Self-Taught Sculptor

In 1915 Warren Wheelock was building himself a log cabin in the North Carolina mountains. He needed a pair of andirons. That was not too hard for a commercial artist who had designed glass ovenware, safety razors and compacts. He took two sticks of oak and whittled out a dachshund (for casting into iron). He liked his firedog so much that he kept on whittling, and by 1922 he was a full-fledged sculptor. On display in Manhattan's Robinson Galleries last week went a Wheelock retrospective show that started with the dachshund andiron, ended in 1940 with a crisp, stylized figure of Washington at Valley Forge.

Self-taught Sculptor Wheelock, short, ruddy, 60, left high school to volunteer for the Spanish-American War, drifted into commercial art via teaching. Industrial design is still one of his side lines, but many a museum is proud to own his sculpture. He uses no model, chalks out his figure on a chunk of wood. Then he takes a homemade hickory mallet, pounds his carving chisel along the lines he wants to make. He never cuts too deeply--"possibly because I was born with a puritanical conscience."

Warren Wheelock does both abstract and realistic sculpture, regularly switches from one to the other. Typical is his Lincoln series. The Intellectual Lincoln (1924) is a cross between an abstraction and a totem pole. The Meditative Lincoln (1930) is a seated abstract figure that might equally well be Rameses II. Realistic from shoes to stovepipe hat is The Tragic Lincoln (1934), his sombre Lincoln on Horseback (1940--see cut).

No believer in repetition, Sculptor Wheelock keeps on experimenting. His lively, engaging pieces range from a plump, belligerent figure of Fiorello LaGuardia to an abstract, pinafored Little Girl, from a bat-swinging Babe Ruth (Sultan of Swat), all curves and planes, to a shiny, swivel-hipped Black Dancer. "When a man stops adventuring," says practical Warren Wheelock, "he stops being an artist."

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