“I remember Jack before he became a sculptor, when he
was a teacher at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. My very first
lithograph was done under his supervision.
I suspect Jack was drawn to Mexico for the same reason I was . .
. an interest in the fresco technique which had become almost extinct
in Europe, but which had undergone a revival in Mexico and the United
States. Many factors contributed to this renascence: the Mexican
revolution, the reconstruction, the emerging sense of national identity,
and, in the U.S., the Depression and the resulting W.P.A. arts program.
Jack knew the major figures in Mexican art, and worked on a large
fresco with David Siqueiros. Much later, he was to produce a very
effective video on the Mexican muralists. When I first knew Jack,
it was before he became a sculptor, during the period of his painting
and print-making . . . .
Form was then, and continued to be, very important to Jack. In all
these works, one can see the formal influences of the early twentieth-century
Cubists, and particularly the influence of the California artist,
Rico Lebrun.
In technique, there is the influence of Jose Gutierrez and the muralists
who were among the first to experiment with Duco paint and pigments
suspended in other synthetic media like polyester resin. Duco (more
commonly used to paint Oldsmobiles) produces an enamel-like intensity
of color . . . just the effect appropriate for Mexican subject-matter,
which can manage to be at once colorful and grim. Mexicans tend to
confront the issues of life and death more directly than Americans
(who never die; they just “pass on”!). Death is a constant
presence amid life, and appears regularly in bizarre ways in the
Mexican culture. (Candies in the form of skulls are a popular delicacy
for Mexican children on All Souls Day.) Thus “Broken Doll,” has
the carnival color of Mexico, combined with a reference to dismemberment.
I’m sure Jack was attracted consciously by the color and form
of the familiar objects, he put them together as a “Mexican
Still-life,” but the soul of Mexico shows through, and in a
manner to re-emerge thirty-six years later in bronze.
His self-portrait, done when he was twenty-eight, became an embarrassment
to him when he was sixty. It had lain unremembered in his studio
for decades, when someone, perhaps Bunny [Jack’s wife], brought
it to light. I remember her showing it to me and saying how much
she liked it, and Jack’s acute embarrassment at the time: “God!
Who did I think I was when I did that? Talk about self-importance
and deep symbolism! Ah, the pretensions of youth!” He would
object to our showing it now, but as Bunny points out, that portrait
sheds a lot of light on the person Jack was to become. On the inside. Top
For Jack was the least pretentious person I know.
He had a deep concern for the condition of the common man: but
he did not give any outward appearance of pomposity, of phony artistic
sensibility, or of holier-than-thou affectations. He was impatient
with people who wasted their time or their talent, and was capable
of strongly criticizing them, but his critical comments were always
witty, and drew a laugh rather than a frown. He was a very straightforward,
lets-roll-up-our-sleeves-and-get-down- to-work sort of person.
When Jack first turned to sculpture, his work combined formal considerations
with surface ornamentation. This latter facet of his artistic personality
no doubt was Mexican inspired, and while it was later subdued,
it never left him altogether. The welded steel works, “Of Ancient
Seas,” and “Armored Horse” are of this period.
Later, Jack began working in Fiberglas and polyester resin. Polyester
resin was a material with which he had become familiar while working
with people like Siqueiros and Gutierrez in Mexico only they had
not used it as a binder for Fiberglas. Since Jack knew how well it
could carry pigment, a number of his Fiberglas works are polychromed.
The color is not simply on the surface, but forms part of the substance
of the sculpture, and is thus more lasting than if it were merely
a coat of paint. No doubt this polychrome technique was first suggested
by the Hispano-Mexican polychromed icons with which he was so familiar,
but was reinforced by his knowledge of ancient Greek practices. (Even
the elegant Parthenon would look gaudy to our eyes if we saw it as
it was intended to be: brightly colored.)
Like any well-trained artist, Jack knew a lot about Greek art before
he went to Greece, but a sabbatical in Crete clearly pushed him in
a new, overtly Greek direction. Particularly the preclassical art
of the Cyclades impressed him with its simplicity. Hearing him talk
of his work at that time, one got the impression that he was influenced
only by the graceful elegance of its form, by the way it achieved
its effect through an economy of means.
I remember admiring his work for those characteristics alone. I
noted the titles: Aristides, Triptolemus, Ariadne, etc., and recognized
the allusions to Greek mythology. But I’m used to the idea
of artists being preoccupied with form, and choosing subjects almost
at random, or at least primarily to justify their current notions
of form, so I assumed that was what Jack was doing. Picasso was preoccupied
with form while he was developing Cubism. But he would choose a guitar
or a bottle as a subject, not because he had any special concern
about the objects per se, but because they served his formal purposes.
In fact, it was only through this show, where I was able to see Jack’s
most recent works, his earliest ones, and the large “Greek
Period” in between that I realized that his work is all of
a piece.
I remember one evening in the mid-sixties, when we arrived at the
Baldwins for a visit. It was too late to go out to the studio,
so we were having dinner and exchanging news. I asked what he was
doing, and he laughed in a self-deprecatory manner, and said something
like, “Well,
it’s not the sort of thing I’m used to doing, and you
probably won’t like it, but I’ll show it to you in the
morning.” Bunny interrupted with, “Oh, Jack! You’re
not going to show him that are you? I mean, it’s so depressing!
Nobody’s going to want that sort of thing in their living
room!”
Jack agreed that it certainly wasn’t “commercial” and
he hadn’t really done it to sell, but, he said, “I get
to thinking about things that just bother the hell out of me, and
I can’t do anything about them, and I just have to get them
out of my system. I don’t know any other way of coping with
them.” (An arty person would have used the words “express
myself.”)
The work they were referring to turned out to be the Hostage and
Fusilado series. These were small bronzes of standing figures.
Some were bound, and some had bullet holes. Jack said these were
reactions to the collective madness of terrorism and political
repression. They are not directed specifically to individual instances,
but, like all great art, are general. They refer to the “Desaparecidos” of
Argentina., the Death Squads of El Salvador and Guatemala, the
Contras of Nicaragua, and innocent hostages taken anywhere from
Iran to Lebanon.
Top
I was frankly astonished by the power of these small pieces. They
were unnerving, and it took me a while to understand why. They
have all the formal elegance of the earlier Greek work, but now,
for me, they had content! They were not just form, but form allied
to purpose. There is a tension in these pieces between the beauty
of the form, and the repulsive character of the content. We are
both repelled and attracted in a disturbing manner. Jacks's approach
to the subject is very original. Wouldn't it have been logical
to deal with a gruesome subject like execution in a roughly textured
manner, along the lines of Georges Rouault, or Theodore Roszak?
It’s ingenious to make us ambivalent toward
the works by combining horror with beauty. It makes us uncomfortable
with ourselves as though we were one of those rubber-neckers who
ghoulishly gawk at a traffic fatality.
Suddenly, upon re-seeing the earlier work in this show, I realized
that we have a continuation of that Mexican fascination with Death
. . . a fascination which is not morbid curiosity, but an acknowledgment
of reality. The juxtaposition of beauty and beastliness seen in “Fusilado,” is
already present in the “Guerra” of Jack’s early
days in Mexico. “Fusilado” literally means “shot
with a rifle.” Its context compels the translation “The
Executed.” “Guerra” means “War.” There
is an irony in the use of children’s toys to express that
idea.
Why should this concern for the childishly selfish inhumanity to
man show up in the early works, then emerge some thirty or forty
years later? A fresh look at the middle period reveals that these
concerns were never absent from Jack’s work. He was always
concerned with Justice, Protection, Order, Remorse. Look at the
subjects:
Protest
The Accused
Jurist
Guardian
Centurion
Aristides. An Athenian statesman and general called “The
Just.”
Triptolemus. He became a judge in the underworld.
Minos. He also was a judge in the underworld.
Even the kore figures were not formed merely
for the sake of tradition (“kore” being the Greek
word describing the early young female figures of pre-classical
time), but to remind us that human concerns with pain, justice,
oppression, self-sacrifice, and honor are common to all mankind
and go as far back as we can remember.
John Baldwin was a gentle man in an often cruel and senseless
world. He produced beauty and pleasure, and at the same time forced
us to think.”
From . . .
“An Appreciation, John Baldwin 1922-1987”
On the occasion of the Manchester College
John Baldwin 1989 Retrospective
James R.C. Adams
Professor of Art
Manchester College
North Manchester, Indiana
2002 U.S. Professor of the Year
for baccalaureate colleges
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“The sculptures in this room represent twenty-five years
of John Baldwin’s looking at the world, making the world,
from a vantage point named Athens, Ohio. To Athens he brought influences
from places named New York, Los Angeles, Calcutta, San Miguel — the
places of his youth and young manhood, the war, a period of painting
and teaching. A dozen years ago he added the island of Crete to
the spaces from which he considers the fact of being human.
One must speak of John Baldwin’s work in the present tense.
The figures which wait in this room happen now, and matter now. They
are simultaneous. They represent facets of a man dedicated to being
an artist, to being his own man, whose only competition is himself.
He sees deeply. He records his seeing precisely. He forces the viewer-listener
to consider with him the figure and the fact of being human.
He begins as a lithographer. He turns to water colors, to oils, vinylite,
and pyroxaline. He is experimental and traditional. In Athens he
becomes a sculptor.
The first pieces are of welded steel. Horse, fish, bird evolve into
a gladiator. Here detail is almost as important as the shape of the
object: an ornate bridle, an intricate head and gills, careful feathers.
The welded pieces, rearing, swimming, flying, often become embellished
skeletons.
The early fiberglass sculptures are skeletal and linear; later the
form becomes more closed. But the fiberglass figures do more than
describe; they assert, often loudly; they comment on aggression and
war. The stark mutilated children and dying men are victims.
John Baldwin continues to illustrate, to protest as he begins to
work in bronze, ceramics, and plaster. His most recent people emphasize
a third quality of his work: contemplation and mediation. Expression
comes through gesture, the turn of head, the thrust of a shoulder.
The textured pieces, smooth against rough, are ambiguous. The colors
are quiet, as if aged, long handled. Detail becomes less important.
Or, one could say as well, more important: the detail is the shape
itself; form becomes the subject. The dignified figures, some bearing
the names of tragic heroes, sense and admit disorder, championing
order.
“Through the mastery of technique the sculptor is able to form intractable
materials and imbue them with spirit and vitality,” says John Baldwin
in his admirable book, Contemporary Sculpture Techniques.
The pieces in this exhibition so prove.
“Introduction”
“John Baldwin Sculpture Retrospective Exhibition 1956 -1981”
Hollis Summers
Poet and Professor of English
Ohio University; Athens, Ohio |
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