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and subsequent interpretations--in which sculpture is further defined as "that branch of the fine arts which chisels or carves...imitations of natural objects, chiefly the human form, and represents such objects in their true proportions of length, breadth and thickness..."

All of which creates a somewhat bewildering atmosphere for such crusaders of modern art as Alfred H. Barr, Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art, who, defending modern art with almost Calvinist intensity against its public detractors and last-ditch Academicians finds Uncle Sam also against him. For Uncle Sam says, too, that this wire construction or those two indefinable shapes by Henry Moore are not sculpture at all since they do not represent natural--human or animal--forms.

Much as the nursery school teacher valiently seeks for one redeeming factor to mention in her report on the wayward child, so the examiners try to be helpful. One of them, for instance, aware that under no [[strikethrough]] circumstances [[strikethrough]] stretch of the imagination could a bottle be [[strikethrough]] considered a natural form, gazed lengthily at Boccioni's "Development of a Bottle in Space," trying earnestly to find an apple image in the chunky, abstract shapes.

James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim Museum, a deeply poetic man despite his brawn, was standing by an examiner one day while the first bit of a marble sculpture by the abstract artist Hans Arp emerged from its crate. In rich Celtic tones Sweeney muttered, "Ah! The human curve divine!" "Human curve?" said the examiner, clutching excitedly at the phrase, "O.K. then. It's sculpture."

But the most famous controversy over "what is sculpture" occurred in 1928, when the photographer Edward Steichen imported Brancusi's "Bird in Flight" as a work of art, only to discover that the custom's collector considered it a manufacture of metal and therefore dutiable