New Directions

Sculpture is probably the oldest of the arts, but in the first half of the 20th century, sculptors have scooted off in more new directions than they ever dreamed of in all the centuries before. While sculptors still chip away at stone with chisels, they also twist bits of wire, cement boulders together, and fire away at sheet metal with the blowtorch. In Manhattan last week the variety of sculpture on view ranged from the traditional figures of Rodin to the mobiles of Alexander Calder, and included a broad cross section of contemporary artists. Among them:

P: Berto Lardera, 45, is a self-taught Italian abstractionist who now lives and works in Paris. One of the fast-growing school of sculptor-welders, Lardera got his start in 1944 in war-damaged Florence when he found twisted chunks of iron and scrap in the rubble, and began to use metal instead of stone. He sketches his sculptural idea on paper before cutting up sheets of metal with shears and blowtorch, then welds the pieces together into the finished product. Over the years he has also learned to unite copper and iron, and graft brightly colored mosaics into his metal creations. An admirer of Calder's mobiles, Lardera says: "Where Calder really introduces movement, I try to give the impression of movement." His current show at Knoedler's is an exhibition of 22 welded pieces of sculpture whose geometric designs express the purely formal relationship of planes, lines and space plus their textural appeal. As one Lardera supporter put it, to look for any literary meaning in his work "is to look for moonlight in a sonata."

P: Giacomo Manzu, 48, takes the opposite tack. Although he, too, is self-taught, he was deeply influenced by classic Greek art, and has hewn to traditional lines. Now ranked as one of Italy's leading sculptors, Manzu won the grand prize for Italian sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1948, was commissioned by the Vatican in 1950 to do a bronze door at St. Peter's, had a recent showing in Manhattan, and is now represented at the Museum of Modern Art by his tender, elegant Portrait of a Lady. Discussing his own work, Manzu says: "Each man has his way of expressing the poetry within him. Some sculptors try the abstract way. My way is the figurative way." His series of religious figures and his robed female figures and nudes have dignity and grace, as well as an unmistakable poetry of their own.

P: Jacques Lipchitz, 65, who was born in Lithuania, came to the U.S. from France in 1941 (and became a citizen two weeks ago), falls somewhere between Lardera and Manzu. He has long since left his cubist period behind, and his work has become much more lyrical and expressive. Since his early days, Lipchitz has liked to shape his ideas in wax or clay, then cast them in bronze or transfer them into stone by hiring a stonecutter to do all the work except the finishing touches. His latest work, on exhibition last week at Fine Arts Associates, is a series of 33 small (7P: in. to 18P: in.) statuettes formed in wax and later cast in bronze. Lipchitz calls them semiautomatics: "They originate completely automatically in the blind. By manipulating my form in such a manner, a lot of images suggest themselves. Ordinarily, one image is predominant. This one I choose." Among the images are a pain-racked Mater Dolorosa, a witty, stylized Geisha, a twirling Dancer, a dauntless Rodinish woman, her hair flying, fists raised, called Defense. The lines of the figures flow freely and lyrically, and most of them have a baroque turbulence. They express a new Lipchitz, but one who refuses to stay put. "I do not intend to turn this process into a durable way of working," says he. "I hope my obsession with semiautomatics will give me the freedom to go on to other things."

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