Coromo In New York, parts 1719 - 1722

1719. Some day perhaps they will realize their mistake, cover it over with burnt umber and ultramarine blue, rub it down with turpentine and return it to its rightfully aged dignity.

1720. The framer cut the edges from the canvas and glued then down to some thick cardboard being careful to use cardboard from very old boxes. After that he put them on the floor of his shop leaning against a wall, put out like cheese for mice, where his usual framing clients might come across them by accident and discover them.

1721. Aldo was one of the framer’s clients, along with a great many other small galleries who engaged in the framing trade to their great consternation, out of necessity. The small galleries that engaged in the framing trade tried to keep it as hidden as possible, only going so far as to put up a few very expensive frame samples on the wall near the desk, as if by accident, and keeping all the other necessary materials hidden until they were needed.

1722. Aldo, and the other galleries that engaged in framing longed for the day when they could dispense with the framing traffic and devote their time and energies simply to the selling of art, but somehow that day never arrived.

Richard Britell

Coromo In New York, parts 1715 - 1718

1715. The next day Tallulah threw all six Coromo’s out in the trash, and never though about them again. There are people in New York City who, every minute, are on the lookout for valuables out at the curb with the trash, some look for furniture and others look for potted plants, and still others are looking for paintings and frames with or without any pictures or glass. One such person was a picture framer by trade, and he took the six Coromo paintings and put them in the back seat of his car.

1716. He had no use for the paintings but he considered the stretchers to be worth something. He intended to pull the canvases from the stretchers, throw away the paintings, and put the stretchers into his stretcher bin. He did pull the canvas off of the stretchers but he changed his mind about the paintings. He stapled all six paintings to his workroom wall and painted them dark brown with some oil paint.

1717. He painted them entirely over with a dark burnt umber with a little ultramarine blue added to make it even blacker in tone and then he let them dry for four days. At the end of four days he soaked a rag in turpentine and rubbed as much of the brown paint from the Coromo paintings as he could get off the surface, and after that he rubbed them down with steel wool and waxed them. When he was done Coromo’s paintings looked like old antique primitive works someone might have dug out of the ground.

1718. Never underestimate the value of burn umber, ultramarine blue, turpentine and steel wool to make something look like an old and valuable work of art. A great many Rembrandts have been created out of lesser works by this exact process. Sometimes however the process is reversed. In the case of the Sistine Chapel all of the dirt and grime, which took four hundred years to accumulate, was entirely removed from the ceiling by the Japanese, making it look like a Disney cartoon instead of the grand historic work it is.

Richard Britell

Coromo In New York, parts 1711 - 1714

1711. Tallulah was described as an art dealer but that was not really accurate. She had an antique store in New York on Madison Avenue, up in the Seventies, it was a small establishment selling only French gilded furniture, gilded mirrors, gilded frames with old etchings of monuments, and the odd sentimental figure painting without any history, purchased from auctions.

1712. Nothing in her shop was newer that 1890, although she did occasionally include a dusty Ash Can school painting, or a German Expressionist etching since she was partial to Kathe Kollwitz. But like all dealers of art and antiques she wanted it understood that even though she showed only the dead, as the saying goes, she was well aware of all the interesting things going on in the world of the living.

1713. It was this desire to be seen as a person who read art journals and attended bi-annuals that motivated her to purchase the works of Coromo mistaking then for the Folk Art they resembled. She put them up in her shop in an dark corner in the back where they went unnoticed for a few weeks, and then one of her best clients noticed them and remarked about them saying, “What have you got here, a few fake Grandma Moses pieces.”

1714. Say what you want to about Outsider out, it can’t include any works by Grandma Moses. First of all she was clearly not psychotic, that is easy to see. Secondly she never spent any time in prison or mental institutions. Mentioning Grandma Moses in the same sentence with Adolph Wolfli is just like talking about Norman Rockwell in remarks about Goya. There are portraits in the works of both, but there the similarity ends.

Richard Britell

Coromo In New York, parts 1707 - 1710

1707. Aldo of Corelli Contemporary knew as he read the article that for the next ten days to two weeks galleries would be black with collectors searching the lesser known galleries looking for the works of unknown outsiders to invest in, so he put the only thing he had out in his window on Tuesday morning, and raised the price to seven thousand rather than four hundred. Besides, his rent was due. His rent was ten thousand dollars a month, and he was short again that month by seven thousand.

1708. He had been short on his rent now for three consecutive months and had been forced to sell stock to cover his expenses but that had been June, July and August, the slowest months of the year when anyone with any money was not in the city.  Now it was September and he started the new season with twenty thousand in the bank, thanks to some Koromo, a person he knew nothing about.

1709. Still in storage were the three other Coromo’s and he wanted to raise their prices to ten thousand but there was no point because the Times article was forgotten, and now collectors were looking for “Seminal Abstractions of the Forties,” works from before the advent of the New York School. 

1710. How did those Coromo paintings find there way to Aldo Corelli’s gallery? That is a long convoluted story but here are the essential points. Those six paintings were purchased for ten dollars, you recall, by Tallulah, who then subsequently sent Coromo the UPS crate full of art supplies so that he could do more paintings for her. She did not follow up on her plans however, and never returned to Coromo’s resort.

Richard Britell

Coromo in New York, parts 1703 - 1706

 1703. The name of the gallery was Corelli Contemporary. The owner’s name was Aldo Corelli. He was aware of the similarity to the famous Castelli name, but that didn’t matter, his name was Corelli, and that was that. He deliberately left the word gallery out of his sign, simply because everybody else used the word. This was one of the reasons Coromo was not able to find the listing on the Internet, and besides, Aldo did not have a web site, he considered it a matter of principle.

1704. About this business of the pictures of Coromo having been sold for seven thousand dollars, there was a simple explanation for that. For an entire year Aldo had the pictures in his storage, and in his inventory all six were priced between four hundred and eight hundred dollars. But then there was a long article in the Times about Outsider art.

1705. The article questioned the validity of the movement beginning with several examples of artists who were part of it but the author pointed out that these artists had degrees from art schools, and mentioned examples of graduates of Yale who, upon receiving their degrees, spent some time as assistants in the studios of well known outsider artists. The author used the sentence, “They received their Master’s Of Fine Art in Outsiderism.”

1706. One had to get three quarters of the way through the article before he began singing the praises of the paranoid schizophrenics like Adolph Wolfli, ending with the sentence. “The only authentic pictorial art of our time is that which was never intended to be art, never intended to be framed, sold of even looked at by anyone. The real art of our century was created only to serve as a moment by moment attempt to save the soul of the dammed, suffering the torments of a personal hell of their own creation.”

Richard Britell

Coromo In New York, parts 1699 - 1702

1699. No, Coromo wanted the Thunderbird simple because it was the only thing available at the time. But we are getting way off the topic which is a gallery in New York City selling Coromo paintings for seven thousand dollars.

1700. But how much is seven thousand dollars to a man living in New York City, a man perhaps whose dream was to have a small gallery in the Village and to sell obscure but intriguing works of art to a discriminating clientele of close friends. A man with ample funds of his own, but with a desire to pay for his expenses out of his income, rather than by selling the stock his grandfather had left him, yet again.

1701. The owner of the gallery in the Village could just have well have opened his gallery in Chelsea, where every other building houses multiple galleries, and in that setting he could have shown a succession of one person shows like all of the others, everything huge, obscure, contradictory and inexplicable. He could have located himself in So-Ho; next to the shoe stores and establishments selling only jeans in the spaces that had once been occupied only by art galleries.

1702. Fifty-Seventh Street was out of the question because he couldn’t afford the time or the parking everyday, let alone the rent, and besides he didn’t know anyone to help him maneuver the difficult real estate market up there. That left him to choose between up-town or the village. But he had loved the village since his college days. Everyone said, “But there are no real galleries down there.” “That is just the point,” he would reply, “I want to be in a small spot where there are no other galleries and selling things no one else is selling.”

Richard Britell

Coromo In New York, parts 1695 - 1698

1695. He has only one overwhelming desire, and that is to own a car, and drive it around in the Forbidden City. Yes, the desire to own a car is the most elemental and primitive of desires, embedded in out genetic structure; finding its outlet in the unsatisfactory substitute of the riding of horses for millions of years.

1696. Car possession is more basic than the need for food and clothing, and is more essential that sex and pro-creation to the species, ask any teenager abut this. So Coromo was just behaving in a natural way.

1697. “But,” you say, “If he has to have a car, wouldn’t it be more appropriate for him, as an artist, to look for something like a Simca, or a 2CV, or even an old French Renault, rather that a later model Ford Thunderbird, after the design of that car had completely gone to seed, after the original concept of a two seater sports-car had given way to a monstrosity for an entire family still vainly hoping to appeal to the head of the family’s desire to be single and living in his fraternity house in his old college.”

1698. It was a car the design of which was a disgrace to the original concept of the car. Yes, even in car design there are those like myself who love the origin of an idea, like the 1955 Thunderbird, and have no use for the 1983 model in which the first ideas can no longer be found. It is just another example of liking Picasso’s Blue period, or of preferring the Aegina marbles to the Elgin marbles.

Richard Britell