The Monumentalist

"Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. The human figure is the image of all men and of one man. It contains all and it can express all." So says Leonard Baskin, whose latest and best carving sat in state at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Mass., last week. Entitled Seated Man with Owl, it was a proud new acquisition for one of the nation's finest little museums, fell to Smith's lot because Baskin happens to teach there.

To be so traditionally devoted to the human figure is to be practically alone among young contemporary sculptors. Most of Baskin's fellows base their sculpture on yesterday's innovations, shaping caved-out, semi-human figures a la Moore, skeletal ghosts a la Giacometti, allusive combinations of metal junk a la Stankiewicz, or totally abstract welded armatures a la David Smith. Baskin, a lone voice in this spiny desert, argues that "the only true originality any art can have is originality of content. If I tried to find a new way of doing sculpture, I'd be like any other guy." Baskin even avoids beautiful materials for fear their texture and color might exert too great an influence on his art, direct the attention of the viewer from the form.

The son of a New Jersey rabbi, Baskin was rigorously trained in the Talmud until his 15th year, later got an equally thorough art training at the Yale School of Fine Arts, in Paris, and in Florence.

His first successes as an artist were dramatic woodcuts, but at 37 he finds sculpture his natural medium. Sophisticated, gentle and intense, he lives with his wife and small son in a home that was once the servants' quarters of the old Frank Lyman estate in Northampton, works in a converted harness room back of the house.

He works in wood "because it is warm and alive, lighter than stone and cheaper than bronze." Baskin gives his figures all the unadorned monumentality he can, tries to capture the most elemental aspects of man's life. Like the sculptured gods of Egypt and Sumeria, his figures are still, withdrawn, awesome. Yet they also express a sharply contrasting sense of the ordinary and everyday. He casts fat, simple, dull-seeming people in the roles of gods and heroes. Except for his owl, and the timelessness it symbolizes, the Seated Man might be riding a subway.

The owl, too, is an ambiguous image. It represents wisdom, but also "the bird of darkness. You never hear an owl when it takes off to attack."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.