SCULPTURE GALORE

Natural Art and Fine Art met, last week, in sunny congress on a California hilltop at the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, overlooking the burnished haze of San Francisco. There stands California's memorial to her War dead, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, an edifice filled with many treasures, including the life of Joan of Arc in Gobelin tapestries, gift of France.

Within the palace and in the surrounding gardens were placed, last week, some 1,200 images carved by 300 sculptors. Largest show of its kind in U. S. history, it was called the Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture. Held under the auspices of the National Sculpture Society, it will remain on view through September.

The value of the exhibition is not so much that of a spectacle as it is of a visual encyclopedia, wherein the seeker may find any trend or individual expression in modern U. S. sculpture. There is, inevitably, much routine work--conventionally graceful garden groups, conventionally austere memorials to Generals and Admirals. But there are female torsos by Alexander Archipenko, possessor of an arresting linear imagination; there are Allan Clark's glamorous oriental shapes; Harriet Whitney Frishmuth's tender and charming studies of adolescence; Jacob Epstein's mottled, vigorous countenances; Paul Manship's images of swift, hound-escorted Diana and Actacon. Many are the stimuli for the senses, but nowhere is the mind so provoked and fascinated as before the portrait sculpture of Jo Davidson. Master of men and millions, the face of John Davison Rockefeller is anxious, unbelievably seamed above his sparse and fragile body. Mistress of precious intellection and writer of what seems gibberish to most readers, Gertrude Stein is shown with a face rugged, calm, confident above a stolid mass which scarcely defines itself as a body. There are many other works by individual chisellers, Hunt Diederich, Daniel Chester French, the late Emil Fuchs, John Gregory, Malvina Hoffman, Leo Lentelli, Henry Augustus Lukeman, Edward McCartan, Eli Nadelman, the Piccirilli brothers, Lorado Taft, William Zorach. . . . If the modern U. S. lacks the glory of a sculptural tradition as deeply embedded and fertile as the Classic or Gothic, it does have a number of sincere experimentalists who keep the art from stagnation, who seek the expression of modern contour and character.

The exhibition was made possible through the unsolicited gift of $100,000 by Archer Milton Huntington of Manhattan. He is the son of the late Railroader Collis Potter Huntington (Southern Pacific). The father's eager eyes scanned horizons for his puffing locomotives and gleaming rails while he repeated his credo: "Labor is the criterion of respectability. . . . I do not work hard, I work easily." The son's glance is also eager, but stays indoors. Archer Huntington, now 59, is among the best U. S. Spanish scholars. Much of his education was received in Spain. He holds an honorary degree from the University of Madrid, as well as from Yale, Harvard, Columbia. He is the founder-president of the Hispanic Society of America. Six years ago he financed a modern sculpture exhibition held at the Society's Museum in Manhattan. Popular beyond prophecy, it encouraged his California venture. He has already presented the Palace of the Legion of Honor with an art collection in memory of his father. Another collection in memory of his mother, Arabella D. Huntington, is in the Yale University Museum.* Mr. Huntington will always turn aside to peer at medals, coins, daguerreotypes.

*Mr. Huntington's mother was also his cousin. Reason: After Collis Potter Huntington's death she married his nephew, the late Henry Edwards Huntington, art patron and bibliophile, founder of the Huntington Library at San Marino, near Pasadena, where repose such notable items as a Gutenberg Bible and Gainsborough's famed Blue Boy.