Art: Addition v. Subtraction

There are two ways of sculpturing—modeling and carving. Examples of each method were in the news last week.

In London, bumptious, brilliant Jacob Epstein unbared his new Lucifer (see cut) which looked something like a winged cigar-store Indian. It was less likely than his prodigiously progenitorial Adam to be exhibited by others for a cheap pornographic thrill (TIME, April 29, 1940). Lucifer had been modeled in clay, then cast in bronze, possessed the refined detail peculiar to modeled figures.

Epstein says modeling is “the creating of something out of nothing. An actual building up and getting to grips with the material.” Famed Fellow-Sculptor Jose de Creeft, a 60-year-old Spaniard who has lived in the U.S. since 1928, says scornfully that modelers work with “just mud.”

To support his preference, carving direct in stone or wood, De Creeft quotes Michelangelo (“sculpture is done by a process of removal”), soft-pedaling the fact that most of Michelangelo’s stone carvings were copied from studies which he modeled in wax, and that all of his bronzes were cast from modeled clay. De Creeft believes that a sculpture, like the chicken in the egg, is partially “preexistent” in the shape of the block, the grain, the texture. He thinks of himself as trying to “collaborate” with the stone to free the figure concealed inside it.

Last week an exhibition of De Creeft’s latest liberations opened in a Manhattan gallery. It proved that he does find his figures in stones, and keeps them there. Anyone could tell that his Aux Aguets (In Ambush) had been carved from a round boulder. His figures had none of the hovering aliveness of Epstein’s Lucifer, nor did they seem to think and gesture as some 15th-Century German cathedral carvings do. They just lay around—like beautiful rocks.