SCULPTURE 1959: Elegant, Brutal & Witty

WHEN Florentine Sculptor Benvenuto Cellini sought to perfect the rediscovered art of bronze casting in the 16th century, he kept the furnace roaring for days and finally set the roof on fire. Now when a fire breaks out in a sculptor's studio, it is more likely to be caused by an unwatched oxyacetylene torch. The material may still be bronze, but there is an added glitter of stainless steel, phosphor or chrome. The great difference is that Cellini produced in bronze a famous Perseus; today's sculptors too often end up with a glittering space divider or macabre wall hanging. Startling and even elegant as such modern objects can be (see color pages), they tend more to snag the imagination like an unexpected piece of barbed wire than hold the eye transfixed in admiration and awe.

But artists have never been asked to do more than reflect the time in which they live. By this standard a selection of 79 works (priced from $75 to $22,000) by 66 U.S. artists (two-thirds under 40) now on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art makes a lively commentary on the present state of modern man's concerns and anxieties as well as his changing view of beauty. The broad selection chosen from some 700 entries underlines another fact: whether today's sculpture starts off as junk and ends up as art. or the other way around, there is a lot of it. Says Art Critic James Thrall Soby (who served on the selection committee ): "I think no fair-minded person can look at the present show and not realize that a spark has ignited our younger sculptors, whether they carve or cast their works, weld them or convert into estimable jewels the wry tiaras of the junkyard."

Radiant Centers. Today's sculptors can be roughly divided into two categories: those who take their clues from the materials they are working and the others who start with an image, then shape materials to embody their vision. The richly decorative materials-first approach is handsomely demonstrated in one whole red-walled gallery at the museum's show. There Italian-born Harry Bertoia's Wall Piece ($750) melds steel, bronze and phosphor into an elegant decoration. Bertoia makes no claim for it beyond stating he considers it "a few squares arranged in a quiet way around a stand." His Flower ($900) proves he can do a welded screen in the round. It also happens to be more personal: "I had just returned from Italy and was feeling wonderful. The essential feeling I was trying for was to begin at the center and radiate out.''

Web Tree ($475) by Hawaiian-born Abe Satoru and Missouri-born Carlus Dyer's Scintillation of Elements ($3,200) both vaguely recall nature in the form of tree or cactus. As sculpture, they aim to catch and diffuse light; at the same time they are as open and transparent as the skeleton skyscrapers or factories that modern man sees all about him. A sub division of the materials-first group is made up of those who derive their inspiration from the swirling intricacies of mathematical forms. Typical of these is the brass Column ($900) by Greek-born Stephanie Scuris, who assembles rods more handsomely than any TV aerial manufacturer has yet managed to do.

Poignant Goats. The modern sculptors of the image first school have no fear of the big subject, but they are inclined to view life with mordant eye. Features are squashed until they look like garden hats; figures develop wry distortions and alarming dropsies. Emotion ranges from compassion to morbid introspection and wry humor--anything, in fact, except that calm which the classicists held essential to sculptural beauty. For Sculptress Louise Kruger, 35. birth is depicted in her Newborn Child ($400), a volume of hammered and welded copper that seems all mouth and umbilical stub. Death for Manhattan-born Joseph Antonio Messina, is summed up in his bronze-cast Bird ($550). which was inspired by a dead bird he found on the beach and is typical of the horrid fascination that decay holds for many modern sculptors. Messina recalls: "That morning the wind moved the bird's feathers, so that it looked still alive. In my work I tried to penetrate into it, almost with the idea of finding within a last breath of life." The bird apparently wasted away in Sculptor-Messina's imagination; in its cast form, it is merely a withered skeleton picked clean by the elements. It still evokes the shock of unexpected death, still looks as if it ought to be lying on a beach rather than on a living room table.

Birds of no conceivable feather are a fascination of Richard Stankiewicz (TIME, Dec. 31, 1956), a pioneer of junk sculpture who in recent years has scrounged the scrap yards of Manhattan's Lower East Side for enough raw, rusty material to turn out a whole series called City Bird, Country Bird, My Bird, and one simply No Bird. The Golden Bird Is Often Sad ($2,500) looks like a sawed-off bazooka, but Stankiewicz sees it as "just a big old .introspective bird, standing on one leg, brooding and withdrawn."

Goats have become the special concern of California Sculptor Jack Zajac, 29. When he first saw them trussed up for market in North Africa, he recalls, "I was struck by their tender plea for preservation of life. The lines of the beasts are both sharp and pure, and yet there is something quite voluptuous about them." For Zajac a work such as his Bound Goat ($1,500) needs only a hop and a bound to move from image to symbol. Says he: "These animals are in dreadfully poignant positions. I think my preoccupation with sacrificial animals is because I feel they are universal symbols that recall the Passion. I do not idealize. I want these things to appear tragic; man is."

Strident Prophet. Though many works by the moderns seem like despairing cries in a man-made wilderness, actually a whole new realm has been carved out as the domain of 20th century sculpture. Whether he admits it or not, there is hardly a sculptor in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition who does not owe some debt to the founders: Alexander Calder. whose mobiles first set metal spinning through the air; Jacques Lipchitz, who turned bronze into writhing rope that sketched forms in empty space; David Smith, the dean and still the most inventive of the sculpture welders, whose 9 1/2ft.-tall Fifteen Planes ($15,000) of welded steel plate is a brutal and beautiful image that seems to cry, "Halt!"

Prophet ($16,000), a 7 1/2ft. figure of Monel metal covered with nickel-silver by Dentist-turned-Sculptor Seymour Lipton, is both warning and challenge. "I was thinking of Isaiah," Lipton explains. "The work suggests a strident person, a gesture of stepping forward. But the work is also a challenge to the observer to become involved in a whole new language of form belonging to the present age." The U.S.'s new sculpture has indeed developed a provocative new vocabulary if not a language of form. But a vocabulary is not a work of art. So far, the new sculpture seems only a vernacular, still in search of its first master user--and its first masterpiece.

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