ART
CHRONICLE
529
this by a certain cruelty in his forms, as if he felt compelled to ob–
jectify the agony of the task; but it is an art also marked by considerable
wit and fantastic inventiveness-fantastic in the literal sense of pro–
liferating fantasies in the form of sculptural ideas.
Of the European sculpt 'lre, Lynn Chadwick's
Inner Eye
was the
only piece to invite comparison with Smith; it was an amazing
tour
de force
in iron and glass, yet when its sheer physical bulk had been
assimilated on several viewings, it showed a disconcerting tendency to
look like Greenwich Village jewelry. Minguzzi's
Acrobat on Trapeze,
in bronze, was a more substantial work, and its complexities are of a
kind which last. Mirko's archaic-looking
Chimera
was another solid
piece, though it looked more like a bronze relic from an ancient Eastern
civilization than anything created in 1955.
In the Whitney group, the only American who escaped the "shal–
lowness" Mr. Gage mentions is Ibram Lassaw, whose "space sculpture"
is one of the few authentic statements of the decade. I am dubiou :,
about whether this style can develop beyond its present quasi-decora–
tive phase; paradoxically, it would require an a :hitectural milieu
in order to deliver itself from the fate of becomil
~
mere
objets.
But
even its sheer decorative power is impressive next to the trivialities of an
artist like Richard Lippold, whose presence in our museums is another
measure of the anarchy of values which surrounds sculpture today.
It is here that the problems of painting and sculpture meet. Be–
cause there is still in this country no native artistic culture to support
the individual talent, our artists are made to function il. a frantic, lonely
arena
in
which they are prey to an anomalous sense of historical anxiety.
There has been a desperate attempt in the last decade, particularly in
America, to produce an historically important art, and this desperation
enters into every phase of the artist's work and career: the museums
are busy naming trends, and artists are anxious to "fit" into them
(otherwise, who will buy their pictures?) . The artist knows that his
own personal history, too, must now be marked by discernible shifts
and "periods"-it is not uncommon to hear painters under thirty refer,
without a trace of irony, to their early, middle, and late works. And
criticism is not guiltless in this matter.2
The responsibility for at least part of this development can be traced
2 Mr. Clement Greenberg's article on "'American-Type' Painting"
(PR,
Spring, 1955) is an interesting case in point. In a discussion of de Kooning,
Hofmann, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Pollock, Tobey, Kline, Still, Newman, and
Rothko, he found it unnecessary to name a single specific picture, which was
all the more curious in view of his parting comment that "there is just the good
and the bad, the realized and the unrealized."
