Me and Kaminski Read Online Free PDF Page A

the edge of the bath. There was a lot I needed to talk to him about. When did he learn about his eye disease? Why didn’t the marriage hold up? What had happened down in the mine? I had other people’s opinions on tape, but I needed quotes from him himself, things he hadn’t yet said to anyone. My book should not come out before his death and not too long afterward either, for a short time it would be at the center of all attention. I’d be invited to go on TV, I would talk about him and at the bottom of the screen it would show my name and
biographer of Kaminski.
This would get me a job with one of the big art magazines.
    The book was now getting quite wet. I skipped over the rest of the
Reflections
and leafed to the smaller oil and tempera paintings of the next decade. He had lived alone again, Dominik Silva gave him money regularly, sometimes he sold a few paintings. His palette brightened, his line got crisper. Pushing to the very boundaries of the recognizable, he painted abstract landscapes, cityscapes, scenes of busy streets that dissolved into a viscous mist. A man walked along, pulling his own dissolving contours behind him, mountains were swallowed up in a pulp of clouds, a tower seemed to turn transparent under the fierce pressure of the background; you struggled in vain to see it clearly, but what had been a window a moment ago turned out to be a trick of the light, what had looked like artfully decorated stonework turned out to be a strangely shaped cloud, and the longer you looked, the less of the tower you found. “It’s quite simple,” said Kaminski in his first interview, “and damned difficult. Basically I’m going blind. That’s what I paint. And that’s all.”
    I leaned my head against the tiled wall and balanced the book on my chest.
Chromatic Light at Evening, Magdalena Daydreaming at Prayer,
and above all
Thoughts of a Sleepy Walker,
after Rieming’s most famous poem: an almost imperceptible human figure, wandering through a pewter-gray darkness. The
Walker,
apparently solely on the basis of Rieming’s poem, was included in an exhibition on the Surrealists, where by chance it caught the eye of Claes Oldenburg. Two years later Oldenburg arranged for one of Kaminski’s weakest works,
The Interrogation of St. Thomas,
to be shown in a Pop Art show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The title was expanded to include the tagline
painted by a blind man,
and the picture was hung next to a photo of Kaminski in dark glasses. When he was told about this, he got so angry that he took to his bed and ran a fever for two weeks. When he was able to get up again, he was famous.
    I stretched out both arms cautiously and shook first my right hand, then the left; the book was quite heavy. Looking through the open door, my eyes fell on the picture of the old farmer. He was holding a scythe in his hands, looking at it proudly. I liked the thing. Actually, I liked it better than the pictures I had to write about every day.
    Because of the rumors about his blindness, Kaminski’s paintings suddenly went all around the world. And as his protests that he could still see gradually gained credence, it was too late. No way back. The Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective, his prices shot up into the stratosphere, photos showed him with his fourteen-year- old daughter, a really pretty girl back then, at openings in New York, Montreal, and Paris. But his eyes were getting steadily worse. He bought a house in the Alps and disappeared from view.
    Six years later Bogovic organized Kaminski’s last show in Paris. Twelve large-format paintings, once again in tempera. Almost all bright colors, yellow and light blue, a stinging green, transparent beiges; streams of color that tangled and merged into one another, yet, when you stepped back or narrowed your eyes, suddenly were sheltering wide landscapes: hills, trees, fresh grass under summer rain, a pale sun that dissolved the clouds into a milky haze. I leafed more