Art: The Sculptors’ Turn

For the last year or two, Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum has been in a stock-taking mood about U.S. art. A year ago, with the help of an elaborate system of regional juries, the museum sorted through the work of 6,248 contemporary painters, and finally culled 307 canvases for display (TIME, Dec. 11, 1950). This time it was the sculptors’ turn. Encouraged by $8,500 worth of prizes, 1,066 of them submitted photographs of their work, and 101 drew bids to crate and ship at the Metropolitan’s expense. Last week the museum invited the public in to see “American Sculpture—1951.”

Inevitably, the selection jury came in for some second-guessing. Some respected contemporary sculptors had somehow been overlooked, and at least one of those invited to exhibit turned out to be an unknown art student. But aside from a few such vagaries, the jury seemed to have brought together a show that was unmistakably representative of U.S. sculpture in 1951. It was also unmistakably dull.

Buddies & Torpedoes. Conservatives among U.S. sculptors, some of whom boycotted the show because they considered the jury too modern, still got their share of space. But, for the most part, they wasted it. Cecil Howard’s sleek, plaster Adonis, Sacrifice, and Paul Manship’s pair of bare-chested soldiers, striding arm in arm, entitled Buddies, were spiritless war-memorial stereotypes.

The ultra modernists were scarcely better. Dominating their wing were a jittering mobile of wire and red fins by Alexander Calder, hung incongruously under the museum’s vaulted ceiling, and Alexander Archipenko’s Figure, an enormous 14-ft. object of aluminum-painted iron which resembled an upended torpedo. The pleasantest of the pure abstractions was David Smith’s lively Flight, which whisked round corners, took unexpected dips with the carefully tracked abandon of a rollercoaster.

The judges, after a cautious look around, avoided both extremes, and handed three of the four top prizes to mild essays in expressionism.

Nothing but Animals. First prize went to Minna Harkavy’s Two Men, a dead-serious head & shoulders study of two long-nosed, lantern-jawed characters, facing each other in solemn agreement. Miss Harkavy, 56, spent more than a year chipping, brushing and sandpapering the scabrous surface of her cast stone sculpture, explained that it represented “communion, maybe between two citizens of widely separated lands.”

The second prizewinner, Rhys Caparn, 41, models nothing but animals. Her Animal Form, an inquisitive mammal with only a suggestion of a head and a pelt flecked with green and gilt, was derived from wild cattle she saw at the Bronx Zoo. The remaining prizes went to Chicagoan Abbott Pattison for his robot-like Striding Man and to Pennsylvanian Joseph Greenberg for a sturdy but graceful Eve.

Museum officials were satisfied that they had accomplished what they set out to, seemed not at all disturbed by the angry snorts of Manhattan critics who termed the show “less than mediocre” and “disappointing.” Next year another stock-taking show is coming up: contemporary American watercolors, drawings and prints.