Kitsch and the Real Thing

...In the catalogue for the Whitney show, Gerald Nordland describes one of the more provocative, if not one of the more baffling, of these works, Dynamo Mother (1933), as follows: "The figure is posed in a seated posture with legs widespread and raised in the air...

...Bad art does not necessarily drive out the good, but a taste nurtured on the inauthentic certainly does seem to diminish one's capacity even to locate-not to say, respond to and understand -the real thing...

...This is all true...

...This attitude is a direct descendent of the old philistine leftism, of which Shahn and Philip Evergood and Jack Levine used to be the reigning talents...

...One knows in advance that each of these lugubrious events will be hailed by the art critic of the Times as a triumph of the human spirit, and thereafter, for three weeks, the gallery will be jammed with spectators and purchasers who resemble all the doctors and dentists, and all the doctors' and dentists' wives, from Scarsdale and the more salubrious purlieus of Long Island...

...The answer to this question is not to be found in artistic considerations...

...Baskin, who also carries on a lively and lucrative career as a designer and illustrator, stands in relation to his artistic sources as academicians and commercial artists always do, subverting the expressive integrity of his materials for easy effects...

...The literary, mythological bias of these images keeps them at a comfortable distance from the realities of everyday life, and yet their combination of the physically repellent (inflated bellies and swollen feet) and the heavily "symbolic" (Baskin's favorite motif, repeated ad nauseam, being a muscle-bound, middle-aged male nude with the head of a bird) makes them seem both culturally provocative and redolent of archetypal dilemmas...

...that, in short, it is run by hucksters and overrun by suckers for the latest sensation...

...It includes some of Lachaise's most powerful and original sculptures, and includes, too, some of the most problematical as sculpture...

...The group of 15 heads, including very fine portraits of Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride and Edgar Varèse, which the Schoelkopf Gallery has just shown, gives one a rather better view of Lachaise's work in that genre than the scattered examples at the Whitney...

...And since he works a good deal in bronze casts and printed woodcuts, which are produced in voluminous "editions," there seems to be no limit to his capacity to supply the voracious demand for everything he produces...

...He was both enormously cultivated and totally enthralled by the private emotions which were inseparable from the very conception of his sculpture and which could not always be contained within its limits...

...When Lachaise spoke of Isabel Nagle as an "inspiration," he was, if anything, understating the case...

...Baskin's is thus one of those styles that belong less to the history of art than to the sociology of taste...

...Just as Lewis Mumford once spoke of the luxury apartment houses that went up in Manhattan after the War as the tenements of the rich, one can speak of this art as the kitsch of the over-privileged...

...Lachaise proved to be a very versatile artist when he needed to be, turning his hand to decorative objects, monuments and portraits, in addition to his more personal work...

...The widespread legs reveal the vagina as if for birth and the counterpoint of legs, arms and erectile nipples establishes an expression of the perpetuation of life which is unforgettable...

...The figure's arms parallel the gesture of the legs and the emotionally amplified breast forms establish a third pair of physical elements...

...And the response they excite does not vary much, either...

...If Lachaise cannot be judged the equal of the greatest sculptors of our century-if, that is, his art rarely reaches the heights of Rodin or Rosso or Brancusi or Matisse or Gonzalez-it is nonetheless of an order that requires us to measure it against the highest achievements of the age...

...Often, indeed, the perennial standby is even worse than the latest hitand-run reputation...

...This great work, with its beautifully controlled amplification of the female form, is a culmination, however, of only one aspect of the interest Lachaise brought to this motif...

...Sometimes these exhibitions consist of sculpture (as this year's did), sometimes prints, sometimes drawings...

...If Lachaise's gifts were not invariably equal to his ambitionhis male figures are generally deplorable-he was nonetheless the real thing, an artist of great courage, craft and unmincing vision...

...It is the pieces in which Lachaise isolated parts of the anatomy-most notoriously, the Breasts with Female Organ Between (1930-32)-that suddenly confront us with an obsession for which the artist could not always find a viable sculptural equivalent...

...Lachaise was an artist of immense powers and profound obsessions...

...As a graphic artist, he continues the line of Ben Shahn in the latter's more recent incarnation as an allegorist of spiritual malaise...

...It is this aspect of his achievement which the Whitney show gives us for the first time...

...As Shahn's principal successsor in this country, he occupies a position comparable to that of Buffet in France and Guttuso in Italy-artists of stylish horror and "conscience" whose expressive flaccidity endears them to a newly-rich middle-class audience that is able, through the acquisition of such prestigous and "significant" art, to assuage its social guilt while at the same time conferring status upon its vacant sensibilities...

...Nagle gave his art and his life a more unique direction...

...What Baskin has perfected is not an art but an attitude, which may for convenience be characterized as philistine existentialism...

...A case in point is Leonard Baskin, whose exhibitions at the Borgenicht Gallery are now a regular feature of the New York season...

...What is it, then, that all these eminently comfortable people respond to in the work of an artist whom the Times' critic comparespreposterously, in my opinion-to Rembrandt and Rodin...

...He had already been trained in the French academies as a sculptor and craftsman when he met this remarkable woman, and his earliest sculptures-and indeed, some of his later, more perfunctory piecessuggest that he might have developed, on his own, into an accomplished but unremarkable disciple of Rodin, an artist perhaps on the order of Despiau...

...But whereas philistine leftism addressed itself to current issues, which it at least handled satirically if not very incisively, the new attitude trades in images of horror and portentous gloom...

...Whatever their specific content, they are anything but variable...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer Kitsch and the Real Thing One often hears the complaint-I have made it myself many times-that the New York art scene is altogether too frivolous and changeable, too vulnerable to novelty and high jinks, too fickle in its tastes and a scandal of infidelity in its values...

...It is a summa of those among Lachaise's emotions and ideas that could be given public -indeed, monumental-utterance, and could be given it because there already existed a sculptural tradition which needed only to be modified and enlarged to receive it...

...Of the 164 works at the Whitney, only a few are in this problematical category, and even these have a power which cannot be attributed to their subject-matter alone...

...But his encounter with Mrs...

...Museums, too, will scoop up the stuff-Baskin is the only American artist on whom both the Museum of Modern Art and the art critic of the Times seem to dote with equal passion...

...But Dynamo Mother, even if it shocks at first glance, has a congruence of theme and structure which the spectator may already have encountered in certain Hindu sculptures...

...To this subject he brought an inexhaustible energy and a wild, obsessive inventiveness which, while at times overflowing the bounds of his capacity to realize it, remained for the most part in a viable relation to the classical traditions in which he was trained...

...The "menace" they ostensibly pose is of that pseudo-allegorical variety that refers to nothing specific in either history or individual experience...

...But it is his sculptures of the female nude which dominate his oeuvre and give it its unique significance...

...But Lachaise was also under the spell of an erotic vision for which, though it could claim precedents in certain examples of prehistoric, primitive and Hindu art, no respectable modern tradition existed...

...The most famous and most heroic work that resulted from this intense alliance of passion and convention is the Standing Woman, 88 inches high, which normally occupies a commanding position in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art and which has been borrowed for the Whitney show...

...They are the sculptural and graphic equivalents of a Hitchcock movie: well-crafted corn with a cosmetic overlay of metaphysical pretension...

...What one sees in Lachaise's art, then, is a classical sensibility provoked and unsettled by the pressure of emotions which far exceed the esthetic precepts to which it has been educated...

...But it would be a mistake to conclude that some of the more stable features of the scene represent, by contrast, a higher level of artistic achievement...

...At 20, in Paris," Lachaise wrote in 1928 when he was 46, "I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces...

...This "young American person" was Isabel Nagle, a Bostonian lady who was already possessed of a wealthy husband and child and whom Lachaise followed to America and later married...

...As a sculptor, Baskin is a slick academician who carries on, but at a great remove in esthetic dignity, the already retrograde "heroic" tradition of Antoine Bourdelle...

...Thus, while the dizziest hosannas have greeted Baskin's latest exhibition, the large retrospective survey devoted to the work of the late Gaston Lachaise, which was organized last year in Los Angeles and is now installed at the Whitney Museum in New York, has been given a reception one can only describe as dumb...