by Efram L. Burk

According to Lethem, Arc of Gravity, is one of his most significant paintings, for it embodies many of the themes that have been important to him in the eighties and nineties-figures caught in moments of crisis, often involving fear, confrontation, and guilt. Lethem faces life's tragic side-:---its vexing questions and enigmas, and in Arc of Gravity, the nature of profound absence. There are a host of lost objects circulating throughout Lethem's conjured space-:---gloves, scissors, glasses, a pocket watch, ring, book, shoe, dog, and, most importantly, the idea of an existence coming to an abrupt end. This fatal moment is that of the American poet, John Berryman, (the figure in the upper portion of the canvas),who hurtles towards the abyss, after jumping to his death from a bridge in Minneapolis in 1972. Lethem was reading Berryman's book of poems, The Dream Songs, when he was working on Arc of Gravity, and identified with the writer's central dilemma-his obsessive feelings of culpability and loss, stemming from his childhood shock of his father's suicide. The result was the taking of his own life, an act caught by Lethem. Underneath the sprawled-out body of their son, Berryman's parents hand over to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, a family portrait, which will forever be incomplete. Lethem's responses to the anguish, like Berryman's in The Dream Songs, consist of irony, ambiguous word play, and dialogue between characters. Ultimately Lethem braves the catastrophic only to find hope and acceptance in humanity. The optimistic component in this, one of his darkest works, might be the amorphous white form that floats in the far left, acting as sustenance for the afterlife. Altogether, the objects in this large oil leave a deeply-felt resonance, be they lost or found.

Efram L. Burk
University of South Carolina at Beaufort