Love's Labor Lost

What were the two intertwined figures doing on the park grass in the heart of Amsterdam? Burgomaster Arnold D'Ailly bustled up for a close look last week, and turned a fiery red. Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz had called his big, blocky, semi-abstract bronze The Couple, and it was all too clearly a labor of love. The burgomaster ordered the sculpture removed that very night to the museum cellar from which it was borrowed.

The Couple had been the central attraction of a park show of modern statues. Discovering that it was gone, six Amsterdam sculptors, whose works were also included in the show, called a protest meeting. The meeting soon adjourned to the park itself, where the sculptors helped one another remove their own six works.

"We'd all intuitively reached the same decision," one of them said later. "Maybe the burgomaster's action can be explained, but for us it's indefensible. The Lipchitz is a fine bit of plastic art, and, anyway, not many people realized what it represented. Most everybody thought it was a turtle." Another added: "The Couple was a pretty statue, and it looked just fine the way it stood there. I don't know what the burgomaster should have done, but it was a real nice show and it's a pity it had to end this way."

Sculptor Lipchitz himself was far from the scene of the fracas, working at home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. When he heard the news, the fierce, brilliant old Frenchman grinned like a turtle. "How touched I am," he said. "How warm in my heart."

Lipchitz remembered The Couple well. While he talked of it, his hands shaped the air as if he were caressing his bronze: "I made it in 1928. That summer I had lost my father and, three weeks later, my sister. I was desperate. But then my optimistic nature came out: I saw that life must go on. From this came the statue. Life must go on--that's what the statue expresses. It is lovers, which means affirmation, but it also looks like an animal in pain. This is because life is a tragic scene and a hopeful scene both at once. So now some people say the sculpture is obscene? That's very interesting. I don't understand people. Nothing more pure ever came out of myself than this work."

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