Viewing page 4 of 14

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

From
Dorothy Herzog,
Director,Art Service,
344 West 72nd Street,
New York, N.Y.
'Phone: Endicott 2-8964.

For the first time in several years, the [[strikethrough]] internationally famous [[/strikethrough]] American sculptor, [[strikethrough]] Miss [[/strikethrough]] Cornelia Van A. Chapin, returns to New York from Europe to exhibit at the Fifteen Gallery, 37 West 57th Street, New York City from April 4th through April 16. [[strikethrough]] 13 and perhaps April 25. [[/strikethrough]] Miss Chapin exhibited in Paris last year both individually and with her master, the great Spanish sculptor, Mateo Hernandez. The pieces Miss Chapin will have on exhibition were especially brought over from her Paris studio for her "one man" show at the Fifteen Gallery.

Born in the township of Waterford, Connecticut, Miss Chapin is nevertheless a native New Yorker whose family, both on her mother's and her father's side, is rooted deep in the early history of the United States. While she comes from a distinguished line of statesmen, soldiers, and writers, Miss Chapin is the only member of her family ever to select sculpture as a career. But Miss Chapin's sculpture is not sculpture as so frequently practised today. Miss Chapin carves direct from life with the authority and power of one whose genius breathes authority and power on the warmth of the strength with which she carves her figures of animals, of birds, of humans direct into the volcanic rock, or granite, or ebony, or marble, or what medium she selects. Miss Chapin makes no model of her figures before beginning her work. She makes no cast of her work. She calls upon no second or third party to aid her in her work. Direct from life she carves with the cold stone growing warm and alive under her creative strength and beauty.

Like the great Spanish sculptor, Mateo Hernandez, with whom Miss Chapin began to study in Paris in 1934, and with whom she has studied since, she translates her conception direct into the stone itself. What Faith Dennis wrote of Mateo Hernandez in the October, 1936 "Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be likewise -- and is, by Mateo Hernandez -- applied to Miss Chapin:
"There are no intermediary steps to dim or distort it (i.e., her work), no other hands or minds to confuse the issue, as is often the case in a work first