your schtick”; no matter how crazy silly or preposterous your “schtick” is. If you insist on it long enough you get noticed and eventually your own comfortable niche is going to be allocated to you. Some (unspecified) restrictions apply, though (under general law of “You Never Know”).
With all its gravity and seriousness, the Judaica theme never became Sharrad’s main subject, not to say “schtick”. Seeing a lot of other venues to explore, he had to move on. In order to make a living, he did a lot of restoration. Later he was fed up with this job and hated it, but the specifics and technicalities of restoration work had an inadvertent beneficial side. On the one hand, it was the deep immersion into the physical (or chemical, for that matter) element of painting as a world of its own, into the inner life of paint and interrelations of pigments and vehicles, liquids and solids; on the other hand the tedium and predetermination of results provoked the artist to seek an outlet in a contrarian direction, freeing the paint from artist’s dictate and engaging in a playful contest between his own will and aleatory behavior of his materials. In contrast to previous laboriousness and rigorous discipline, the early 80-ies in Sharrad’s work were marked with a sense of liberation; he allowed himself (not without a sense of humor) a reckless abandonment in elemental force of color itself, in random dramatics of splatter, flow and amalgamation of paint, resulting in undecipherable hieroglyphics or unpremeditated anthropomorphic or animalistic images. The action of the artist followed the famous ending of Boris Pasternak “February” poem: “The more you randomize, the higher the precision” (translation is far from precise, but not at all random). By all means, these lighthearted exercises, sometimes nothing short of brilliant (even by the game of chance), had been for him a form of creative relaxation. Concurrently, within the same time frame, Sharrad continued to produce figurative work. However, his proven technique of meticulous finish had no longer satisfied him. By the beginning of the 90-ies, when he began to feel himself more like a denizen of Brooklyn, than an alien from a town of the long dead Austro-Hungarian Empire, he started to develop a new sensitivity to his surroundings and people in the streets. In landscapes of this period he regains the expressionist immediacy of his very early, Lviv cityscapes, which were still marked with timidity of probing a new road. The Brooklyn views of the 90-ies show the confidence of uninhibited hand at ease with his palette, boldly daubing thick layers of paint to convey a sense of mature, well-seasoned urban environment. In his choice of sights he preferred the unsightly, nondescript areas, showing the buildings tilted and skewed in a Caligari-esque manner. And again, true to himself, Arnold refused to see people in these streets. It is not the inevitably faceless passers that speak of human presence—the humanity of these structures is in their rough, sometimes even squalid condition. These landscapes are permeated by a sense of an unidentified anxiety, a characteristic that will determine the tonality of his later works.
The absence of people in Sharrad’s landscape didn’t mean he was indifferent to human beings in the street. Quite the opposite, he was a keen observer of people as representatives of certain social strata, carriers of certain trends, fashions and fads. Fascinated with punk subculture prominently visible in the late 70-es and 80-ies, he painted a series of canvases, where he, avoiding any psychological connotations, presents chest-high portraits of characters whose main significance was their picturesque appearance. As the punks themselves where preoccupied with showing off their hairstyle and odd outfits to assert their radical dissimilarity with the crowd, Sharrad, in the most nonjudgmental way, depicted them reducing their similes almost diagrammatically as the exotic and quite benevolent embellishment of the urban crowd. Gradually, his interest to street people moves from this initially superficial decorative perception closer to socio-psychological observation. His characters were becoming not only socially typological figures; they had grown to be the objects of his empathy and compassion. In this period the style of his painting had been undergoing another overhaul: he started to seek the way to make the very texture of his paint, the surface of his canvas to be a palpable equivalent of the material manifestations of the human condition he saw in his characters. They are all from what the news media lingo calls underprivileged or less fortunate; the poor, the uneducated, the ones of the lower social stratum. In Sharrad’s interpretation with all his empathy to them they are not a bit glossed over. Not a pleasant picture, sometimes they are just plain ugly. But this ugliness, in an odd and poignant way, only underscores their ineradicable humanity.
One can’t help noticing the similarity of these paintings, created in the final years of the artist, with Francis Bacon’s style. With all the external resemblance, these two artists are fundamentally different, even opposite in spirit. Bacon’s characters are always threatening, menacing or in a state of total revulsion. It seems they hate the whole world outside their frames, including the viewer. Obviously, Bacon’s personal story is the key to understanding of the whole depressing essence of his painting. The fame bought at the cost of his self-inflicted martyrdom was the punishment and reward rolled in one. His oeuvre can be described, in his own words, as “a brief interlude between life and death”.
Sharrad’s late canvases are populated with completely different crowd. Hardly he would ever consider a cardinal as his sitter or make a Velasquez character into an outright bogeyman. His interest to street people has grown from painter’s esthetic curiosity to earnest societal observations and finally to a sadly poetic commentary to human condition. Very often Sharrad builds his compositions as if his characters pose in front of him being photographed. Here’s a man, looking straight into your eyes; if he is destitute, he is well trained in the art of being comfortable with misery. He looks like a retired biker, proud of his beard, smoldering cigarette butt in his mouth and a pin with cat’s face, saying, “happiness is a warm pussy”. A woman posing naked is entirely unashamed, she seems to be posing in a clinical setting, where she thinks she is the doctor’s problem, not her own; the other one is dancing alone with arms akimbo ignoring the deserted landscape with a dying sunset. The young girl in white outfit—isn’t she from a church choir? — she is happy, too, in spite of the eggplant color of her face. And she is not at all bothered having a redundant extra pair of eyes. Perhaps, all these people are redundant in their very nature, and in the same time blessed with this redundancy and irrelevance, which they know how to enjoy. The artist had chosen that fleeting moment in their lives to nominate them for immortality.
Yet another revision of his style manifested itself in a picture of a sleeping man. Apparently homeless, he is rendered in untidy and dense brushstrokes, darkly saturated coloring reminds of the last flickering of dying embers. The man’s expression is a strange mixture of oblivion and profound absorption in thought. He is at peace with himself, invulnerable to vicissitudes of this vale of tears.
The sleeping man was one of the last of Arnold Sharrad’s paintings. Sadly consistent with his character, the artist passed away on his birthday.
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