Page 22 - Studio International - January 1968

Important developments in the arts sometimes seem to Recent American sculpture is bidding for the vanguard.
spread by contagion. Social, technological, and economic This is the more surprising when one considers how
conditions need only be right, like the factors of epidemic, impoverished American sculpture was in the nineteenth
except that in the case of the arts—by my analogy—some- century, and how derivative, banal, eccentric, or foreign-
thing dormant or moribund is brought unexpectedly to dominated it has been for most, so far, of the twentieth.
life. How else explain the sudden, massive commitment Twenty-one years after Daumier sculpted Le Dégoût
to sculpture now taking place in the United States? Personnifié (1830-32), his sophisticated portrait bust of
I am not suggesting that American sculpture is a wholly Senator Fuchard, and seventeen years after Francois
new thing, though it is new enough in most ways. If one Rude completed La Marseillaise (1833-6) for the Arc de
gives emphasis to Americanness, and means attitude or Triomphe, the American Clark Mills produced his
formal interest rather than subject matter or proven- equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson (1853) : it was the
ance, what is happening in the States today declares for first in the country, and a matter for special congratula-
newness where it counts. Innovation is not at issue, but tions because the artist himself had never seen such a
the ability to marshal certain insights, techniques, and statue before. More typical of the nineteenth century
forces in the service of expressive or aesthetic goals, even was, for instance, the expatriate American sculptor
of moral ones. Recent sculptural developments in the William Wetmore Story, who set up a studio in Rome and
United States show perhaps the beginnings of a national presumably made his Cleopatras and Sibyls next to his
Bernard Rosenthal
End over end 1967 style, but one that is unparochial, unprovincial, and George Peabodys and Professor Henrys; or Randolph
corten steel capable of delivering yet another international challenge. Rogers, another Roman by adoption, who benefitted