Art: Out in the Open

The Georgian mansion had seen the day when 30 guests could be seated at the Sheraton banquet table, and when it took a staff of 14 to keep up the house and 18 in the garden. The owner was John S. Phipps, whose father had made a fortune with Andrew Carnegie, and who had built for himself in Old Westbury, L.I., a regal private park for quiet ponds and hemlock hedges. Last week the “guests” were the paying kind who had come to see one of the most delightful art exhibits of the summer.

A year ago the Phipps clan opened up the estate to the public, but it was the energetic sportswoman and socialite, Mrs. Ogden Phipps, wife of one of John Phipps’s nephews, who got the idea for an exhibit of 150 years of American sculpture. She assembled a formidable committee of artists and museum experts, soon had the gardens populated with 89 pieces which seemed to take on new life in their outdoor setting. Last week Mrs. Phipps announced that the show had become so popular that it would stay open an extra month until the end of August.

The earliest artist shown is William Rush, who was born in 1756 and became the nation’s first professional sculptor. His Music is a graceful wooden girl who is as pleasing in her mute way as the muse she represents. When it came to women, Rush’s 19th century successors were even more gallant than he. John Rogers’ Lost Pleiad shows American sculpture at its most blatantly sentimental. Daniel French’s Memory is a matronly nude shown brooding about some lost and precious moment, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ golden Diana is as winsome as the larger original that once graced the top of the old Madison Square Garden.

The sentimental side of U.S. art never vanished completely: the show has a revealing number of small animals and little girls. But the modern imagination bursts out in all directions. Isamu Noguchi’s Double Bird, seen against a deep green hedge, looks like a piece of exotic calligraphy done in white marble. David Smith has produced a Hudson River Landscape of delicate bronze, while Theodore Ros-zak’s bristling sculptures seem to spring from the ground like wild and angry plants. As in all shows, art sometimes seems far removed from nature at the Old Westbury Gardens, but seldom has the one so complemented the other.