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PARTISAN REVIEW
Ibram Lassaw, Noguchi-and still others. Not all these artists are richly
gifted and not all of them have broken away from the monolith; their
styles are as various as the variety of sculpture since 1905. But unequal
as they are in talent, they all show freshness, inventiveness, and positive
taste, qualities they owe, I feel, to the fact that their medium is so new
and so cogent that it produces interesting work almost automatically, just
as the new naturalistic painting of the fifteenth century in Italy and
Flanders extracted masterpieces from even mediocre hands. The same
seems to be the case, from what I can gather, with the new sculpture in
Paris and London.
As yet not enough attention has been paid to the novelty of the
new sculpture. But not enough attention is paid to sculpture in general.
For most of us, raised as we are to look only at painting, a piece of
sculpture fades too quickly into an indifferent background as a matter–
of-fact ornamental object. The new sculpture-construction has to contend
with this habit of vision, and it is for this reason, I think, that so few
attempts have been made to evaluate it seriously and relate it to the
rest of art and to the feeling of our time. Yet this new "genre" is per–
haps the most important manifestation of the visual arts since Cubist
painting, and is at this moment pregnant with more excitement than any
other art except music.
Clement Greenberg
