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LIFE
November 7, 1938

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GREAT TECHNICAL ABILITY MARKS CORNELIA CHAPIN'S 4-FT. GRANITE FROG

SPEAKING OF PICTURES
(continued)

making a record and catching a likeness was the most important part of their job. Copying, without understanding, the mannerisms of a great past has produced such classic nonsense as Horatio Greenough's 20-ton statue of a half-nude George Washington, now in the Smithsonian Institution (see p. 5.) It cost the Government $35,000.
The modern sculptor, freed by photography from the need to imitate nature, has other problems. Like modern painters, he is interested in design, in simplification, in form. The intrinsic material of sculpture has a deep beauty of its own, whether it be a block of marble, a granite boulder, a massive tree trunk or a golden cauldron of liquid bronze. Modern sculptors are always striving to preserve this beauty in their material. Thus the glittering bronze of José de Rivera's Bust (see p.4) has a richness and dignity that only a great master could equal in marble. Dina Melicov's Girl on a Horse is cast in aluminum that its shifting silver shadows may suggest speed. The startling pose of Chaim Gross's Mother and Child (below) was a dictated partly by the sculptor's desire for rugged surging movement, partly by the fact that the pala blanca log from which it was carved was once a jungle tree.

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CHAIM GROSS'S 5-FT. "MOTHER AND CHILD" CARRIES ALL EYES UPWARD