ART
CHRONICLE
after three hundred years during which they seemed to have left it
strictly alone. And why, since then, they have so often been better
at it than any but the most exceptional of professional sculptors. Also,
whether there is a reason other than mechanical convenience why they
model but never carve. A remarkable exhibition of sculpture by painters,
from Gericault to the present, at Curt Valentin's (formerly Bucholz's),
gave immediate warrant for these questions.
Recent work by the German sculptor, Gerhard Marcks, also at
Curt Valentin's, offered another lesson in the rewards of probity.
Marcks's thorough craft competence matters less than his tenacity in
insisting on .the truth of his feeling-a wonderful and profound
tenacity. In stylistic terms he follows where Rodin, Maillol, Lehm–
bruck and Kolbe have led, and archaicizes a little, as countless
sculptors do nowadays, the inspiration in his case being late medieval
Gennan carving (though himself mostly a modeler). Thus he is not a
revolutionary phenomenon like Brancusi. But the value of art that is
explicit and authentic in feeling, even
if
"backward" in style, becomes
increasingly evident of late, in the face of the "modernistic" trickiness of
some one like Henry Moore. "Plastic" novelty has to be felt all the
way through, or not attempted at all. Actually, I found the earliest and
most straightfor.vardly naturalistic piece in Marcks's show, the bronze
nude "Brigitta" of 1935, to be the most satisfying among at least seven
or eight superb pieces. Marcks is over sixty, but his art came to New York
like a new dispensation. (Most of what was shown dates from 1943, the
Nazis having melted down many of his previous bronzes.)
Marcks goes wrong only when he attempts humor, perhaps because
he then becomes overly aware of his own feeling. Truth of feeling in
art is in great measure an effect of detachment, but the detachment
cannot be too conscious. Falsity begins with feeling about feeling.
What Marcks, however, like his fellow-German sculptor, the late
Lehmbruck, demonstrates to our time is that it is not necessary always
to make this selfless detachment quite as explicit as Matisse does; and
that the obviousness of emotion in German Expressionism is not as much
a liability as we used to think. Nor is the danger of sentimentality as
great as it used to be-at least not when compared to that of slickness
and trickiness. It might be well for a change to invoke some "Nordic
depth" against the flashiness of artists like Marini and the Giacometti
of the second phase, or the all-American, streamlined quaintness of a
Ben Shahn.
