A Trip to Montreal: The Funk of Mati Klarwein’s Surreal Paintings

I’m not sure how I feel about Montreal. Ever since I started learning French I’ve associated the language with hostility and romantic impulses for sneering antagonism. The language of love and revolution. Or perhaps just indulgent protests and overpriced espresso. In all fairness, my narrow and decidedly cliche perspective is both the fault of and refers only to Parisians.

At any rate, it was a bit of a shock to speak the language to the warm and helpful Quebecois. For instance, I stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibit on the life and work of Miles Davis (“We Want Miles“), which included a couple of his original paintings (who knew?), and the female worker at the gift shop didn’t even erupt in laughter when I screwed up the word for stamp. I had just bought a postcard of Mati Klarwein’s strange and brilliant gatefold cover of Bitches Brew (shown above), Miles Davis’ first foray into the funky side of jazz. Timbre said the museum attendant, her face wrinkled into a professorial concentration, generous and stern, the word for a stamp as well as the creator of that art. She fingered my postcard. I looked at her slightly confused. Someone who is crazy in the head. Her face finally dewrinkled and she gave me directions to the nearest post office.

I was quite impressed with Mati Klarwein’s disruptively strange work, activated both by my listening to Miles’ music and my reconfiguring fairly petrified impressions of the French language. On the cards titling Klarwein’s work — Earth Wind and Fire’s Last Day and Time, Santana’s Abraxas, Miles’ Live-Evil – they listed his middle name as Abdul. I imagined him Muslim, and it seemed to make sense in relation to the spiritual questing, psychedelic visions and black empowerment themes inherent in the bright imagery.

It turns out Klarwein was a Jewish immigrant who relocated to New York in the 1960s after taking on the life of a post-holocaust nomad throughout Europe. But I wasn’t the only one confused by Klarwein’s name: Apparently Yusef Lateef wanted to commission Klarwein for album artwork but refused after he found out the artist was white. Klarwein, who originally added the name to signify his hope for unity with his Mulim brethren (he believed all Jews should adopt a Muslim name and all Muslims a Jewish name), dropped Abdul thereafter. Still, there it was bold and proud on the cards of a very well curated exhibit.

Oh how to piece together the truth? Attempting any sort of rigorous research while using only Internet sources seems hopeless. Although, I’m not sure how much more reliable are written documents or even first-hand conversation. I commiserate with the plight of the artist compelled to the internal working of the imagination where both surrealism and fractured narratives rule. After all, Henri Rousseau never left France and still painted strange and distant lands.

Ignorance has its perks for the creative minded. From there (let’s call it a psychological state of charged naivete) we might call creation into being and let the truth permeate through its natural and utterly murky, deceptive, clouded, grossly vibrant mechanisms. That’s the spirit of the funk.