In a small village on the foothills of the Pyrenees was born the second son of a strict, bourgeois notary. At the age of five, his parents took him to his brother’s grave, saying he was nothing more than his brother’s reincarnation. He felt traumatised and outdone.
When he fell sick at childhood, he was packed off to stay with a family on the Mediterranean coast, where he discovered modern painting, and on the sly, practiced how to boost his ego. His Catholic mother enrolled him at Christian Brother?s school. A painting by Millet hanging on the school wall became his obsession. It had a woman?s head bowed, and a man holding his hat in front of his body. The boy?s Freudian interpretation was that the man was seducing her by hiding his sexuality. This inspiration was a constant theme in his later artistic career, and became his icon.
In art college in Madrid he befriended two other equally egotistic, eccentric, out-of-the-box thinkers, one of whom metamorphosed into a famous film maker and the other an influential poet and dramatist. The notary?s son was expelled from this school because he insulted his professors. He said they were incompetent to examine him, that he knew more about art and artists than they did.
Expulsion devastated his father, whose summer home he returned to. But he continued to draw huge public attention with his mastery of painting skills, flamboyant dressing style, long hair and unusually pointed moustache. He realised and implemented deep-dream imagery on canvas. One day a few Parisian friends came visiting, among whom was a French poet and his Russian wife. Our protagonist and this woman, 11 years his elder, fell in love at first sight. Immersed in his magnetic power, she decided to stay back, impelling her husband to return to Paris alone.
For the audacity against Catholicism of taking another man?s wife, his father asked him to leave home. Totally flustered, he sought purity by shaving off his hair to become bald. But realizing his unique talent, she took control of things. She became his business manager, aside from being his muse and inspiration, and went about the task of milking his immeasurable talent for commercial gain.
Living on the shores of the azure Mediterranean waters with no steady income was difficult. So she encouraged a move to Paris, hob-nobbed with nobility and the rich and took a sophisticated place for his painting studio so nobody would know they were penniless.
One evening, the protagonist didn’t want to accompany her for a dinner invitation because he?d started a painting with a stark, wide, expanding landscape and a leafless olive tree, but he didn’t know how to finish it. He was staring at the painting while eating Camembert cheese that melted, creating a stretched chewing gum effect. For him time was like that, not rigid or deterministic. So he hung soft, limp, melting pocket watches on the olive tree branches and called it ?The Persistence of Memory.? When she returned that night, her eyes stayed riveted on the canvas, ?Nobody can ever forget this painting,? she said. ?It is much beyond its time.?
She confided in a few prosperous art lovers that the artist was a genius. To sustain the limpidness of his creativity so he could avoid becoming commercial, she told them she had a plan. Twelve chosen wealthy patrons would help unleash his imagination by financially supporting the lifestyle he chose to live. In return, they will each get a painting from him every year. The chosen patrons were convinced; the couple managed a luxurious living style even as the artist was exceptional and totally weird.
The artist?s father was outraged when he read of his son?s exhibition in Paris of a painting called “Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ” which had a provocative inscription, “Sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother’s portrait”. He demanded his son recant publicly, but the son refused. Instead in response, he handed his father a condom containing his own sperm, saying, “Take that. I owe you nothing anymore!”
The artist had bizarre and unreal ways. He believed in transparently painting without censorship of morality and conscience, and ignored doyennes who criticised him for depicting a man with excreta in his pants on a canvas. In fact, his fellow eccentric intellectuals at their 42 rue Fontaine, Paris headquarters put him on trial and expelled him from their society. ?I am too intelligent to be a good painter,? he said. ?Painters are stupid. Really talented creative artists like Raphael and Mozart died very early. I prefer to live longer and be a bad painter.?
Before the Second World War started, he did not, unlike his other artistic compatriots, condemn Hitler. He refused to do so by saying he was apolitical. He went off to the US where his paintings caused a sensation, and Americans lapped up his eccentricities and strange antics. When the wealthy feted him, he showed up wearing a glass case on his chest, which contained a brassiere. He also took part in Hollywood and was sought after by advertisers to endorse different products like chocolates. He was extremely particular about his creations. When a retail design that he did was changed in implementation, he smashed the window of the shop.
The roaring success of several art exhibitions in the US and Europe made him stand apart from most other artists who never became famous in their own lifetimes. At a lecture in London he wore a deep-sea diving suit and helmet. He had arrived carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds, and had to have the helmet unscrewed as he gasped for breath. He commented, “I just wanted to show that I was ‘plunging deeply’ into the human mind.”
What does this story sound like? I?ve taken the liberty to make you, dear reader, find out how you?d enjoy this, or perhaps feel some discomfiture, were this story fiction, fantasy or real. Tell me!
?Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top managements. Reach him at http://www.shininguniverse.com