Swooping & Floating

Sculpture is thankless work these days. Private collectors and museums can seldom afford it, public buildings do without it; even Roman Catholic churches, which supported Western sculpture for centuries, now generally buy mass-produced statues of painted plaster (TIME, Jan. 17). The wonder is that sculptors keep going, and manage to chip out such new works as were shown at Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week.

It was the Whitney's twelfth annual mixed exhibition of contemporary U.S. sculpture and watercolors. On the whole, the watercolors had more quality than the stone, steel, wood and bronze figures on display. But if only because it was less familiar, sculpture stole the show.

Gumdrop Remembrance. Actually, frightful was the word for most of it, and the worst pieces were generally the ones that relied on ideas instead of shapes. (Low point: a head of Christ with a crown of bona fide barbed-wire thorns and chandelier pendants for tears.) But the abstractions seemed little better: Theodore Roszac's spiny steel Recollection of the Southwest looked no more handsome than a broken bedspring, and Leo Amino's colored plastic Remembrance of Things Past might have been mistaken for a highly original gumdrop display. Such eccentric exhibits made the few conservative examples of academic excellence (including a pair of female nudes by Raymond Puccinelli and Oldtimer William Zorach, both entitled Invocation) look even, finer than they really were.

The hits of the Whitney's show, as of any show, were the works in which form and content were so skillfully united as to be indistinguishable. Burr Miller's sleeping alabaster nude entitled Subconscious and Koren Der Harootian's swooping Sea Bird and Fish were two such sculptures.

Sunlit Boulder. Burly, balding Burr Miller began as a conservative figure sculptor. At 43, Miller best likes "carving nudes out of stone, but I also want to keep the quality of the stone itself, so I suppose I'm trying to blend realism and abstraction, in a way." The translucent alabaster boulder he used for Subconscious was what gave Miller his idea for the figure itself: "I used to turn the boulder and look at it a lot, in the sunlight that came in from the garden window, and after a while it got so I could practically see what I wanted to carve--as if it were floating there inside the stone."

Der Harootian's Sea Bird also owed much to the stone it came from--a 4-ft.-high slab of onyx. Pocked with chisel marks, it successfully simulated the feathery plunge of the bird; polished, it represented the wet scales of the fish. Der Harootian had deliberately exaggerated the size of the fish and taken vast liberties with the shape of the bird. The fact that they seemed far less abstract than they were in actuality was a measure of the sculptor's power to create illusion without slavish copying.

Armenian-born (in 1909), solemn little Der Harootian has carved 60 pieces since he switched from painting to sculpture nine years ago. He gets ideas for sculpture "from nature, from experiences, and from the Bible." While he never expects to get rich at it, Der Harootian considers sculpture "a beautiful profession. I wouldn't change it for anything in the world."

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