Leonid Lerman, "The Memories of Ruination"
Mark Daniel Cohen
I met a traveler
from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
Sculpture is, by
its nature, the veneration of ages. It is the art that assaults the deteriorations
of time, the art that remains when all else has fallen to ruin. And it is the
art that recalls the capabilities of time, for it bears and carries forward the
marks of time’s passing. No one knows sculpture without knowing of ancient
sculpture — the works of the classical past are the backdrop and the context
of all we now can make. They are the gloss, the legend of the meaning, the capability
of sculpture’s import. Sculpture is what we come to when we grow old enough
to recognize time eating at us like acid biting a plate on which it will write
the lesson of fate.
True sculptors know this, they know that, with the art form they have adopted,
they have acquired one of the most profound meanings of existence, and one of
the most imperative responsibilities of thoughtful reflection: the destiny of
mortality within the passing of ages. Leonid Lerman is a true sculptor, and he
is one that everyone should know. Born and raised in Odessa, he was trained in
the Russian realist tradition and he was trained to be a master of his craft.
He has lived in New York since 1980 and is currently teaching at the Art Students
League, the New York Academy of Art, and the Bridgeview School in Long Island
City. To know the work and teaching of such artists as Lerman is to know the
naïve folly of fashion and an ongoing art history that attempts to characterize
the moment, and it is to become aware that excellence and craft still pertain,
and that nothing from the past is every truly gone.
The 11 sculptures in Lerman’s current exhibition at the McKee Gallery, much
like those of his last in 1999, are a congenial introduction to his work, particularly
for being uncongenial. There is a dark and brooding tone to the busts and the
faces on wall plaques that dominate the presentation. Executed in bronze and
plaster, with one work in terra cotta, and done over the last three years, the
heads and faces have a white patina that seems to be the very wear of time, as
if these were works unearthed from some archeological dig rather than contemporary
creations. The surfaces of most of them have been incised with Latin letters,
and the centerpiece sculptures — Last Man (Guardians of the Forbidden Books),
2000, a set of three busts — stand on pedestals formed to resemble stacked
volumes.
The effect is comparable to that of Shelley’s enormous broken statue, for
the poet knew of the implications of sculpture — it is a lesson in the folly
of pride in the face of the decimation of time. All will fall, and the sculpture
will remain to remind us of our fate, to remind us of what Hamlet thought to
say to his lady as he contemplated the skull of Yorick: “let her paint an
inch thick, to this favor she must come.” For all the calling down the corridors
of time implied by the Latin incisings, for all the voices we may read from ages
long gone, there is a destiny that we know came to them, and will come to us.
We ourselves are voices out of time, siblings to the dead, and it always has
required a sculptor to remind us of the clock of the world, to recall to us that
we are passing instants. Master sculptors know this and warn us, warn us against
our dilettante idlings in the moment, and the warning is clear in the works of
Leonid Lerman. Leonid Lerman: The Last Man
McKee Gallery
Web Sites:
McKee Gallery: http://www.mckeegallery.com
Poem: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias.”
