Franklin Einspruch

The Farnsworth Museum of Art, subject to New England winters up in Rockland, Maine, and consequently confined to a shorter calendar than most museums, made one of the bolder institutional decisions in recent memory: devoting part of its precious summer schedule to showing prints about the Holocaust. Moreover, these are the sublime and horrifying woodcuts of Leonard Baskin (1922-2000), executed in the last years of the artist’s life, which he spent contemplating the ravenous appetite that Death has for the Jews. Baskin was not to everyone’s taste, and the feeling was mutual. The critic Hilton Kramer called him a “macabre sentimentalist,” and that was only to denigrate the other artist he was reviewing at the time.

In a way it felt like a walk around campus on graduation day: one last stroll through the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before the mayor’s medically nonsensical, legally dubious, morally atrocious mandates force museums, restaurants, gyms and more to oblige entrants to prove that they’re vaccinated against Covid-19. I could comply, but I will not. “There’s nothing more American than coming together to ensure we’re taking care of each other,” said our unctuous new mayor in her typical passive-aggressive fashion. Perhaps, but there’s nothing less American than commanding such sentiments from City Hall and punishing us who see through the ruses of power. The commencement, then, was that of a new relationship between your reporter and his adopted city’s art holdings.