Sculpture: Fresh-Air Fun

Outdoor sculpture in the U.S. has long taken a back seat to the great plazas of Europe: Florence has its Mi chelangelo, Paris its Rodin, Rome its Bernini. But of late the U.S. landscape has come alive as dozens of American collectors have turned their gardens and front lawns into veritable sculpture galleries (see color pages).

Modern sculpture itself made it in evitable. Alexander Calder’s vivid mo biles were meant to jiggle and gyrate under the leaves, George Rickey’s feathery kinetics to stir in the breeze. To be sure, bronze and marble for centuries have gained in luster and patina from exposure to the weather, but a whole new range of materials, notably stain less steel and plastics, practically demand the reflective brilliance of sun shine. “Aluminum shines wonderfully against the greens of summer and the greys of winter,” observes New York Collector Robert Scull.

Strange Firefly. Scull and his wife Ethel — whose purchases helped get pop art off the ground — have 20 works scattered across the 1½ acres of their summer home in East Hampton, L.I. “Our lawn looked naked without sculpture,” says Scull; he promptly commissioned ten young unknowns to fill the space.

Their 1st century marble Bacchus was a natural for their modern atrium, but their love of the moment happens to be minimal sculpture. Scull first has wood models made, then shifts them from place to place. Sometimes he discovers delightful juxtapositions: Robert Morris’ painted-aluminum square handsomely frames Mark di Suvero’s tangled wood; after dark, Ben Berns’ blue neon looks like a strange and lovely firefly among the hemlocks.

Architect Gordon Bunshaft and his wife Nina began collecting in the early ’50s. They have only four treasured works displayed on the rustic grounds of their summer place on Long Island, but each one gains a new dimension be side the woods and water. Indeed, Giacometti’s worn but stately woman seems plainly made to stroll among the maples in the moonlight. Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, widow of the Milwaukee indus trialist, missed Gerhard Marcks’s Bremen Town Musicians so much after she lent it to the Milwaukee Art Center that she took it back again, keeps it illuminated at night so she can observe it while dining.

Lionel Nowak, Bennington College music professor, owned no sculpture, but when he saw Tony Smith constructing his gangly Gracehoper—a title Smith lifted from Finnegans Wake—he commented, only half in jest, that it was just the thing for his backyard.

Smith agreed. Whereas indoors it would look like just a jumble of wooden beams, under the trees in Nowak’s yard it really becomes a kind of whimsical grasshopper, assuming all the delightful associations with which James Joyce loaded the word.

Snow in her Hands. Joseph H. Hirshhorn, whose 5,800-work, $35-50 million art collection will soon be installed in its own permanent museum in Washington, admits that he and his wife bought their Greenwich, Conn., estate in 1961 largely because of the setting it would provide for their sculpture. “I could just picture the Henry Moore under the trees,” he says, “the David Smith beside the pool, Rodin’s Burghers by the front door. In fact, I bought the property in 20 minutes.”

Unlike Scull, Hirshhorn never commissions a work. Despite that fact, he almost singlehandedly keeps the sculpture world solvent: last year he bought $785,000 worth of art. He spotted Rodin’s Woman Crouching at a dealer’s in 1957, and snapped it up because he liked the “play on anatomy.” It promptly went into the Hirshhorn garden.

“Sculpture gets dignity outdoors it often doesn’t inside,” he says. “Take my Maillol woman. She’s beautiful all year round, but when the snow is in her hands, I love her.”