FIRST AND LAST

Southland Times, Issue 22499, 8 December 1934, Page 13

FIRST AND LAST

Arthur Putnam’s Life There are two pictures in Julie Heyneman’s “Desert Cactus” (Geoffrey Bles), her biography of Arthur Putnam, the Californian sculptor. As someone has said, it is difficult to pin genius to paper. Mme. Nijinsky did it in the biography of her husband, and in places Julie Heyneman reveals the true Putnam.

One of these episodes, the first recorded, tells of a tall, uncouth young man presenting himself at the Art Students’ League of San Francisco and asking for drawing lessons. The author set him to copy a model of the Discobolus.

He scarcely seemed to do more than glance at the cast I had pushed forward. It took me some moments to cross the wide expanse between the two studios, and I had scarcely had time to resume my own work before a loud “Hulloo! recalled me. “Say,” he shouted, Ive done it. Distinctly annoyed, I recrossed the room, with the stern intention of making him feel his inadequacy, but when my startled eyes took in that astonishing drawing, it was my own that was promptly brought home to me. There could be no further hesitation in my mind after realizing with what power he had used that thick unfamiliar stick of charcoal. He had not sharpened it, and in consequence his line was too heavy, but the force and simplicity with which he had expressed that cleanly modelled figure was an instant revelation. His temperament was difficult, and when he was set for success in Europe as a young man, he abruptly, returned to California. He called himself a desert cactus, which dies if it is watered—he was a hard man to help. In California he worked furiously, frantically and then came breakdown, loss of sensation, and the diagnosis of a tumour on the brain. There was little hope of recovery, but an amazing constitution pulled him through, and he lived on for twenty years, obese, semiparalysed, unable to work, liable to sudden storms of fury, estranged from those who had loved him best. One of the most terrible things in the book is the account of his last desperate effort at modelling.

"Come and see it. It is good. It is good,’* he assured them (his friends); but his agoniasd eyes sought the faces ox those who were silently staring at what he had so painfully accomplished. There were traces of his marvellous craftsmanship in the treatment of detail, but, as a whole, what he had perpetrated was grotesque, like the registering of a camera terribly out of focus. He needed none of their stammered assurances. Their verdict was his own. He knew—beyond further question or doubt. His body lived, but so far as his

creative ability was concerned he was a dead man. He lived on for some years, fortunately finding serenity before his death in 1930.