Endurance

Marino Marini is a tall, bland Milanese with mild brown eyes and a sculptor's muscular hands. Two years ago his works were little known outside of Italy; now, at 49, he is internationally admired. The exhibition of his works which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week was sure to shock some people and deeply move oth ers. It showed that he had earned his belated fame the hard way, with sculptures that were often downright unpleasant.

His major pieces had been partly in spired, said Marini, by the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome's Pi azza del Campidoglio. But there was noth ing conventionally heroic about Marini's riders ; they were scared, not proud. They looked, indeed, very much like lonely, out size babies mounted bareback on broad, unbridled Mongolian ponies -- going no where. Marini had carved them with mingled delicacy and deliberate awkward ness, sacrificing handsomeness to pathos.

Marini could be brutal as well as touch ing. His little Kneeling Girl had the crude, ruined air of a primitive idol dredged up from a marsh. It was academically con vincing in some parts, arbitrarily distorted in others. Where pieces of the plaster mold had stuck to the bronze, it was leprously splotched. The head was as round and almost as blank as a cannon ball, but its blankness was part of Marini's intention: a human "universality" that classic features might have lacked. The Kneeling Girl's fat, soft hams and absurdly shriveled arms gave her a look of aged help lessness, an impression which was contradicted by the energetic forward thrust of the spine and the stubborn tilt of the head. As a symbol of humanity she could not have been less attractive, but she was nonetheless impressive: she obviously suffered and survived.

Those whose taste in sculpture had been formed by that of the Greeks and Renaissance Italians would find such works hard to take. For them, sculpture is primarily a celebration of human pride, grace and joy. Marini's sculpture celebrated humility, awkwardness and sorrow -- plus dogged endurance.

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