Art: Woman on a Pedestal

Smooth as ice and sweet-looking as ice cream, they stood naked and serene for all to see. They had names like Shirley, Janet, Dottie and Barbara. Their creator, who had carved them in stone and wood, and exhibited them in a Manhattan gallery last week, talked of the little statues with impartial enthusiasm. Sculptor Oronzio Maldarelli, a sure-handed classicist, had spent 13 years on them, working almost entirely from memory and imagination, and had named the figures after friends as a courtesy. “I’m trying to create form, beautiful harmonies of shapes. I wouldn’t waste a minute on just the physical aspect, but it’s the darndest thing, my work looks physical all the same.”

A goldsmith’s son, Maldarelli was apprenticed at 17 to a jeweler. He earned a fair living as a jewelry designer, studied sculpture at night—first at Cooper Union, then at the National Academy of Design, and finally for seven years at the Beaux Arts. Now he is 56, and has his own students at Columbia University.

Maldarelli looks like a chunky businessman, mild and bespectacled. The respectful attention he gets from art critics seems to mean less to him than the affection of his students, who call him “Mai.” Wearing a hat made of newspaper to keep the chips out of his hair, he lets them look on while he carves, knocks off now & then to serve tea. “When I get bored with myself I go and see what the students are up to. I don’t dictate, and I don’t make them work too much from the model. The important thing is memory; I harp on that. For instance, coming across the campus this afternoon I saw a girl with her skirt blown back against her thighs. Now you can be inspired by a lovely glimpse like that, but never by copying. Right?”

His students sometimes tease Maldarelli with his consuming interest in the female figure. “I used to do abstractions,” he says, “but you can put that down to research. Right now I’m working on a panel with a man in it, but I’m miserable with it. Now just the other day a student brought me a figure she said was supposed to represent a soul fettered by society.

‘You chose the wrong medium,’ I told her. ‘You should write a book.’ In sculpture, woman is the thing to glorify.”