THE ART AND THE ARTIST
Leonard Baskin, sculptor, draftsman, printer, and
printmaker, is the latest in a seemingly infinite series of artists who
have portrayed the events of June 25, 1876. The decision to commission
the drawings reproduced in this handbook is a most proper service to the
memory of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Baskin cuts through a
century of mediocre, apocryphal pictures to reveal the actors of this
tragic drama as they were, not in the event, but in life and in
death.
In 1968 an effort was made by the staff of the Amon
Carter Museum in Fort Worth to catalogue the many pictures of the Custer
fight. With more than 900 versions identified, it is an established fact
that this sad occasion is the most memorialized single event in American
history. A deluge of paintings, prints, sculptures, cigarette cards,
bottle caps, whiskey labels not to mention muralshave been
inspired by the battle. Each, of course, is the product of the artist's
imagination. Many have been copied even three and four times, while
others are sincere efforts at historical reconstruction of the event
based upon documents, eye-witness accounts, and physical remains.
In a situation where imagination may properly replace
truth (no witness survived to contest the artist), it is curious that
almost every artist to the present time has been absorbed in the reality
of the event and has neglected the human overtonesthe sullen quiet
of the Indian betrayed the sudden surprise and totality of death on the
vast plainsthe frustration of hindsight judgmentsthe
responsibilities and loyalties obliterated in the aftermath. There were
no victors that day; just survivors, each aware that a day of reckoning
had passed and another would soon be upon them. As in any disaster, many
people learn much, but too late.
If this foreboding air hangs over Baskin's drawings
to leave the reader disquieted, it is because the artist has sensed the
real tragedy of Custer and the Indians. Authority and manifest destiny
had in some way contradicted our "solemn word" and treaty obligations.
Custer and his men became the instruments to correct a situation
embarrassing both in Washington and on the frontiera change of
mind. Examine Baskin's drawingsIndians and officers; all are
asking "Why?"
We see man's mortality, brutality, and futility. And
yet we read in the faces of Baskin's people the basic humanity which
ties us together in a tragic climax no one seems to comprehend. Leonard
Baskin teaches art at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. His work is
represented in collections of the major art museums of the United States
by examples of sculpture, drawings, prints, and fine press books. His
genius, combined with a great sense of design and typography, is
reflected in the publications of the Gehenna Press, founded by Baskin in
1942 and now located at Northampton.
Mitchell A. Wilder November 1968
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