How a series of mysterious Marilyn paintings placed in the window of a closed storefront on Kingshighway sent Toby Weiss on a strange adventure
Remember, the work of art lives in the experience, the journey within the process, not in the resulting monument to be presented in a certified art-place.
—Eric Booth
Summer 2003: A vacant storefront on South Kingshighway became my clandestine art gallery. Stuck in traffic, a vibrant image caught my peripheral vision. A double take revealed a painting of Marilyn Monroe gazing from a blackened storefront, a bizarre and blazing moment.
Pedestrian investigation heightened the surrealism. Peering through the dirty glass, Marilyn’s half-lidded stare and parted lips were thick swirls of florid acrylic colors. She was alive, but there were no signs of life in the abandoned shop behind her and no signature on the painting. Even though I stood on a busy street with traffic rushing past, silence enveloped this first reel of a mystery art movie.
Over the next two years, it was a drive-by routine of admiration and anticipation as an unseen hand would pull one Marilyn from the window and replace it with another. It was a slow-motion nickelodeon, and I was the sole audience member. My enjoyment of each new painting was accompanied by a list of unanswered questions: Who is the artist? Why only Marilyn? Are they for sale? If so, how do I contact the artist? Is there a deeper significance behind all of this? Is this art or an obsession—and exactly whose obsession is it: mine or the artist’s?
Finally a name appeared on one of the paintings: KABBAZ. An Internet search brought up a painting of Janis Joplin and the artist’s website, demetriekabbaz.com. He was a St. Louis-born painter who had been drawing and painting Marilyn since the age of 10, but his world also included Jean Harlow, James Dean and other icons. His curriculum vitae began in 1972 with countless shows of paintings and photographs in New Mexico, Ohio, Illinois, Italy and California, including the mecca of his vision, Hollywood.
This list ended abruptly in 1996. Somehow an actively exhibiting, public artist had turned into an anonymous, solitary painter who didn’t seem to care whether anyone ever noticed his work resting silently in the dark. An admiring message I sent to his e-mail address went unanswered. Several months later, Marilyn disappeared from the storefront window. I felt a tangible sense of loss.
December 2005: It was hard to break the habit of glancing at that storefront every time I drove by—but just as the mystery was losing its grip, up popped an e-mail from a Kabbaz “associate.” The writer of the e-mail had been reading my blog entries about the Marilyn paintings, and would I be interested in meeting the artist? Son of a Seven Year Itch! The candle in the wind was reignited.
February 2006: The home studio of Demetrie Kabbaz was above that storefront all along. I climbed the stairs and stepped into a studio littered with Jim Morrison, Jean Harlow and Billy Idol. As I took in all the movie-star books and paraphernalia scattered across shelves and tabletops, a deep, scratchy voice called “Hello!” and in walked a slender, swarthy gentleman with dark, dancing eyes. It was Demetrie Kabbaz, and he greeted me with a big hug.
He introduced me to his clan and gave me a tour of his world. It was a Technicolor toy box of Judy Garland, Divine and Joe Dallesandro. As if in a dance number from an MGM musical, he animatedly pulled out decades’ worth of his photographs, lithographs and celebrity souvenirs. He talked of why he hightailed it out of St. Louis in the very early 1970s, how Kenneth Anger became his Los Angeles patron, the stars he’d met, the Mae West and Carmen Miranda paintings still hanging in San Francisco discothèques and, of course, Marilyn ... the constant muse, the touchstone who grounded him, goaded him and granted him artistic success.
In 1993, Kabbaz had to leave L.A. (“kicking and screaming”) to care for his ailing mother in St. Louis. This left him no time to paint; her death left him depressed, robbed of the spirit to create. Besides a few close friends, his only communication with the outside world was an occasionally airing out of his stash of Marilyn paintings in that dusty display window. She was the gentle reminder of a sleeping creativity.
A friend built a website to catalogue and sell his work, allowing Kabbaz to exhibit around the globe without ever leaving the house. His brushes and paints came out of hiding, and just after he turned 60 the Whitney Museum’s 2006 Biennial, a Chelsea design studio and I all came knocking at the same time.
Marilyn serendipity continued when Kabbaz unleashed a month-long exhibit of Monroe paintings at a Soulard gallery. The raucous opening reception took place on what would have been Marilyn’s 80th birthday. I spotted a brand-new Marilyn painting on a far wall and was entranced. It was Marilyn from her last, aborted movie, Something’s Got to Give, and she was holding in her hand a photo of what appeared to be a young Joe DiMaggio. After I declared, “That painting is mine,” a dear friend of Demetrie’s greeted me. I told her of my intent to own it, and she said what a perfect painting for me to have since that was Kabbaz’s high school graduation picture in Marilyn’s hand! My personal Kabbaz saga culminated with the artist hanging Marilyn on my wall as I jumped about like a sugared-up 3-year-old. We toasted the joyous occasion and noted how the room was suddenly alive now that she was “home.” My definition of art is anything that unlocks the guileless part of your soul and makes it sing. My Marilyn coos, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President!” every time I glance at it.
Kabbaz’s creative rebirth continues at warp speed. His paintings are currently displayed at South City Diner, World Café, I Love Lucy’s Gift and Thrift, The Ink Spot and local fashion house SKIF International, which is hosting a showing of Kabbaz’s “Great Women of the 20th Century” paintings it its lobby, where they’ll remain through 2007. And while Kabbaz is “coming out a block at a time” in St. Louis, Van Gogh’s Ear, an influential Paris art-and-poetry publication, is featuring four of his Marilyn paintings in its fifth anthology, with the added intent of procuring him a gallery exhibit of such. Marilyn serendipity, indeed.
