The Rubenstein Gallery

New York, June 1980.

"Do you want me to show it to you," Evan Rubenstein repeated
as we sipped Perrier in the glass-pyramid vaulted atrium of the
Rubenstein Gallery on east 73rd street in Manhattan, the mid-
summer late afternoon light streaming into the granite-walled
space, a sleek and stark interior belying the building’s ornate
nineteenth-century brownstone facade, the mirrorlike reflections
on the polished hood of the nearby grand piano drawing my
attention, the chamber echoing with the undulating tones of one
of Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Études, performed on a
Bechstein grand once owned by famed Schumann interpreter,
Alfred Cortot, a French pianist with a brilliant technique, as a
select crowd of moneyed visitors passes through a metal
detector at the entrance in the arched vestibule, “it’s the piece by
Scherbakov I told you about, Posthumous Variation V, painted
during the artist’s last year at his home in Hampstead, Inner
London,” Rubenstein explained, “I can show it to you,” he
added as I handed the empty Perrier bottle to a gallery attendant
and joined Rubenstein, whose eminence in the New York art
scene has formidable underpinnings, to visit the Scherbakov
exhibition, to view a collection of self-portraits painted in a
multitude of styles over many years, creating an
autobiographical narrative transmuted into art, together with
Vera, the artist’s indomitable daughter who continues to live in
London where her late father, a Russian-born naturalized
Frenchman, a respected art dealer as well as one of the great
expressionist painters of the twentieth century, who emigrated to
the British capital after the Second World War . . . Vera, an
emotionally-disengaged old maid who idealized her
incomparable father, sought to promote his vision of art as a
truth-telling enterprise that depicted, often in garish acrylic, the
interior psychic truth of the artist’s subjects as well as the
inherently disquieting imperfection of the human body, the
awkwardly warped jumble of flaccid musculature and
convoluted contours of bulging flesh of the middle-aged
grumbling mortal, with an intensely executed fealty to visual
subtext, reality reconstructed on canvas as hyperreal aesthetic
exposé, the artist convincing others, as Picasso said, “of the
truthfulness of his lies” with the clinical dispassion of the
psychoanalyst regenerating the passions and afflictions of his
pitiable patients, with an eye tuned to the inner self of the
subject, seeking the nuts and bolts of another human’s soul
while gazing at his subjects with evenly hovering attention, Vera
explaining that her father was guided by a search for the
persuasive authenticity that lies behind the mask of the model’s
corporeal presence, dense renderings of the inner life, sifting and
shifting the details of the subject’s organic deportment, giving
notice to everything while neglecting nothing, to compose a
naïvely astute representation of the Mind Inside, rejoicing in the
ideal of artist-as-truth-seeker (Scherbakov frequently
admonishing his students, Nous, les artistes, devons être des
chercheurs de verité! “We artists need to be truth seekers!”), an
unbiased reporter of temperament and character . . . and then it
came time for Vera Scherbakov together with Rubenstein, her
confidant and adviser—a self-consciously Jewish gallerist with a
note-perfect instinct for the next big thing in art—and myself to
make our way to the Scherbakov showing on the gallery’s
second level, Rubenstein leading us up the ample stairwell,
through the dimly-lit corridor, along entrances to a cluster of
exhibition rooms each with a character of its own, some
sprouting newly erected tentative walls designed to showcase
the work of up and coming artists, past workmen clumsily
poised on ladders, applying a fresh coat of deep-toned flat latex
to recent construction, with well-heeled onlookers coming and
going, ignoring the occasional disorder, here and there the scent
of fresh flowers, set in stands, swelling the air . . . and in short
order we arrived—Scherbakov at last!—Vera Scherbakov
immediately pointed to her father’s final self-portrait,
Posthumous Variation V, completed weeks before he died, a
somber meditation in large stroke, dark-hued pure tincture (red,
blue, green, brown, black), a self-revelation baring the secret
colors of his end-nearing months in London, the subject’s
gnarled hand suggesting uninterrupted and inescapable tension,
in the background a vase, filled with Black Baccara roses and
Karma Choc dahlias, complementing Scherbakov’s astonishing
head—punctuated by an unfocused duplicitous gaze—a vase-
like repository of Scherbakov’s mental torment and strained
inspiration (his imagination grown weary), near the end of his
life, an ugly portrait, conspicuously ambivalent, questioning and
unyielding, yet acutely observant, the face of a crank, a head full
of malign thoughts and thwarted sadism, and, intrigued I stared
at the portrait for a time, aware of an uncanny impression,
forbidden yet alluring . . . I had to know more about this man! . .
. Miss Scherbakov, sensing my curiosity, spoke of her father’s
years in Paris during the Second World War, his art gallery on
the rue Amelot with a studio on the top floor, her father’s
inseparable friend and business partner, Emmanuel Godin, with
whom Konstantin Scherbakov, missing his alter ego in Paris,
shared a voluminous correspondence, written in French, after
emigrating to London . . . Miss Scherbakov, aware of my work
as an art historian and intuiting a common bond, then suggested
that I undertake an annotated translation of her father’s
unpublished letters to his friend, Godin, a collection of letters
sold to her by a Parisian bookseller at a hefty price, and, on the
spot, I accepted her proposition.

London, February 1981.

“Would you like me to pour you another cup of tea?” Miss
Scherbakov asked, as we sat, on a gray winter day, in the study
of the Scherbakov home in Hampstead, London, a storeroom of
memories where her father lived out the last months of his life
after escaping from German-occupied Paris in 1943, extremely
ill, an exile, alone in an alien culture, in the very study where he
died—in the company of his daughter and a doctor vying in their
grief—looking out over a plush cluster of peonies,
rhododendron, and irises in the garden overshadowed by
autumnal foliage, Vera Scherbakov, a small, hauntedly gaunt-
faced, thoughtfully perceptive lady seated across from me in her
father’s frayed wingback chair, amid a trove of antiquities
acquired by her father over a lifetime of collecting, now told me
why she wanted to see me, her concerns raised by a letter I had
written to her just days before alerting her to a discovery I made
while working on the annotated translation of her father’s letters
written to his friend and business partner, Emmanuel Godin,
following a trip to Paris where my research into French archival
resources and inquiries made to a narrow circle of Parisian art
dealers who knew Konstantin Scherbakov revealed that his art
gallery on rue Amelot had dealings with Nazi plunder during the
World War, laundering works of art seized from Jewish owners
at the time of the Holocaust, paintings stolen as a result of the
organized Nazi looting of European countries, both Scherbakov
and Godin having extensive transactions with Nazi looting
organizations, obtaining seized Jewish-owned paintings and
selling them in their gallery to unsuspecting Parisians and
foreign buyers, and, as I spoke to my host, who was inordinately
proud of being her father’s daughter—her father's legacy laying
heavy on her shoulders—Miss Scherbakov listened, coldly
reticent, seemingly dumbfounded by my confrontation, as I
recounted her father’s long-buried, illicit commercial intercourse
with Nazi functionaries, while I, consumed by a pressing desire
to play a role in a drama of historical importance, painted a
staggering portrait of the long-buried crime, an embodiment of
evil, carried out under the banal cloak of routine trade,
unfastening lids of boxes as it were, reconfiguring a chaotic
patchwork of self-evident forensic facts . . . and then, with
growing displeasure, Miss Scherbakov replied in firm, evenly
pitched tones, politely urging me to direct my interests
elsewhere, but after a moment, in a brisk, emphatic rebuke, her
gnarled expression betraying an inescapable inner rigidity, she
charged me with a desecration of her father’s memory and held
out steadfastly in defense of Konstanin Scherbakov, a master-
hand of audacious soul secrets whose art derived from a search
for truth, a truth seeker who ironically harbored a dark secret of
his own, and, in that moment, seeing her response (and
wondering how this canny woman—a woman who knew her
father better than anyone— could not have known about his
covert trafficking in stolen art) and grasping I had stumbled
upon something that was better left alone, I knew that
proceeding further posed unforeseen risks, and, sure enough,
this was made even more apparent when, weeks later, Evan
Rubenstein, accusing me of a “certain psychopathic personality
charm,” advised Miss Scherbakov by telephone to terminate her
connections with me and insisted that the collection of her
father’s letters be destroyed.