Lawrence and Pascin

By sheer coincidence the two modern artists who devoted their lives to exploring the mysteries of sex—the writer D. H. Lawrence and the painter Jules Pascin—were both born in 1885 and both died in 1930. It is less accidental that their work appeared on the scene shortly after the inquiries of Freud, Weininger, and others had flung open the door to a frank discussion of man’s sexual relations. Nor was it by chance that their best work was done in that era of moral turbulence following just after a great world war.

Today there is no scarcity of critical volumes that inform us of D. H. Lawrence’s stature as an artist, and most of his own writing is in print and in demand. With his painter-counterpart, the case is somewhat different. No full-length Pascin biography is available in English. Although excellent Pascins are owned by the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and twenty others, none of them has ever staged a Pascin show. (Amusingly enough, the Cincinnati Museum last year included his “Nude with a Green Hat” in a list of its recent acquisitions by American artists. The Bulgarian-born cosmopolite had chanced to become an American citizen at one point in his career.) Some of the very best Pascins were buried for thirty-odd years at Merion, Pennsylvania, in the fabulous but nearly inaccessible collection of the late misanthropist, Albert C. Barnes. Only this year has a Pennsylvania court order opened this gallery to the public.