"The Only True Mission"

Not too many sculptors concentrate on the figure today. Of those who do, only a few make it recognizable, and fewer still beautiful.

Oronzio Maldarelli, who died last January, took for his favorite theme the female nude, for he believed it to be nature brought to near perfection. "The only true mission of sculpture is the beauty of shape and form. It was good 10,000 years ago and it is good today," he said. How much beauty Maldarelli captured could be seen last week in a retrospective of his work at Manhattan's Paul Rosenberg Gallery.

At the time of his death, Maldarelli was a professor emeritus of sculpture at Columbia University--a professor who never went to high school. Born to a goldsmith in Naples in 1892, he was brought to New York when he was nine. He be came a jeweler's apprentice by day, an art student at night. While roaming Europe in the early '30s, he flirted--but only flirted--with the abstractionists' world of pure forms and shapes. Back in Manhattan, he turned almost exclusively to nudes, refining his style until his surfaces were as smooth as a young woman's skin.

Over the years, he turned out a family of voluptuous women; and even the few other shapes he produced--from sea shells to tulips--had a feminine sensuousness and grace. But Maldarelli was not concerned with sensuousness alone. "It isn't the flesh but the spirit I'm interested in. I wouldn't waste a minute to represent the physical aspect. I'm trying to create a form, beautiful harmonies of shapes." To isolate the spirit, Maldarelli used models only for preliminary sketches; for the finished work, he fell back on memory, trusting it to capture the essence that his eye might be blind to. With their looping, twisting solid geometry, Maldarelli's nudes remain fluid and somehow elusive--the lips, noses and eyes are usually only fleetingly perceptible. His women may be solitary figures in repose, misty images that suggest a sense of renewal or emergence, or group studies combining two or three figures that share some common movement or emotion and thus seem to melt into one.

Maldarelli sometimes worked in terra cotta, plaster, limestone or wood, but his favorite material was marble. With it, he said, "you can play a chisel as a musician plays an instrument." It was while he was working on a piece of fine marble one day in January that a heart attack struck him dead--an artist due, like many another, to win greater fame after death than he ever knew while alive.

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