Art: From a Wheelchair

Henry Toledano’s first one-man show in Manhattan last year had the critics comparing him to Goya and Ensor and brought customers on the run. In four weeks he sold 19 of the pen & ink drawings on display. Last week Toledano’s second exhibition was drawing just as appreciative crowds to the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the museum itself quickly bought one of the pictures.

What makes Toledano’s sudden success all the more surprising is that he is unable to stir from his wheelchair. An accident at birth seriously injured his central nervous system. He has extreme difficulty speaking and only limited control of his arms and hands. But with brain and eyes unimpaired, Toledano got a good education from tutors, became a voracious reader. In his early years Toledano hoped to become a writer; later he dabbled in sketching. In 1952, when he was 42, he produced a cartoon lampooning Presidential Candidate Eisenhower that the Democrats blew up for a Madison Square Garden rally. An artist friend saw the cartoon and encouraged him to begin drawing seriously each day. Last year an official of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art saw his work, was so impressed that he suggested the first Toledano show.

The India-ink drawings on view in Baltimore represent nightmarish characters and situations that fascinate and disturb simultaneously. In Dancer’s Whirl, Toledano presents a ball spun by two spidery hands, symbolic of “the world in its present condition of frenzied agitation.” Two Half Moons, or The Disturbed Camel, sets against the night sky a haloed camel being worshipped by three Arabs who look rather like melting vanilla cones. Guardians of the Primal, which the Baltimore Museum bought, shows a bird-faced man doing a minuet with a man-faced bird; between them on a string stretches a fanged serpent. Toledano says he was trying to show “the seeds of life and the forces which protect it,” using human, bird and animal parts to create “a synthesis of life.” In Parallel, Toledano’s intent is clearer. As he explains it, “The man and the vase, the animate and the inanimate, resemble each other very much. The joke is on man here. Man considers himself the crown of creation, but he is really empty, like a vase.”

There is something vaselike about the immobility of Toledano himself, though he is far from being an empty vessel. He must sit and wait for the visual impressions which are at least half of any artist’s material. But the impressions obviously crowd in upon him, to spark a fantasy life far richer than that of more mobile but less perceptive artists.