Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
For results outside of Tributes please use the general search or click here.
"The Human Form is a fiery forge." William Blake
We are now made heir to an immense treasure. The bounteous treasure of a life's-work forging. His thousandfold of drawings were laced with the linear frenzy of the search for forms: they always opened truth to beauty. And in paintings and with his last great strength, sculpture, he remade man into a terrain, a morphology of the marvelous. Discovering and refashioning new relationships, he lit up the interior darkness, as torsos parted and revealed the castellated forms within. The very body of man was aggravated by his persistent prying and scraping and probing and sounding into a noble carriage of expressive power; refulgent and lambent, terrible and hateful, always grand, granting us a deeper image of man. This prodigious man, this child of Gruenewald, laid open the center of man; revealed the lineaments of man's body, its wisdom and horror. Nothing human was alien to Lebrun's vision, and through his vision he made us see man as in "an ecstasy of fumbling" move deeper and deeper into the gloom and density of the Dantean context.
Before the drawings for Dante, Lebrun was constrained to contend with the heart- and brain-puncturing reality of Buchenwald and Dachau in paintings and drawings. He felt it a lapse, an evasion, for an artist not to deal with this subject and its unspeakably horrible content. Here is wonder, and here is Lebrun's grandeur; that so charged and inhuman a disaster could prove plastically tenable, and make such filth-clotted truths live precariously but enduringly in our brains. Few artists in our times were with such passion enkindled as to broach the ghastly and the terrible and to fashion beauty of those truths. Lebrun is for all times kin to Goya.
I once called him a prophet and he with grimace said, "No." But his was the prophet's gesture and his words were eloquent with prophetic power: "…knowledge of the facts of the human form, plastically translated into terms of its own image and likeness, is still an unexplored field and the only realm proper to the art of image making." Thus as early as 1932, when those words were written, is made manifest his implacable commitment to the human figure. In 1959, twenty-seven years later, the words reiterate the idea, but they are deeper, encumbered with wisdom, and they say, "the vertebrate marvel has new sight for new eyes. Its terrain cannot be prefabricated by geometry, nor found through bizarre accident. It may, now and then, condescend to be measured by love."
The man is inseparable from his work. Bound together are the fire, the tempest, and the fury of his trenchant living frame. The physical fabric of his work is his palpable, living monument.