Art: Giants in Baltimore

Most theatrical of U. S. gallery showmen is the Baltimore Museum’s dark-haired, homely Leslie Cheek, who putters around in a paint-spattered sweat shirt thinking up ways to startle Baltimoreans into appreciating art. Last week more than 1,000 expectant people crowded the museum to see Director Cheek’s latest show. They were not disappointed. While a small string orchestra played Viennese waltzes and items from Gilbert & Sullivan, visitors gaped at 1) photographs and movies illustrating the history and technique of sculpture, 2) plaster casts and bronzes under blue and green spotlights, 3) in a basement auditorium, as a sideshow (35¢), a bevy of vacant-eyed, open-mouthed ballet dancers. The premiere ballerina, a half-clad blonde named Missouri, swooned in the arms of a sweating youth named Mississippi. They were giving a choreographic version of a famed group of statues: Carl Milles’ fountain The Meeting of the Waters, whose huge, wriggling nudes still cause bluenoses to avert their eyes when crossing Aloe Plaza in St. Louis (TIME, May 30).

All this was buildup. The main attraction was stocky, bob-haired Carl Milles himself. He had come from Detroit to make a personal appearance at the biggest Carl Milles sculpture show ever held anywhere. Looking like one of his own rugged-faced Tritons, Swedish-born Sculptor Milles (amid cries of “louder”) quietly addressed the crowd in his own Scandinavian brand of English, expressed pleasure at all the exhibitionism (“It is the first time an exhibit of my work shows all the steps what we have to do”), spoke feelingly of the problems of outdoor sculpture. Often, said he, when a sculptor sees his work for the first time outside his studio, “he wishes to shot (sic) himself.”

The guts of the show were 30 hulking specimens of Milles sculpture. In the museum’s court stood a plaster replica of The Meeting of the Waters. Outside the entrance pranced the equally famous bronze Folke Filbyter equestrian statue (original in Linköping, Sweden), its carefully matured green patina turned a soupy grey by orange floodlights. Inside, Tritons, mermaids, strong-faced Nordic mythological characters, Aztec-and Assyrian-looking monoliths, squirmed and writhed with the power and suppressed energy that only a master sculptor can give to inanimate stone and bronze.

Even hardheaded critics, who have long held that sculptural Virtuoso Milles sacrifices purity of line to superficial melodrama, had to admit that few living sculptors could match the sound & fury of his mystical, Norse fairyland in sculpture. Most impressive of the works displayed was his most recent: a surging, scowling winged bronze figure called Monument to Genius (see cut), which cut loose from Milles’ polished style and told its story with roughhewn realism.

Carl Milles (born Carl Emil Wilhelm Anderson) is regarded today as the finest monumental sculptor in the U. S. Because his family thought the name Anderson (which sounds to Swedes like “Smith” to Englishmen) was too common, it took for a surname the father’s nickname (“Mille”). In Paris he became a friend and assistant to the late Auguste Rodin. After World War I he got a job as professor of modeling at the Royal Academy of Stockholm. But the Swedish critics disliked the distortions and fearsome grimaces of his statues, never conceded him a top ranking among Swedish artists. It was not until 1926, when curious Londoners gathered together a large Milles exhibition at the Tate Gallery, that Carl Milles became known to the outside world as Sweden’s No. 1 sculptor. Following year Chicago’s Architects Holabird & Root brought him to the U. S. to do a fountain for their Michigan Square Building in Chicago. Then Detroit’s Philanthropist George Booth, who was trying to found an ideal art colony at nearby Cranbrook, invited Milles to teach sculpture there. Since then Milles has lived at Cranbrook, dividing the honors of its famous Art Academy with Scandinavian Modern Architect Eliel Saarinen. Sculptor Milles teaches, but goes on hewing and casting too. Says he, of his bold, agonized, monumental figures: “You see their faces are ugly. That is why they didn’t like me in Sweden. I like salt in their faces. I do not like prettiness in figures. It is all right by a charming woman, but in art, no.”