Never-Never Land

This week in the little French village of La Napoule in the Alpes Maritimes, townspeople and fishermen streamed across the Place Henry Clews, through the great gate of the Chateau de la Napoule, to the carved and vaulted mausoleum within. They went to pay their respects to their benefactor, buried just two years. Four thousand miles away, in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, some of Henry Clews's countrymen also paid their respects, by viewing a memorial exhibition of his sculpture.

Henry Clews was a poor little rich boy turned artist. Born and bred in a big Manhattan house, son of an English-born international banker, Henry went through the regular paces of an idle and talented young man. He tried his hand at Wall Street and at playwriting, married, divorced and remarried, turned to the expensive indoor sport of sculpture. He put on seven shows, drew from the puzzled critics only such faint praise as "decadent, exotic, bizarre, sensational." In 1914 Sculptor Clews left Manhattan with silent dignity for Paris, the haven of Bohemian expatriates.

But even Paris, taken at first hand, soon lost its sheen. Henry and his devoted second wife (beauteous Elsie Marie Whelen of Philadelphia) moved again, this time to the idyllic seclusion of an 8th-Century fortress-monastery at La Napoule, on the shores of the Mediterranean. There they set about to create their Never-Never Land. Self-conscious Aristocrat Clews carefully restored the chateau and gardens, stocked the whole place with white birds and animals (to his white pigeons he had tiny flutes fastened, which whistled musically as they flew), worked when he felt like it at sculpture, writing, painting. La Napoule's villagers regarded his wealth, his largesse and his talent with open admiration; celebrities from far and near beat a path to his door.

Clews's Jekyll-&-Hyde sculpture falls into two utterly unrelated groups: 1) Rodinesque portrait busts and vitriolic caricatures (of the human race in general or friends in particular), generally in bronze; 2) grotesques--like Jan, King of the Jins of La Napoule--usually in polished red and green porphyry. Always a competent sculptor, he showed to best advantage when he chiseled the monsters of his own imagination.

Last week Mrs. Clews, now living in La Napoule, where she is writing her late husband's life, announced that her sculpture-encrusted Chateau de la Napoule will be permanently thrown open to the public some time this year, expose to the tourist gaze the medieval riches, actual and Clewsian, of the archwayed, sarcophagied, fountained interior.

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