Page 50 - Studio International - October 1972

Visser and Maaskant: later Giacometti. They are rather discrete in
their effect, which must have looked surprising
their relation to Brancusi at that time — in the Dutch art context at least
where for instance the subtle, assemblage-like
pieces of Gonzalez, from the thirties, were not
Rudi Fuchs too well-known or too well-thought of. Visser's
small sculptures didn't try to look especially
A sculpture like the illustrated Double Form impressive (in terms of sculptural bulk), nor
(These notes were occasioned by three important 1957, of which several versions exist differing in were they made out of especially beautiful
exhibitions: `Jan Maaskant: sculptures size and sometimes in title, was very crucial to material like bronze or marble — which meant
1969-1972', May-June 1972, Gemeentemuseum, Visser's development as an artist. Born in 1928 they were quite out of touch with everything
The Hague; 'Carel Visser: recent sculpture', Carel Visser made his first sculpture in 1947, that was then fashionable in most sculpture. (It
April 1972, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and a then went for one abortive year to the was the time when the fame of Henry Moore
large retrospective of Card Visser, Polytechnic to study architectural engineering, began to reach the stars, when Marino Marini
October-November 1972, Gemeentemuseum, The and after that for two years, equally abortive, to was considered a very great artist, while other
Hague. Good catalogues are available — an art school. There he got some formal then well-known Italians, like Marcello
unfortunately only in Dutch. There does exist a training, though he couldn't use it very well. As Mascherini or Umberto Mastroianni, are now
small but excellent book in English on Carel Visser, a sculptor he is virtually an autodidact. I think rightfully forgotten.)
by Cor Blok, in the series Art and Architecture in this comes out in his first really serious pieces, While sculpture seems to have an almost
Holland, published in Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, done in the early fifties : thin, resistant and in natural tendency to get monumental and
1968.) some respects even awkward little sculptures, grandiloquent, Visser's early pieces looked very
welded together with small bits of solid, rusty private and sketch-like. This peculiar
iron, figurative in a simple way, somewhat privateness, which is rather typical, I feel, of
reminiscent of the slender, walking figures of the much of the best twentieth-century sculpture (for

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