VISUAL ARTS: Birds of a Feather

The exhibition Crow and Raven: Baskin, Hughes, Manet, Poe, on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute through January 10, is a fabulous premise for an Oscar-attracting film—Surviving Picasso meets Julie & Julia, with a little bit of Possession thrown into the mix. 

Scene One: Paris, 1875, at the height of the Impressionist movement. Painter Édouard Manet is in his studio, reading aloud a stanza from his friend Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic poem “The Raven.” Manet sets down the page, picks up his brush, and begins to sketch an ominous winged form.

Cut to almost a hundred years later: Northampton, Massachusetts, home of the sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin, who pulls from his mailbox a bulky package containing a thick sheaf of poems by his close friend and frequent collaborator Ted Hughes. He, too, reads aloud a few lines, then sets pen to paper. Beneath his hand an image takes shape—part man, part crow.

Cut to the present: interior of a window-lined office a few floors above the galleries of The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The sets of black-and-white illustrations are spread out on a long table in preparation for an upcoming exhibition, which will pair them for the first time. Here we are introduced to our heroine, the dark-haired, blue-eyed curator Jay Clarke.

Colorful supporting players include Hughes’s wife, the poet Sylvia Plath; Lisa Baskin, the artist’s vibrant wife of thirty-three years; and Mallarmé, the charming host of a series of Tuesday salons attended by a group of Parisian intellectuals known as les Mardistes. Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, friends of Mallarmé, make appearances as well.

Hollywood fantasies aside, the backstory on Crow and Raven is as intriguing as the images themselves. Both Manet’s lithographs for Mallarmé’s 1875 Poe translation, Le Corbeau, and Baskin’s pen, ink, and wash drawings, made for a 1973 edition of Hughes’s poem cycle Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, are products of long-term collaborations, and each represents the artist’s unique vision. The exhibit also brings together two birds that serve as richly symbolic characters in ancient folklore and mythology, associated with darkness and death as well as godliness and the sun.

“These two projects are so different and so similar at the same time,” says Clarke, the museum’s Manton curator of prints, drawings, and photographs. “They’re both born out of friendship, and fascination with literature and the image.”

Clarke, who came to the museum last summer after eighteen years with the Art Institute of Chicago (and who will likely become far too familiar in ensuing months with the words “no relation”), is clearly passionate about this installation, which is fairly small-scale by the museum’s standards.

This is the first time the Baskin drawings, on loan from the artist’s widow, will be exhibited in public, and the first time The Clark has shown the rare Manet portfolio, which the museum acquired in 1997.
Mallarmé and Manet plan-ned a limited edition of 240 copies, but it’s doubtful that even that many were printed, according to Manet scholar Jay Fisher, a graduate of the joint Williams College/Clark masters degree program who is now senior curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Originally priced at twenty-five francs (the installation includes a poster-sized advertisement for the book), Le Corbeau was not a bestseller.

“They hoped it would sell a lot more copies than it actually did,” Fisher says.

Contemporary readers might have found Manet’s images too rough, almost like sketches.

“Compared to traditional nineteenth-century illustration, which was so much more detailed, it’s really kind of night and day,” Fisher says. “They look unfinished in a way—instead of drawing to the edges of the sheet, these look like vignettes floating in the middle of the sheet.”

Fisher says that the transfer lithography, previously seen as a predominantly commercial medium, was now being taken up by artists who wanted to experiment with the form, but Manet wasn’t interested in the technique itself so much as its ability to communicate the power and spontaneity of his images. He fixed on crucial points in the narrative, such as the raven soaring toward the narrator’s window:

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter
In there stepped a stately raven, of the saintly days of yore

In another print, the bird, “sitting lonely on that placid bust,” looks down upon the narrator in a strikingly modern composition. The fourth print, illustrating the final lines of the poem, approaches the abstract, as the shadow of the raven unspools across the room like a fog.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!

“You get this idea of something almost imaginary or visionary,” Fisher says. “These are so spontaneous and so subjective, and yet very much connected to the poem.”

A year later, the pair launched another collaboration when Manet made four drawings for wood engravings to illustrate Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune. Their friendship, which began in the early 1870s when they were neighbors on rue de Moscou, was cemented by their common experience of rejection by critics and the public alike. Mallarmé repeatedly championed Manet’s work in various publications, and was immortalized himself in a portrait painted by the artist in 1876

A similarly fruitful partnership was launched when Baskin and Hughes met in 1958; Plath was teaching literature at Smith College, where Baskin was a professor of printmaking and sculpture. They went on to collaborate on some three dozen works, and the Baskins spent a number of years in Devon, England, close to Hughes’s home.

“They resonated, they fit each other,” Lisa Baskin says of the poet, who died in 1998, and the artist, who passed away two years later. “They endlessly invented books and projects, right through to the end of their lives. They had a really remarkable and productive creative relationship. It was the kind of friendship that is pretty rare—they loved each other, they worked together, they fed each other intellectually, and they made lots of great stuff together.”

Many times Baskin’s illustrations came first, she says. “Very often, Leonard would make images and send them off to Ted, and a number of months later, a parcel would arrive and there would be a sheaf of poems.” Most published work on the Crow collaboration indicates that it unfolded in this way; in a recent interview, however, Lisa Baskin corrects that misapprehension. The crow was an ongoing motif in Baskin’s work, and it was he who suggested that Hughes use the bird as a jumping-off point for a book of poetry. However, in this case the illustrations were made after the text and published alongside the poems in a 1973 Faber and Faber limited edition (Harper & Row first published the poems in 1971).

“Most of the drawings Baskin did for the Crow book were done after he read the poems, and Faber, in fact, commissioned the drawings, so everything that’s ever been published about this is completely incorrect,” Clarke says.

“[Baskin] wanted an occasion to add more crows to all the crows that flock through his sculpture, drawings, and engravings in their various transformations,” Hughes wrote in a 1985 article. “As the protagonist of a book, a crow would become symbolic in any author’s hands. And a symbolic crow lives a legendary life.” Hughes envisioned the bird as both hero and trickster, an embodiment of man’s foibles and hubris. From “Crow Communes”:

God’s shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat.
“Come,” said Crow, “Let’s discuss the situation.”
God lay, agape, a great carcass.
Crow tore off a mouthful and swallowed.

Baskin’s accompanying drawings fill nearly every square inch of paper with dense striations and pitch-black washes of ink. His crows, some endowed with male anatomy, are at times depicted in poses of desolation and despair; in other images, they possess a noble, kingly quality. One crow’s manly torso is reminiscent of idealized Greek sculpture.

“Manet was considered radical because he was choosing images of everyday life, and his style was radical because it wasn’t very precise,” Clarke says. “Baskin was a rebel in the opposite way—he wasn’t necessarily interested in the reigning hip of abstraction, he was interested in representation, in this case capturing the essence of the bird but also evoking humankind. He didn’t really see the drawings as a visual equivalent of the poems—they expanded and extended the meaning of the text.”

Crow and Raven offers an object lesson in the serendipity and unpredictability of fertile collaborations, which exist without regard for background, culture, or nationality. Mallarmé spent most of his life in relative poverty; Manet was born to a rich and well-connected Parisian family.

In a 1983 recording of a conversation between Baskin and Hughes, the artist reflects, “I think about it a great deal, how I, the son of a Lithuanian rabbi and a White Russian mother, can get on with this Yorkshire Englishman of ancient lineage. It’s just odd, isn’t it, that we should be crow-haunted and death-involved. I have lots of people I’m friends with, with whom I do not share an invigorating, inspirational relationship in terms of work. In fact, I have that with almost nobody else.” [NOV/DEC 2009]

Contributing editor Tresca Weinstein writes about visual art, dance, and yoga for national and regional publications.

THE GOODS

All images courtesy The Clark

Top: Untitled (Crow's Fall), 1971, pen and ink, by Leonard Baskin, collection of Lisa Unger Baskin

Second: Once Upon a Midnight Dreary (Under the Lamp), 1875, by Edouard Manet, collection of The Clark

Third: Crow, 1971, pen and ink and watercolor, by Leonard Baskin, collection Lisa Unger Baskin

Fourth: Untitled (Conjuring in Heaven), 1971, pen and ink, by Leonard Baskin, collection of Lisa Unger Baskin

Fifth: Perched Upon the Bust of Pallas (Raven on the Bust), 1875, by Edouard Manet, collection of The Clark

Sixth: Untitled (Revenge Fable), 1971, pen and ink, by Leonard Baskin, collection of Lisa Unger Baskin

Seventh: Untitled (Crowego), 1971, pen and ink, by Leonard Baskin, collection of Lisa Unger Baskin