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Art S. Lane Faison, Jr., THE condition of sculpture in America today offers little encouragement to the earnest beginner. To put it mildly, the sculptor's lot is not a happy one. A few sculptors will survive the triple attrition of neglect, economic need, and the passage of time. A few will sell one or two works to five or six museums and a clutch of daring collectors. Meanwhile, public commissions will continue to go to a coterie of walled-in 3-D illustrators and Beaux Arts ghosts handy with dead allegory. State Senators and national Congressmen will continue to authorize the expenditure of public moneys for marbleized mementos of the victory of Pennsylvania over New Jersey or the entry of G.I. Joe into Valhalla. All this is possible because almost nobody looks at sculpture. More than painting, sculpture is rooted in the physical existence of things - their displacement of space, their weight, density, texture, perforation, ductility, tensile strength. It is not detached or set on a wall but something engaged in the same space in which we live and move. It claims our attention in the same terms as other objects, and yet its whole meaning is expressed in absolutely different terms. More than painting, sculpture breaks the Second Commandment. Thomas Eakins won the battle of the nude (posthumously) for American painting, but nude sculpture still has to overcome the folklore of the sideshow, whether it be Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, touring the country a century ago propelled by churchly certificates of respectability, or Jacob Epstein's Adam of the day before yesterday. In the English-speaking world sculpture and ethics have long been mortal enemies. The outcome of their combat provides a way of distinguishing whole cultures. Maillol's greatest masterpiece, a slumberous seated woman, plastic as Poussin and silent as Cezanne, is with utmost exactness entitled Mediterranean. Between the Middle Ages and Henry Moore it is difficult to name a single British sculptor except Sir Christopher Wren's helper, Grinling Gibbons, whose work is larger confined to decorative woodcarving. (Even Gibbons was born in Amsterdam, though probably of English parents.) It is tempting to account for sculpture's difficulties in America in economic terms. We have it from Bea Lillie, that the best things in life are very expensive. On that bases sculpture should rate high, but the folklore lowers a curtain between our sculptures and our millionaires. Still another threat has recently emerged - reproductions, real painted plaster ones, of approved masterworks from the past. Our national cemetery at Arlington is the home of the newest and most monstrous memorial to a moment of greatest American heroism. It would be more appropriately placed at the entrance to the Rose Bowl, or even on a platform of the I.R.T. How sculptures with a fresh and penetrating view of life keep going in the face of all these obstacles is a story of another kind of heroism. At least two of our best sculptors are dentists; some others are teachers (teaching is a profession, not a refuge); and some have private incomes. This is less heroic, but in our culture it is certainly no sin. The probable outcome is that many fine minds and talents go in other directions altogether. Arthur Pope's remark, made The NATION Jan. 15, 1955
