The Sea from Voyages: Six Poems from White Buildings by Hart Crane

Leonard Baskin

1957 · Wood engraving · Drawings and Prints

Although Baskin became known for his striking figurative imagery, The Sea represents one of his more abstract depictions. He reproduced this print for the book Voyages, a series of illustrations that accompanied poems by the modernist American writer Hart Crane. In that text, Crane employed sensuous oceanic imagery to muse on a beloved paramour, now understood to be the Danish sailor Emil Opffer. Language such as "fresh ruffles of surf" and "ribboned water lanes" recalls the dynamic swirls and streaks of The Sea. Baskin may have found an extra layer of meaning in Crane’s death, whereby the poet drowned in the Gulf of Mexico in an alleged suicide following a failed advance on a boatsman.

Artist

Leonard Baskin

Date

1957

Medium

Wood engraving

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of Armand J. Fred Ferretti and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, 2002