Art: Plaster Critters

Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History put on a little show this week to make the weariest museum trudger smile: eight plaster statuettes of fabled animals. Among them were Pegasus sitting exhausted on a cloud, Leda tête-à-tête with a Donald-Duckish swan,Brer Rabbit battling the rude Tar Baby, Androcles nursing a huge, unhappy lion, and the elastic-nebbed elephant and tenacious crocodile of Kipling’s Just So Stories. What the sculptures lacked in naturalism they more than made up for in naturalness.

Modeled ten years ago by Sculptor Paul Wright, they had never before been publicly shown. Wright, who was only 23 when he made them, had found the statuettes a great relief from his regular museum job: modeling made-to-measure dummies for the preparators to fasten skins to. He had long since left the museum staff, was busy building a sculpture studio in Corales, N.Mex. when word came that his sideline creations were at last going on show. “Why,” Wright crowed, “I’d almost forgotten the little critters existed!”