Two of a Kind

Right next door to Manhattan's well-heeled Whitney Museum (see above) is the Clay Club, a converted stable which is one of the nation's few sculpture galleries. The Club's annual group exhibition last week included two especially talented--and all but unknown--modern sculptors.

They labored against heavy odds: in an age of disappearing palaces and severely plain public buildings, there is little incentive for carving statues. Except for a handful of men like Jo Davidson, who get fancy commissions for portraits, monuments and fountains, nobody makes big money these days out of sculpturing.

The best nude in the Clay Club show--a pink marble La Victoire--was done by 43-year-old Burr Miller, who was once intercollegiate wrestling champion at Yale. "You have to chisel down to the skin," explained ex-Wrestler Miller, cupping his square hands, "and not a fraction farther."

Brightest bit of fantasy was the work of an expatriated Englishman named O'Connor Barrett, who had to outgrow a strait-laced start. Barrett's strict parents had talked Latin at dinner, limiting their conversation almost entirely to religion. In 1923, when he was 15, Barrett went to work in a furniture factory and subsequently carved hundreds of Chippendale chair legs. Says he: "Oh, how I hate Chippendale!" There was no Chippendale influence in his squatly intense Stalemate, which looked like a couple of ancients so intent on a game of chess that their bodies knottily reflected all the possible moves on the board.

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