Art: Conversation Pieces

The new sculptures at Manhattan’s Knoedler Galleries last week were conversation pieces, not because they aim to shock, but because they converse. Sculptor Etienne Hajdu sees the world as an infinite series of dialogues—dialogues between men, between organisms, between all objects and things that make up nature. In sculpture, the dialogue is translated into the interplay of light and shadow and of rhythms and forms. The concept might seem a bit farfetched, but the results can be striking. Few sculptors can fashion of gleaming marble, glistening Duralumin and mellow bronze images of such refreshing purity as Hajdu.

Rumanian-born Sculptor Hajdu got the first glimmerings of his ideal while a young student in Paris, his present home. It came not in a classroom but rather at an exhibition of paintings by Fernand Leger. Leger’s machines and cubistic cityscapes seemed to speak the language of the present, and Hajdu resolved to find an idiom that would speak of the present too. The polished spheres of Brancusi impressed him, and for a while he went abstract “to rediscover purity.” But his own abstractions seemed shallow: what he wanted was to explore what lay underneath. As he put it, “I would like to break open the shell of Brancusi’s egg.”

In his early bas-reliefs he hoped to parallel the fugue conversations of Bach, in which “the violin speaks with the flute, the flute with the piano—it is a conversation.” The metal reliefs, which he shapes from plaster forms, may look a bit like a line of geometric figures dancing across the background, or they may be clusters of rounded forms that bubble in the light, each one responding to and being affected by all its neighbors. But for all the movement, the total image is never broken, and the sculptures retain their basic logic.

For the standing sculptures, Hajdu makes innumerable drawings until the right design emerges. Unlike many abstract expressionists, he never allows accident to dictate his course. He carves the marble from the design, then polishes by hand. The Duralumin, too, is carved rather than welded or hammered. He uses it only when the design calls for a looping intricacy that the marble could not withstand.

These forms, which often seem scooped by the wind and molded by the sea, make up Hajdu’s “image of man in the world today.” It is obviously not a literal image, but an effort through this orchestration of forms to show the orderly interplay of nature, including man. To some viewers, the sculptures might seem cold; actually, they are inspired by the warm view—a sort of 20th century version of the ancient Greek ideal—that the great dialogues of nature are essentially noble and graced by elegance. “Many artists,” says Sculptor Hajdu. “show man as crushed, sick, filthy. I wanted to portray the grandeur of man. While most artists seek disharmony, I seek harmony.”