Animal Art: It Figures

It is instructive to learn at “The National Sculpture Society Celebrates the Figure 1987,” that the NSS was founded in the 1890s out of the stimulus to civic sculpture provided at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago by the heavy hitters of the craft—Saint-Gaudens, MacMonnies and Daniel Chester French.

It was the figurative “one percent for art” sort of patronage before the International Style ruptured the national alliance between Beaux Arts architecture and figurative and allegorical sculpture. Indeed, one of their first pro bono ventures was the 1898 Triumphal Arch for Admiral Dewey in the old Madison Square (the plaza, not the “garden”) by 27 members of the art trade association.

This highly touted “first time in more than 50 years outside of New York” exhibition is interesting but hardly exhilarating. It is divided (with not a little gall) into three highly unequal parts—a historical sequence, the current membership and invited contemporary nonmembers.

Of the three parts, I’m moved to say: The oldies are definitely more golden than the newies., and the invited “stars” (Butterfield, Baskin, Hanson, Segal et al.) may be felt to be needed, but the examples chosen are hardly luminous—in fact I find Segal’s masturbating woman, “Nude on a Redwood Chaise,” (1983) as tacky as the orange shade he has tarted up his white plaster model with.

Cheek by jowl with Tom Wesselman’s lovely “Steel Drawing / Standing Nude Edition” (1986) or even John De Andrea’s dreamily mythic “Classical Allusion” (1987), Segal’s work seems calculated simply to antagonize, like his Greenwich Village homosexual lovers.

Since these 150 works were assembled in celebration of We the People 200, there is a visible effort to be aggressively ecumenical. Only such a commitment could account for carting a pompously rhetorical “General Pulaski Equestrian” (1976) all the way from Spartanburg, S.C., to leave no Pole unturned in an eagerness to provide a little bit of something for everyone.

That, I suppose, also accounts for the Donald DeLue “Thomas Jefferson” (1975) and “George Washington Kneeling in Prayer” (1966). The DeLues on the Federal Building at Ninth and Chestnut are far superior to my eye (and 50 years old this year, I noted on my last amble past them). Maybe bas relief can sustain the patriotic rhetoric better than in-the-round Foundling Fathers.

It may also account for the cases of splendid medallions cast by members of the society over the years—you can even finance your own small medals in an era when Big Money goes to the Corten Troops. Don’t miss the amusing cat chasing a mouse in cheese, a marvelous bit of metallic wit.

Even the busts seem a bust to my eye—Wilson Goode is not that Negroid looking, nor is Edward Koch that fat. Maybe the plethora of images of political figures that inundate us every day make verisimilitude an unrealistic aspiration. Perhaps we prefer caricature, even the unintended one of a too-friendly couple—Franklin and Eleanor.

I hope this doesn’t sound misanthropically perverse, but I find the animal images most beguiling in the show, especially Cleo Hartwig’s work. Her “Owlet” (1969) uses  a creamy Tennessee marble brilliantly, polishing only the eyes, beak and feet, leaving the rest downily soft. And her bronze “Guinea Fowl” (1986) is a delectably Precisionist abstraction of that beast. How marvelous that Ms. Hartwig (b. 1911) is still hard at work. She was the highlight of the Philadelphia Art Alliance’s retrieval of figurative American sculpture from the 1930s and 1940s last spring.

But there are other wonders, such as Beatrice Fenton’s bronze “Wattled Crane” (1943). I note that this bird is from the Academy of Fine Arts aviary, and that Philadelphian Fenton was born a hundred years ago (1887-1983). What a joy for the eye it would be to see a roomful of her animals—she must have created a zoo of her own in that long a life.

Also delighting my zoomorphed eye were Charles Rudy’s terracotta “Sleeping Pig” (1952), Jane B. Armstrong’s “Rhino and Baby” (1976), Shayne Haysem’s African sneezeweed “Vulture” (1985) and Carole Lewis’s terracotta “November Bird” (1984).

I’m sure that the NSS didn’t mean to go gaga over animal sculpture when they carted in all their monumental stuff. Sorry, folks, the big stuff feels mighty little to me; but the unpretentious snaps of our feathered and furry friends use materials inventively in ways that pleased me. And I’m a figure lover. But not with the Elie Nadelman, Jo Davidson and Gaston Lachaise they trucked in for this one.

National Sculpture Society Celebrates the Figure: At the Port of History Museum, Penn’s Landing, through November 15.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, November 11, 1987