Invitation to Art; 27; Leonard Baskin

The author Leonard Bersken was preoccupied with one main theme, with man and man. In Bersken's work, man, as in the great tradition of European art, is still king. But in the 20th century, he is really a king without a kingdom, so he is forced to look into the very source of life with enemies at war to find whatever affirmation can and must be made. In Bersken's work, the human body degraded and suffering becomes the image of this search. In 1952, he did this woodcut and called it Hydrogen Man. For in Bersken's view of the world, man is constantly threatened with extinction. And now this is a terribly-beformed mutant, a sort of signpost to a road which we must all realize humanity may travel.

This figure has its own internal logic in an anatomy that is a travesty of textbook anatomy. He is interested in anatomy and in the articulation and structure of all forms of life is often the starting point for the brilliantly-exploited formal aspects of the woodcut. Now here are the lines of a tension of sinew. There is a visceral sense that occurs in his art. The other pearl to this vision is the dream of peace. Now here is the dove from a woodcut that has since become a classic. It's called Man of Peace. It was also done in 1952. Where the bird is dead and the man is isolated behind barbed wire, the tensions are still evident in the naked anatomy of the figure. But it's a rare moment of relative calm in his work with hints of a lyricism which we rarely see allowed freeway. The barbed wire is full of brilliant invention that's barbed and its pointed shapes are

certain horizontal lines like the shapes of sounds, like notes of a harsh and dissonant music that is yet to sort of strangle lyricism. Boards appear again and again in Leonard Baskin's work and they are often terrible and hostile and are nearly always seen in relation to man. In Frightenburg this dog, the headless wheeling shape is a projection of terror and very often birds seem to be symbols of environmental forces which attack his lonely and isolated figures. This preoccupation with birds is one of Baskin's private myths which seems to have an archetype of many cultures. Leonard Baskin's men and they stand alone and their aloneness is both touching and terrible. The product perhaps is an extremely sensitive lyricism which is always qualified by a sort

of cosmic awareness of man's position and that occasionally becomes a savage pessimism. This position has I think something of paradox in it because there's a sense of brotherhood with the anonymous man, every man, and yet a preoccupation with the men who have dared to be great at whose talents have made them lonely or rejected. This is his statue of Thomas Ackin, one of the lonely giants of American art that combines extreme sensitivity again with enormous book or strength. The men who appeared in Leonard Baskin's art are Mariah, Jean Debz, John Brown, and in connection with John Brown, Baskin's mentioned this saint-like ability to slaughter. Now again, this is a union of contradictions. Another man who fascinates him is, as one might expect, William Blake, shown here in

this moving head. As with Blake, the metaphysical facts, they also obsess, Baskin, death, the dream of Utopia, heaven and hell, and the point where the natural and the supernatural meet, thus angels, who are here, the transcendent becomes wonderfully miraculously matter of fact. There is in this and in many of the rather static later carvings, a hint of that redemption to which Baskin seems to be being his art. But the metaphysical intensity resulting from an acute realization of spiritual truth is also open to him as in this tender and haunted wooden graving of Tobias and the angel. Now the resemblance to Blake seems to stem from a similar sense of the individual. The individual who is beset by cosmic forces, social forces, and internal forces.

When now with Baskin, this feeling takes its shape in his latest work in the great vision of every man. He's arms are stretched in a crucified pose, suffering both destroyed and yet indestructible. And all this is expressed more in more flat contrasts of light and dark, and the visceral sense is replaced by a more abstract approach here. So this becomes more of an icon than anything he's done before. Leonard Baskin's work has been concerned with one main thing, that is the human figure, stripped and naked and perpetually dying. Now without using any industrial or social images, whatever, his work is yet a savage criticism of the time in which we live. Mr. Baskin, there's just one point that I mentioned and going around there. I think I'd like to hear from you about, and that is the contradiction that seems to

me to be involved in this vision of every man, this sympathy for every man, and yet on the other hand, this preoccupation with the exceptional man. That seems to me here a sort of conflict between pearls of pride and humility. Do you find any conflict there? One might think of any society or people's great men as a projection of a society's attitude and idealization of a culture's ideal. This would be seen in the mythic sense. So that there is surely a union between a people's great man and the people themselves. In a sense, one is a microcosm of the other. Yes, but to me many of these people like Mirat and John Brown seem to be a sort of spiritualization of evil.

How can you say that this is the common man's projection of the common man? There's this superman idea here that I find. I don't know whether you agree with that. I surely would take objection to the notion of Superman and all that it implies in terms of a leader and your fascist attitudes. Mirat and John Brown have both, I think, been produced and maligned in terms of interpretation of their historical role. Both, for example, have one great thing in common in that they were absolutely inevitably and undyingly honest to what they believed in and held to be true. Is this what you mean by the same like ability to slaughter a literal human being? Well, in John Brown's case, the ability to so project a belief which was tied to the good of an entire people, to project it so far that he was capable of actually taking lives for his cause. Now, this is a combination of slaughtering and safetyness.

But surely this is far and a way removed from the vision of every man, the common man. Herman Melville and Marvellous Palm in his book of poetry called Battle Pieces has almost an epigraph to the volume of Palm about John Brown. It's a vision of John Brown hanging, suspended, hung, and Melville points the image of the civil war streaming from John Brown's beard. So that John Brown's sync like slaughtering actually held within it the eventual bloodbath that resulted in the civil war, but which also resulted in the great reconstruction period and what we now see today in the final liberation of the Negro people. You mentioned that the mythic quality in these men, now they seem to me to have great familiarity, people like William Blake, Gene Debs, you've even done things of Sean O'Casey

and Bertold Brecht, you've done who else, you've done Mariah, and what is the connecting point in myth with these people, is there a connecting point? What strikes one at first show is that these were all in one way or another, champions of the people. I see. Mariah surely was, he was the only man who was not ultimately corrupted during the tribune. Bertold Brecht, for whatever your political attitudes was, I think, a great writer who was basically and essentially concerned with the welfare and good of all people. As were O'Casey, as were John Brown, as was Gene Debs and Sarah. Yes, well, I couldn't agree with you more, I think that if Plato were around now, he wouldn't have got a visa. You know? True, and if all of this would indicate that my tendency is towards socialism, my own

with power that it is. Well, the socialism in socialism, but before we go into that, Leonard, I'd like to talk about something else. And that is the aspect of myth in these people. Now, there is another aspect of your art that we mentioned just a moment ago. There seems to recur again and again, and that is the birds. And now, I'm not going to ask you to explain this, because obviously, if you could, you wouldn't be haunted by birds. But these two things, birds are sort of symbols of environmental forces, always attacking very often your figures. And this preoccupation with men as myth. Do you miss the communal myth very much, more than most do you think? Well, I indeed not only miss it, but whole that actually sculpture is an obsolete art form. Art form. Art form. Yeah. Delete that form. Yes. Art form, yes. Because with the destruction of the great communal mythology, no great monumental sculpture could emerge, which would express the idealization of an entire people.

And this has become private, has become class stratified. You then sort of see creation very much in this sort of yetzian point of view, where you create your own myth, your own milieu, the exact function within it. Exactly. And what is today monumental, I should term an Erzatz monumentality, a kind of self-conscious monumentality. And going back to earlier forms, writing the lessons of monumentality in earlier great monumental sculpture and applying it in a kind of almost textbook manner to run its own work. I mean, it hasn't got the genuine thing or no. But yet, you're a very conscious then of the lack of the myth and you're also very conscious of the community, the social thing. Well now, you work in North Hampton and the studio isolated from the communal thing, I think, don't you? Well, what is your answer? What is your artistic answer to such a thing?

I mean, here is another contradiction. I mean, you're deeply concerned with common other things and yet you isolate yourself from them. You work up in North Hampton, and if I could change a famous line, one could say that artist violence recollected in tranquility. Yes. I see what answer is it on the nose, but it's a question of experience really, isn't it? I mean, surely you don't hold to that adolescent and an entire view of experience as meaning that one has to empirically experience each and everything that one writes about, paints about, sculpts about, and ultimately talks about. It was a question of degree because I remember once you said to me, I don't have to go down, it's sort of a quote to yourself, you know, you just said to me once, I don't have to go down to a cold man to turn it into art. But isn't it truly at the very essence of experience that you're most suffered to gain from it?

It's not the experience. It's very experience of suffering can then be transmuted and transmitted to other experiences and to other realizations or impressions and knowledge across things. I mean, suffering indeed in itself is an entity which there are many doors. One can couple, one's experience of suffering in one area to suffering in many other areas. In other words, one didn't have to be on all fronts of the last work to have understood what yes, the front was lying. Yes. Well, no, are you satisfied with your time? You aren't as very angry in many ways. Do you find your time corrupt? Do you find it irritating? Do you find it infuriating? Well, generalizations about one's time tend to be asinine at best. But since one has to make them, I obviously think, as my work would indicate, that we live in what one would call a ghastly period from the point of human being and his values.

Man is not counted for much in our time. May I say something just there? I don't know, then it's this. Now, in your work, man occupies very precariously, I feel, at the edge of despair and at the edge of the precipice, the last stand of the great tradition of European art, where man is king of the universe, king of the world. And now surely the modern realizations above all show us that man is not king that he is a part of nature. Isn't your position then in some way unrealistic? Shouldn't the art of our time deal with things like Garbo and Pefsma, who face this immense realization and create art in the face of it? It seems to me that what Garbo and Pefsma and other non-objective painters and sculptors are doing is to try to imitate nature in its own terms. This is obviously an ironical construction, but the abstract painters are really the literary artists are the imitative ones,

because they would simply like to make constructions a la nature as it were. They were concerned simply as the world of the new land, the world of the new landscape, capishes new book. This is a philosophical rationalization at its most simplest, at its most simple level. The fact that the new constructions, the new configurations, for example, newly revealed aspects of nature does not make for a confertunity in type or an ideal, it simply means that that element of creative process, that marvelous moment of insight, when an artist wholly in control of the formal language and metier of any given art form, weds it in a miraculous way to something which he has to say, thus bringing together all the elements,

which have worked in works of art in the past, and has created a new and meaningful art form. Not new and meaningful in terms of simply formal configurations, but new and meaningful in terms of a unique human being reacting, expressing his experiences, and further communicating his experiences as only he being unique and do. Which is why a vast salon of abstract art has a dreadfully uniform and monotonous life. But getting back to the point of men as king, isn't this position a little untenable? I mean, there are other realizations that force themselves. And you simply have made this construction, this doesn't mean that I have to go wrong and accept it. Sure. I mean, I don't see my concern with man as man as king, I see it as man as man, which in itself is unique and I should hope fresh attitude in this day and day. Well, really, let's take something else.

Now, I've provided myself with a little bit of ammunition here, and I'm going to see what you'll do with it. And this again is a little unfair perhaps, but remember, communal art is what you would not, isn't that right? An art for the community, but it is for them, it is understandable by all of them. Now, a critic has written this, he says, that the reduction of art to formal components, doing away with the image to a certain extent, to a harmonic absolute, opens the possibility of a communal art based on the inherent sense of form which nearly every person possesses. So, in a way, this critic says that the very fact which you condemn is an advantage in that it opens art at its most basic. The inevitable question that follows from that destruction would be, why make works a wrong? The world, as we know it, is full of the most magnificent formal configurations. They abound all about us. One only has to look at a group of crystals, at gems, at leaf tracery, at the construction of trees, at the silhouette of hills, the variety and formal articulation of mountain versus valley, and as one changes into the other, eternally moving platforms.

There you have the entire world of this man's community, and it's community on a most vulgar, that is to say, primitive level. But the artist must do is simply commune beyond and above those simple elements of the formal structures, the formal substructure, the pattern which every work of art is based. You see abstract art as an in-metry divorce. Essentially, it is. It's a reduction to the elemental, to the primitive, to the skeletal pairing and removing those elements which precisely change the work of art from an intellectual play, a kind of theoretical by-speel to write great and wondrous thing, which we know as a great work of art. No. The trouble of abstract art is that it's selfless for too little.

You hear great many people complain that abstract art is difficult to understand. On the contrary, the trouble with abstract art is that it's too simple. We've settled for so little, really. What can an abstract work of art do? It can also bring us through its apprehension of cosmic law into a union with the universe, which we wouldn't have without, I don't know, seeing these comprehension of cosmic law means, Brian. I was hoping you would come at it. Yes, I do. What does it mean? For instance, the rhythmicity of nature, the multiplicity and complication of its laws, which seem to be based to some extent on regularity, on periods and time, sort of music, you know, the Greek thing and all that, there's a comprehension of this that is beyond mathematics that is apprehended intuitively by the artist in abstract.

There's a comprehension of it, but the controller that is based on mathematics, isn't it? Well, the control of our circuit mathematics run out. It's beyond mathematics, and so far as it transcends the ability of mathematics to comprehend. So, therefore, it is an intuition of things that can only be apprehended by the whole plus and by the mind and by the heart. If you're simply speaking of the complexity of the universe, which I think it you are. Then, obviously, no work of art will ever comprehend and wholly contain that complexity, nor should any work of art ever attempt it. Oh, because it's simply the complexity is too vast, the scope is too great. That's right, well, these little things are just grasped from the cosmos and just provide little windows, little insights, little feelings, which allow us with it. I mean, that's from what that sort of abstract art is marvelous. Look at a great person, look at a gabo, look even well.

These works of art, Brian, really and truly relate only to themselves. There's nothing to do with any cosmic universe with any complex entities. There are structures that revolve about their own access completely. And to make species of marriage-riches analogies between their inner workings and constructions in the world of nature instead of your mystic cosmos, it seems to me to be just curious from beginning to end. And this is the kind of high school philosophizing that is confounded and frightened most people into a kind of silent acquiescence when they do over the deal of ophthalm card art. Also, the guilt of our forefathers lies heavily on us. Our great grandfather is ridicule of vanguard. Their dismissal of the impressionists, post-impressionists, the number of other great mistakes that they've made, makes us very worried of simply speaking freely and openly about our reaction and relation to a work of art.

In other words, we're fearful of condemning a work of art, or not liking it simply because it may turn out to be great, which is a pretty hopeless situation to be in. Time is running out, and on this one point that I want to get to mention to you and I, it's something that's occasionally said about your art. It's excessive morbidity, but what you've seen is this preoccupation with death, the preoccupation with dying, man eternally dying. It's truly morbid to some people. One only has to look at the work of Greia, of Rembrandt, of Corvette's defined, certainly prime examples in the past for a similar involvement, a similar approach, a similar concern. Now, the world of art is a many faceted thing. There are endless paintings of flowers, still lives, beautiful landscape, ripening grapes, young bucksome ladies, naked and dressed, and one has this entire world to choose from.

I can't one single obscure isolated artist be morbid, gruesome, and decadent, or I don't agree that I'm any of these things, as I tried to. Reflectively like the world that I've seen. This is the only possible view you could have of the world. This destructive, seems to me to be destructive in some way. What is the world? Yes, what is the world? I mean, Joe Freeman, a man you've probably never heard of as described, our time is a landscape of death. And if you think about the last decade and the half, and if you think of the possibilities and the decade and the half to come, and this is a very apt description, and this is just not the time. No, ripening grapes. No, I'll take you up completely in that. For instance, I'm sure that looking back at this century, a future age may find that one of the most consistent, one of the most unified, one of which was consistent progress with a few minor setbacks, a few wars and things like that, but consistent progress for the common man that is enshrined in your art.

Well, I keep seeing the gaping hole, the bleeding wound. Surely the rest of the body, the rest of the body may be healthy, but the blue, the wound that bleeds is what concerns me. And I think surely some artists should be concerned with this. You have this vast world of the non-objective, the avant-garde art, which is concerned with none of it. Well, ultimately, they do express a great deal of neurotic chaos, uncertainty, uncertainty, the need for a cathartic release and so on. I think that in your sculpture, in your later sculpture, it's unfair to say morbidity. I just, you know, sort of, so there are to rise you. But there seems to me to be a development of the stillness of silence. It's very different from the graphic art, which is in some way positive and immobeling in the true sense. Why are there so different graphics? First of all, I should want to say that morbidity doesn't mean a lack of nobility ever. In other words, a person dead is no less noble than he is alive, or a person wounded is no less noble than he is when alive.

So the notion of nobility, dignity, pride, et cetera, as not being attributes of the morbid is absolutely false and childish. Beyond that, the graphics are immediate, are direct, are spontaneous, are political. And one last word now about the sculptures. Yes, the sculptures try to express my attitude toward the overwhelming, the grand, the large, the monumental enduring qualities of man. We have been listening to Manor Baskin talk about his art. This is NET, National Educational Television.