It’s Fine Press Friday!
Gypsy is a collection of several poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), published by sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Searsmont, Maine in 1989. The book contains a portrait of Baldwin etched by Baskin (1922-2000), printed on blue paper from the original copperplate. This copy is also signed by Baskin. The type is Centaur, cast by Harold Berliner's Typefoundry. The red pomegranate is one of the Gehenna Press's printer’s marks. Though Gehenna often worked collaboratively with poets, this collection was published two years after Baldwin’s death in 1987.
Speaking with The Black Scholar in 1973, Baldwin traced a mid-century shift in black culture in America, as part of the generation born in an urban, northern environment after the Great Migration: “It had become clear,” he explained, “that one could no longer live by the so-called standards of white civilization.” His writing embodies an intense, and honest excavation of history and its implications on the personal, the psychological, the emotional, the spiritual. “History is a very strange crucible and I don’t pretend to understand it; but I do understand at least in my own mind that you are lucky if you are forced to understand your own history.”
To grapple with reality and history through art: Baldwin here speaks to Baskin’s own artistic motivation. A vocal critic of “the irrational and accidental,” Leonard Baskin saw these approaches as the “denial of history.” Sidney Kaplan (1913-1980), an editor at Gehenna, scholar of African American history, and activist, explored Baskin’s portraits of artists:
“The true issue of mastery—the bold and conscious exploration of the past as a past of total reality, the discriminating and weighing of its necessities, the courage and intelligence to use the past without being used or used up by it, the endless desire to know man again and again in all his avatars of flesh and art…all this is what has led Baskin to look hard and long at the deathless faces of those who, for him, have been masters of man’s changing image.”
See other posts highlighting Leonard Baskin.
Check out our Black History Month posts.
--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern