Art: Possibly Eternal

Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum is less concerned with contemporary art than with the possibly eternal; in general, it leaves purchases of recent art to others. But last week the museum announced the purchase of a work by U.S. Sculptor William Zorach, 65. The Met’s new sculpture is, however, on an eternal theme: Mother and Child. Moreover, it is an old friend; for three years, in the early ’40s, it stood in the Metropolitan, on loan from the artist.

Sculptor Zorach took three years to carve his warmly maternal Mother and Child from a three-ton chunk of rose-colored marble. In the sculpting, he ignored the common practice of making a plaster model and translating it into stone mechanically. In an older and more honored tradition, Zorach worked the marble freehand, using a small plaster model only as a guide.

He finished his carving in 1930, later displayed it in turn at Chicago’s Art Institute, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland’s Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan. It is the first purchase by the Metropolitan out of a new $100,000 fund for the acquisition of contemporary American sculpture. Says Director Francis Taylor: “We fell in love with it.”