Fortunate Fingesten

Refugee Peter Fingesten, who jumped out of Germany and then out of Italy, has a cocky manner, a small black mustache, a big black bow tie. Though only 23, he has had 23 one-man sculpture shows in the Europe he deserted. Last week Sculptor Fingesten's first U. S. show opened at Philadelphia's Warwick Galleries, lived up to its advance notices.

Sculptor Fingesten works chiefly in concrete and stucco, gets his variety of texture and color by mixing pigments into the wet cement or plaster, coating some figures with beeswax, finishing others with shellacs and acids.

Neither abstract nor academic, he uses a selective symbolism that packs more into a fragment than many sculptors get in a whole figure. Mother and Child consists of a woman's head and arm, with a baby's head nestled peacefully in the palm of her hand. The double mask Time shows the same face in youth and old age. Zog of Albania commissioned Time last spring, lost his throne before it could be delivered. "Fortunately I received the mo-nee," says Fingesten with a grin, "and it paid for my passage to America."

Son of a Tyrolean etcher, Peter Fingesten grew up in the litter of a studio. In his teens he turned to sculpture, wrangled with his teachers at the Berlin Academy for a couple of years before striking out on his own at 16. His sculptural characteristics: eyes sealed shut without any lid line showing, mouths that curve sinuously downward. A medium-sized concrete piece, practical Peter Fingesten figures, costs him only 50-c- for cement, 80-c- for other materials.

Sculptor Fingesten gets a small monthly check from a patroness, Mrs. Joseph Wasserman, millionaire rugman's widow. For studio he uses a leaky shed in Oak Lane, lent him by Temple University. On rainy days he moves to a cellar. He has taught his Irish landlady how to make bouillabaisse, goulash, spaghetti sauces. "Already I am seven days behind in my rent," says breezy Peter Fingesten, "but she treat me like a mother; when I am sick she cure me -- everything. Now she even wants to study painting from me."

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