Antwerp Does Better

To catch its share of the swarms of postwar tourists, the proud city of Antwerp (pop. 266,636) has been delving into its rich old attic and displaying its heirlooms--the work of generations of Flemish craftsmen and painters. This summer Antwerp is trying something new.

Its burgomaster and aldermen got the idea last year when they went to see a modern sculpture show in The Netherlands' Arnhem (pop. 103,666) and came away determined to beat the Dutch. They vowed that it would be "necessary to the renown of Antwerp to do better than is done elsewhere."

The aldermen thereupon got busy assembling one of the most comprehensive shows of 20th Century sculpture ever seen in Europe. Last week it was on exhibit in spacious Middelheim Park. Already a first-rate tourist-catcher, the show would run through September.

Its 166 sculptures ran the range from the realism of Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol to the tortured what-is-its of contemporary abstractionists. Among the standouts: Rodin's cape-shrouded, beetle-browed Balzac, Maillol's hippy, sprawling nude, The River, and Ossip Zadkine's roughhewn Statue for a Garden. Such statues were easy to look at. Old-fashioned visitors to Middelheim were not so sure about some of the others.

In the center of one broad lawn, standing like a nightmare clothes rack with triangular metal planes hung out to dry, was a quivering Mobile by U.S. Abstractionist Alexander Calder. Sprouting from the grass like a strange new species of mushroom were a pair of coldly obscure stone lumps by Englishman Henry Moore, who had laconically dubbed them Carving and Sculpture. Near by perched two glistening, seal-sleek shapes entitled Crown of Buds and Bad Fruit, by ex-Dadaist Jean Arp. "The most obscene works in the show," commented one visitor, "but nobody realizes it."

Antwerp took no official position, one way or another, on the sculpture in its big show. But the city fathers could read the press reviews with pride and pleasure. Acknowledged Brussels' Le Peuple: "Antwerp . . . never does things halfway . . . Honor to the city of Antwerp."

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