Viewing page 94 of 154

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

artists can be assisted deserves the fullest support. 

Indoor and outdoor settings have both, their advantages, just as each has its less congenial features. Sculpture designed expressly for use in the open fields finds a greatly enhancing natural ally in sun and air, wind and rain. It throve in the al fresco adventure last Spring. Conversely, portrait heads, busts, and delicate, intimate little forms can often seem lost or ill at ease deprived of the comfort of roof or walls- comfort not now, in Brooklyn, witheld. It is a matter of give-and-take

Perhaps some day our sculptors will have an exhibiting establishment of their own, in which might be incorporated a spacious arcaded open court, flanked by rooms, large and small. Meanwhile, the interested spectator should try to dramatize as well as he can a piece of sculpture's intended function- giving Cornelia Van A. Chapin's stupendous granite frog, for instance, a nice luxuriant garden jungle, and Warren Wheelock's Walt Whitman (reproduced) nothing short of a public square, in which the world- Walt's world- may be hailed with stentorian, if stylized lustiness.

It is the most amusing, and also the most generally satisfying characterization of "the good gray poet" I have seen, this Whit-man in plastic dress. The figure is forty inches high; and while one might be a little rash in saying it should be enlarged to forty feet, at least that would be carrying an essentially heroic embodiment in the right direction. 

Another work- "Industry" by Robert Cronbach, reproduced-not alone invited but vehemently demands employment of the heroic scale. A fifteen inch plaster may not attract excited crowds; how-ever, were this very excellent archi-tectural design (so alive with an interplay of dramatic light and shadow) increased in size until its dimensions matched the scope of its implicit or potential decorative serviceability, the result would, one feels sure, be highly rewarding. I hope the architects will look at it and jot a reminder in their note-books. 

While we are on the subject of scale, what about Ahron Ben-Schumuel's "Wrestlers" in granite? That powerful conception ought triumphantly to lend itself to the magnitude-at least-of life. And Genevieve Karr Hamlin's "Unison" (reproduced) could advantageously be expanded, in both directions, from the full-face figure (the now imaginary projected figures on the right appearing, of course, in reverse) to form an architectural frieze- though the building would have, I daresay, to be dedicated to repose, and does it exist? Perhaps our world of tomorrow (not the one at Flushing Meadows, but the sequel to which it is to point) will furnish some miraculous haven ....

Sonia Gordon Brown's life-sized Melicov and Héléne Sardeau (despite the silver gilt on her "Woman With Mirror," which is horrifying to behold)-these, among other sculptors, help keep the show in Brooklyn out of trouble.

A show it is then, that contains much meritorious work, a little really outstanding, some indifferent or of poor quality. As a group demonstration it argues progress and points the forward way. However, I think it might be well (and still, I hope, on the constructive side) to run a prudent storm signal up the mast of Mr. Baur's previously quoted salute to courage and enterprise. And I shall try to be brief.

With the "departure from out worn canons" and the espousal of the "frankly experimental front of modernism," there can be no hint of a quarrel here. At the same time, it seems to me that in our readiness to applaud all that is progressive and in our eagerness to see put tellingly to work all the factors essential to creative as opposed to academic expression, we should beware of replacing "outworn" canons just with new ones that may quickly prove deterrents, mere en-tombing, rut-binding formulae - no better, in the end, no whit better, than the old.

One current trend in American sculpture to which such peril appears ominously to attach (and of this phase alone I shall speak now) is that toward oversimplification; toward a confining of the plastic form within what often wears the aspect of an inert, "unworked" mass. 

This type of simplification I have in mind is not that that stems from such sculptors as Brancusi and Archipenko, whose abstract designs rely to so large an extent upon highly finished, polished surfaces. This may also, of course - and in some degree has-become an accepted stock recipe in America; but it pertains to a decorative realm within which the procedure finds facile justification and raises few taxing problems. 

What I have in mind is instead, the sort of "roughshod" simplification exemplified (for so long almost uniquely here) by the work of John B. Flannagan. Following the precept that forms should not be wrought but rather that they should be released from within the stone itself, our sculptors have increasingly wooed understatement until now they seem to have made a positive fetish of it, and ironically enough, produce what is neither wrought nor released. 

By way of concrete instances, one may refer to certain figures in this show by Alonzo Hauser, Ward Montague, Louise Cross, Maurice Glickman, Polygnotos Vagis, John Hovannes (whose "Coquette" is, however, smoothly flowing in its contours, not roughly inarticulate), Cesare Stea, who stylizes, and Jose de Creeft. It should be noted that