Camelia
82, Sofia, Bulgaria
It had been raining all day in Sofia when I rushed into the grey concrete building on Vasil Levski boulevard. It was difficult under these circumstances for the apartment to be “Sunny”, like the ad promised, but my first thoughts when Stanislava opened the door were “dry” and “warm”.
The tiny hallway was a buffer between the inhospitable outside and cosy inside, filled with wet umbrellas, muddy boots and winter coats. She guided us through the narrow corridors and conflicting doors, and turned the lights on in our room. The bottom half of the eggshell walls was covered with beaded wooden wainscoting panels, which matched the planks of the parquet. Two large oak closets painted in shades of red and yellow brought the sun where there barely was daylight. Everywhere, framed colorful paintings, drawings, sketches, posters and scattered figurines told a story of tormented artists, abstract geniuses and past childhood.
Near the door, two bookshelves stacked on top of each other went almost up to the ceiling and bent under the weight of more than four hundred books. Most of the titles on the spines were in Cyrillic but a few words stood out to me. La Chute by Camus, Rhinocéros by Ionesco, Poésies by Paul Verlaine, as well as a dictionary of French slang were scattered across classics of Bulgarian and Russian literature. “Does someone in the house speak French?” I asked Stanislava in French. “Yes,” she replied with a smile in a sigh of relief, “everyone.”
She took me back through the apartment, narrow corridors and conflicting doors to a tiny kitchen. At the even tinier table, a frail old lady was bent over her plate, finishing a bowl of rice, vegetables and fried egg. “My mum broke her leg a few weeks ago. She’s staying with us until she recovers”.
Camellia was eighty-two years old and spoke a French from another era. She was wearing baggy light checked pants, a black wide woolen sweater and a thick red and black striped scarf tied around her neck. A fringe that had grown too long covered her eyes. Her wide and generous smile revealed missing teeth and made it difficult for her to keep her eyes open when she laughed.
She owned an art gallery downtown — Art 36 — that invited me to visit. I showed her the pin on my phone’s map to confirm the address. “Who put this there?” she asked, surprised.
Camellia was sitting on her pink satin chair, to the left of a small oak desk, against the wall facing the single glass door of the art gallery. Next to her, a fat white and brown cat was sleeping on a pile of papers, next to a plate of cookies and a red telephone. The room was a four by four meters low ceiling basement, accessed through the gate and side alley of an ordinary brown grey building near Knyazheska Garden. A small window of dusty glass and rusty blue frame was the only source of daylight. Spots shined a warm white light on the paintings of Boris Simeonov, a fourteen years old boy from Sofia. “I opened this gallery in 1990,” Camellia remembered, ”It was the first private gallery in Bulgaria.”
By the door, two boards listed hundreds of names of artists that had organised exhibitions at the gallery. I felt like I was at ground-zero for post-Communist Bulgarian art.
The second name was Genko Genkov. “My husband and I were driving through the countryside in our red Simca, with Stanislava in the back seat, when we saw a man standing outside by a pile of paint tubes.” Genkov’s painting was the first they bought. They were drawn to the strength, colors, and large amount of paint he poured into his expressive landscapes. A close friendship quickly grew between the couple and the strange man, who was an opponent of the communist regime, and would always visit them to recover from his hospital visits. When too vocal or rebellious, the authorities would force him into Sofia’s psychiatric ward for days of torture with electric shocks. “Quickly, friends and relatives rushed to get his paintings,” Camellia remembered. “One day, he came to the gallery and told me ‘you know Camellia, I am a man of great fame and wealth, and you have many female friends. Would you introduce me?’ But he was broke, a drunk and lived like a bum. He wasn’t a very practical man.” Genkov was very allergic to paint and eventually died painting, alone, a true romantic hero.
During the twenty years before the gallery opened, Camellia went on collecting hundreds of paintings from Bulgarian artists, put on every available inch of wall, under beds and in basements, making her and her husband respected collectors in the underground art scene.
Svetlin Rusev, “the master of them all”, was another name Camellia mentioned often. He was a member of the communist party who managed to live comfortably from his art and became a patron to the art students of the nearby university. “But his art wasn’t socialist,” Camellia insisted. Rusev used to paint giant, expressive paintings, that were too large for the tiny gallery. So, like many others, he painted collections specially for her basement. In the late nineties, invited by Camellia, he visited one of Genkov’s exhibitions and bought one of his paintings. She was proud of bringing them together. “The tortured opponent and the party member talked about art,” she smiled.
There used to be long wait times for artists who wanted to exhibit at her gallery. But not anymore. The next painter booked was calling her in the middle of the night to read poems to her. He, too, was a drunk. “He’s the third name on the list,” she said pointing at one of the two boards by the door, “all the others are dead now”.
Camellia had been at the center of the Bulgarian art scene for fifty years and her world was one of colors, paintings, unknown heroes and political dissidents. Now, surrounded by the paintings of a fourteen-year-old boy, she repeated the names of Genkov, Rusev, Kazakov and Kirov out loud in incantations to keep their memory alive. “Rusev’s large gallery didn’t survive his death,” she muttered, “but today, it is fashionable to have a gallery”.
“She and the gallery are legends!” Stanislava added.
Her grandson was thinking about taking over, to keep her name and the gallery alive. But for now, he lived in Singapore.
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