ART CHRONICLE
641
itself felt in sculpture by tending to deny it the monolith, which in three–
dimensional art has too many connotations of representation. Released
from mass and solidity, sculpture finds a much larger world before it, and
itself in the position to say all that painting can no longer say. The same
process that has impoverished painting has enriched sculpture. Sculpture
has always been able to create objects that seem to have a denser, more
literal reality than those created by painting; this, which used to be
its handicap, now constitutes its greater appeal to our newfangled, posi–
tivist sensibility, and this also gives it its greater license. It is now free
to invent an infinity of new objects and disposes of a potential wealth of
forms with which our taste cannot quarrel in principle, since they will
all have their self-evident physical reality, as palpable and independent
and present as the houses we live in and the furniture we use. Originally
the most transparent of all the arts because the closest to the physical
nature of its subject matter, sculpture now enjoys the benefit of being
the art to which the least connotation of fiction or illusion is attached.
The new sculpture has still another particular advantage. To
painting, no matter how abstract and fiat, there still clings something of
the past simply because it is painting and painting has such a rich and
recent past. This until a short time ago was an asset, but I am afraid
that it has begun to shrink. The new sculpture has almost no historical
associations whatsoever-at least not with our own civilization's past–
which endows it with a virginality that compels the artist's boldness
and invites him to tell everything without fear of censorship by tradi–
tion.
*
All he need remember of the past is Cubist painting, all he need
avoid is naturalism.
All this, I believe, explains why the number of promising young
sculptors in this country is so much greater, proportionally, than is that
of promising young painters. Of the latter we have four or five who
may figure eventually in the history of the art of our times. But we have
as many as nine or ten young sculptor-constructors who have a chance,
as things look, to contribute something ambitious, serious and original:
David Smith, Theodore Roszak, David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Seymour
Lipton, Richard Lippold, Peter Grippe, Burgoyne Diller, Adaline Kent,
*
One of the ways in which the new sculpture's advantage over painting is
revealed is by our feeling that what we see in the pictures of such painters as
Matta, Lam, and sometimes Sutherland-all three of whom owe so much to
Picasso--and in a good deal of Picasso's own work, is illegitimate sculpture,
illustrations of sculpture or of ideas essentiaIly sculptural. But we never feel that
the new sculpture is illegitimate painting. It is too fresh, just as Mantegna's
painting which owed so much to the other art, was too fresh to be called illegit–
imate sculpture.
