True to Life

Jose de Creeft and Hugo Robus are two elderly U.S. sculptors whose styles, backgrounds and techniques are worlds apart; but they get their inspiration from the same source. To both, form is all-important, and the human female has long been their ideal subject. Last week their works were on display at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art in a major exhibition that is bound to please rather than puzzle.

When Spanish-born Jose de Creeft arrived as a student in Paris in 1905, only Rodin was turning out anything but the academic nudes and busts that dominated the galleries. Though he lived in the same building with Picasso and Juan Gris, De Creeft himself was at first deaf to the noises of rebellion. Like everyone else, he made his bland clay models and sent them off to be cast at a foundry. Then one night he went to his studio and smashed every model in the place. From that moment on, he became a pioneer in reviving the nearly forgotten art of carving wood and chipping stone.

"Close to Earth." "When you work in clay," says De Creeft, who speaks English with a liberal lacing of French and Spanish, "and you tired, the clay is tired. No fresh." Furthermore, "I could not afford to pay casting into bronze." Free from the "translators" (the foundries), he found his challenge directly from the block of wood or stone before him. His figures are often seen still emerging from their blocks; others seem to be rising out of nowhere as if still in creation. But his women's faces all bear the calmness of those who know the secrets of life and birth.

A spry, bright-eyed man of 75, whose working companion these days is a sweet-faced alley cat with a raucous meow, De Creeft took one sensational detour while still in Paris. It happened one day when "I was sick in the bed." The great flamenco dancer Escudero suddenly burst in and demanded that he make something for a party that would take place that night. De Creeft gazed up at the cold stovepipes that crossed his studio ceiling and, though still muy mal, put together his famous Picador. Almost overnight he was hailed as the founder of a new school of stovepipe art, and his reputation was to follow him across the Atlantic when he arrived in the U.S. in 1929. He made three more such things "which was scraps," and then abandoned the movement to others. "The human form," he says. "I like it. I am Mediterraneo after all. and we are close to earth."

"Just a Jughead." Cleveland-born Hugo Robus, also 75, the son of an iron molder, managed to get to Paris in 1912. His ambition was to paint, but he found himself "so fascinated by form that I was building paint upon my canvases a quarter of an inch thick. It became expensive, so I decided to find a medium I could af-i'ord." Back in the U.S., he supported himself and his wife, who died a year and a half ago, by designing textiles and making silverware and jewelry. His studio was soon filled with his lithe and delicate figures, but the public was not to get to know them for years.

Dawn, a floozy-looking blonde yawning furiously at the new day, was the first piece of sculpture he ever exhibited, but 25 years passed before he could afford to have it cast in bronze. Yet Robus never lost his humor. He himself would refer to his graceful sculpture of a girl washing her hair as Soap in Her Eyes. He did Three Caryatids Without a Portico, a Water Carrier with a pitcher for a head ("Just a jughead, I guess"), and "a vase that takes its head off." Hugo Robus' figures have a fluid charm that makes them bend to unheard melodies and swirl to soundless rhythms. But only in the last five years have these figures brought him enough to live on, and the Whitney show is the biggest one he has ever had. "My wife," he muses, "would have loved this show."

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