Carvers & Casters

Seldom have U. S. amateurs of the arts had so good a chance to survey contemporary sculpture as they had last week, provided they would visit two cities. City No. 1 was Cleveland, whose Museum of Art concluded a comprehensive show of works by the best known men in present-day sculpture. City No. 2 was Manhattan, where exhibitions showed new work by some of the same sculptors and good work by several up-&-coming candidates. To those who attended the great exhibition of American sculpture at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1929, these shows were striking evidence of how far modern sculpture has drifted from marble grace toward the representation of massive "primitive" simplicity, in a multitude of materials.

Cleveland's show, "Sculpture of Our Time," included 103 pieces by 60 artists, borrowed from museums, galleries, private collectors and the sculptors themselves. One of the weightiest pieces in the exhibition was Head of an Indian, done in 3,300 Ib. of Mexican onyx by Swedish Sculptor Carl Milles. Its transportation from St. Paul, Minn, indicated the ambitiousness of the Museum's show. Other monumental statues were a bronze by the late, great Gaston Lachaise, Standing Woman, and an already famed piece in marble by William Zorach, Mother and Child.

Especially fascinating to Cleveland visitors were the works of two famed European experimentalists, Spaniard Pablo Gargallo and Rumanian Constantin Brancusi. Gargallo, who died in 1934, was a blacksmith whose skill with metals helped him to do some of the most intricate abstractions in modern sculpture. His bronze, Prophet (see cut), was a figure constructed half of metal and half of empty space, as a piece of music is built of sound and silence. Brancusi's work was represented by a torso composed of three softly melting cylinders and a bust, Mile Pogany, showing the subject as geometry in meditation.

Three sculptors included in the Cleveland show, Zorach, Heinz Warneke and John Flannagan, got a more varied display of their work in Manhattan's Passedoit Gallery, sharing honors with Spaniard Jose de Creeft, whose Semitic Head was the most impressive single piece on display. Done in beaten lead, this dark maiden was also highest priced ($4,000) in the exhibit.

Manhattan's Midtown Galleries this week showed many an excellent piece of sculpture by saturnine Herbert Ferber, 31-year-old second cousin to Novelist Edna. Like Gargallo, Sculptor Ferber has worked in a blacksmith's shop to familiarize himself with metals, but his favorite materials are wood and stone which he frequently picks up on motor trips to Connecticut. Ferber has been working for only six years but has already been through four great influences in that period: African, Egyptian, Mexican and Lachaise. Best whittling: The Wrestlers, in mahogany, and Worker, in lignum-vitae. Best stone work: Cat, from a cobblestone (see cut).

In Manhattan's Delphic Studios appeared likewise the first one-man show of a cosmopolitan whose work has ranged from wrought-iron railings for the Grandstand and Terrace of the Saratoga Race Track to a bust of Couturiere Elizabeth Hawes: pink-cheeked Alexander Stoller, who likes to work in white plaster and limestone. Most critical interest last week was won by a terra cotta panel of a pony chorus called Dancers (see cut), a heroic bronze, Standing Nude, and a solid, primitive figure in limestone, Crouching Woman.

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