INTERNATIONAL REPORTS
In the Wake of a Brazen Hussy: American Sculptors in Rome Today

BY JOHN LUCAS
ARTS MAGAZINE/October 1963

….My Saul is finished, and the tornatore [sic] is at work upon it…. I have represented him at the moment when the evil spirit is upon him and David is called in to play to him.
The action is all interior-the struggle of a half-demented soul. … The Pope is in precarious health and may die any day….We have had a gay and pleasant winter, warm and genial weather, and numbers of agreeable people… . The Piazza Navona was a superb spectacle; all across the square were triumphant globes of light; from the windows colored lanterns were suspended, and little lamps starred the eaves and façades, while crimson Bengal lights glared in the center, round the fountains that seemed to pour wine, and reddened the churches and palaces….

So wrote William Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot Norton exactly a century ago. Story was not the first American sculptor to establish his reputation while living and working in Rome. He was preceded a half- century earlier by Washington Allston, who furnished the prototype for numerous artists of our own day by arriving at Rome a painter and promptly turning sculptor in this city that William Roscoe called “the great university of sculpture.” Allston was succeeded not only by Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, each of them eventually settling in Florence, but also by John Gibson and Thomas Crawford, both of whom became staunch Romans, as Story was to do by 1855. That was the year in which his friend Robert Browning published the last half of his long poem Saul, which with plenty of Biblical precedent took David for its actual hero, thereby linking Story indirectly with Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini.

Just as Allston had been praised in his time by Canova along with Coleridge and Irving, Story was at the peak of his fame in 1863, acclaimed by the likes of Hawthorne. Yet as Hawthorne gave way to Henry James, so did Story to Saint-Gaudens,”the first of the moderns.” Biographer of both Hawthorne and Story, James wrote to Norton in 1873, only a decade after the passage above:

So you are acquainted with Story’s Muse-that brazen hussy – to put it plainly. I have rarely seen such a case of prosperous pretension as Story. His cleverness is great, the world’s good nature to him is greater … I wish I could take you out on my balcony and let you look at the Roman house-tops and loggias and sky and feel the mild bright air….

Two years later, heir to Kenyon of The Marble Faun, his own Roderick Hudson amused the native sculptor Gloriani by exclaiming: “I think I could have shown Canova how .” And despite all shifts in fashion, the William Henry Rineharts as well as the Harriet Hosmers ever after kept coming to Rome.

The current trend is nothing novel then-except perhaps in its extent and surely in the quality of work which Americans have been producing at Rome since the Second World War. The reasons for this expatriate phenomenon do not differ basically from those which, according to Van Wyck Brooks, motivated Thorwaldsen and Winckelmann before him. Like them, many an American regard Rome as “the mecca of the art world” and “the dream-land of my imagination.” Rome still evokes that physical response to which James and Story testified. It offers at once a past and a present to exploit, a splendid environment and an incomparable climate to enjoy, a sense of life and a feeling of freedom especially attractive to us, a pace that may seem mad at first but ultimately proves comfortable, and a race that can accommodate as naturally as it exasperates. To anyone, Italian or other- wise, such features appear compelling enough. They certainly are for the American, even more so for the artist, and maybe most of all for the sculptor. To these general advantages he would add the stimulating value of Rome’s sculpture and architecture, plus the practical value of Rome’s foundries and artisans – a combination making his situation almost ideal.

Italy’s impact upon American sculptors is not restricted to Rome. A short time ago Frisco-born, Florence-based Raymond Puccinelli volunteered: “I was strictly an abstractionist until I reached Italy. Then and there I realized that, in order to represent something significant, abstract qualities must be made to serve figurative purposes. Never again did I create a pure abstraction.” Yet it is most frequently Rome that turns the trick. The case of Milton Hebald is typical. Born in New York in 1917, he studied at the Art Students League and the Beaux Arts Institute, then taught for years at Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, among other Milton Hebald, detail from the Zodiac screen sculptures in the Pan-Am Terminal, Idlewild International Airport, New York. places. Coming to Milan in 1954 to cast a work com- missioned for the San Juan airport of Puerto Rico, he afterward continued to Rome in order to visit his former student Dimitri Hadzi, then guest artist at the American Academy. “That did it,” Hebald confides; “I had always considered myself primarily a teacher but now resolved to return to Rome and concentrate exclusively on sculpture.” Awarded a Prix de Rome the following year, he too came to the Academy, where he remained until 1958 working mainly upon a Zodiac for the Pan-American Air Terminal at Idlewild. He then went to New York to mount it, but once it was installed in 1960 back Hebald hastened to Rome, and here he intends to stay.

All the American sculptors in Rome have in common a great appreciation of the casting facilities and craftsmen. About other things they often tend to disagree. Asked what else keeps him here, Hebald for example will answer: “It’s principally my love of antiquity, a hangover from teaching, I suspect. I try to interpret the art of the past. First it was the Etruscan, but now it is the less popular periods. You have to be in Rome to do that and to get into the continuous tradition.” His master attempt so far is the huge Rococo zodiac for Pan-Am, a glass screen 210 feet wide and 23 feet high studded with the familiar dozen in unfamiliar conformation and combination, the sculpture integrated with the structure in a way enabling it to be seen with equal effect inside and out, its semiabstract two-faced deep-reliefs affording an illusion of something in the round from front and back alike. Other efforts include his Three Graces and his Mermaids and Triton Fountain, a Sphinx and a Bacchante, a Homage to the Baroque and a Paolina that seems intended to emend Roderick Hudson’s remark to: “I think I could show Canova and Lollobrigida how!”

For not all Hebald’s subjects are suggested by the past. If one month he refurbishes Lot’s Wife and Noah’s Ark, another may find him reacting to the present with a clutch of Roman girls or a boy and sweetheart on a hurtling Vespa, while the late Olympics inspired such animated clusters as 500 Meters and 5,000 Meters. These games appealed still more to Robert Cook, first of the current group to inhabit Rome. He is a specialist in arresting and dramatizing action-carnival, circus, pantomime, ballet, sports-and his series of Olympic studies climaxed a pursuit of movement that had already embraced American athletes, Chinese acrobats, Irish horsemen, Italian swimmers, and dancers from Russia to Tunisia to Spain. Consistently reflecting the contemporary scene, Cook is much less affected by the art than by the life of Rome, where distances are closer and existence seems simpler than at home. “My imagination works better here. My mind becomes a commuter’s mind back there; I think like everybody else, and my work suffers,” he maintains. “Besides, I was born in 1921 and I’ve been here since 1948, almost my whole grown life – so that, as the language has added another dimension, I’m by now practically part Italian.”

A native of Milton, Massachusetts, Cook began his studies in Boston under George Demetrios and completed them at the Beaux Arts in Paris. Arriving in Rome on the G.I. Bill, he took a studio in the same Via Margutta courtyard where Nino Franchina and Pericle Fazzini do their work. His technique is his own invention and involves modeling in beeswax molded by means of a soldering iron. Of the results his good neighbor Fazzini remarks: “His statues are like the olive trees that are hollowed out by man and by nature. He is always working… to arrive at the reality of the image and then to begin again … ” The poet Eugene Walter, another transplanted American, amplifies as follows: “One of the most interesting things about these works is the sculptor’s refusal to observe the terrible line of demarcation between representational and nonrepresentational..” And a Baroque ambiguity that nearly belies Cook’s professed unconcern with Roman art informs his best, most recent efforts. In the several Jacobs and Merry-Go-Rounds he appears to be asking with Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Hadzi was born, like Hebald, in New York — like Cook, in 1921. Graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School with a chemistry major which has since served him well in obtaining unusual finishes, he worked as a laboratory assistant before joining the Air Force in 1943. After his discharge three years later he studied art at Cooper Union and Brooklyn Museum Art School, received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1950 to continue his examination of Greek sculpture at the Polytechneion in Athens, and the following year came to Rome on the G.I. Bill to conclude his studies at the Museo Artistico Industriale. Before long he determined to remain on a permanent basis. “I enjoy it,” he allows, “because it is like living in a museum and because this is such an architectural country.” Fame came soon: a Tiffany award in 1955, a Guggenheim award in 1957 and a Reynolds award in 1963; several important commissions, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; two one-man shows in Rome and two more in New York, as well as one in Munich and another in Düsseldorf; a triumph at the last Venice Biennale, as one of two sculptors in the American pavilion; and this spring in the New Gallery at M.I.T, a retrospective exhibition of fifty-eight sculptural pieces together with various graphic works.

Superficially, Hadzi resembles Hebald more than Cook. His subject matter, unlike the latter’s, is almost always classical. However, unlike Hebald’s, there is something of Lipchitz about his treatment of these themes. They become myths and monuments of our time, with its comedy fully manifest, its tragedy ruthlessly implicit. In fact his early work — Ledas and Swans, Centaurs and Lapiths — culminated in 1958 with a Europa and Bull in homage to Lipchitz. Then began the period of Shields and Helmets, more abstract in handling but more concrete in meaning, that reached its peak in the Elmo-MIT of 1963. Here, five foot five of beaten bronze, is all of Hadzi to date-the gay pagan centaur became by profound and gradual metamorphosis a piece of armor more alarming than any astronaut’s headgear, a mechanized creature as ominous as the H-bomb itself. Yet our sympathy goes out to this anomalous sport in our headlong evolution, this composite throwback and projection. We find it proudly pathetic too. To this all our past has come! Hadzi has shown us, moreover, how so-Auschwitz to Salamis and Thermopylae, Suspended Forms and Floating Helmet to Fall-Out . . .

Hadzi is currently represented in London’s huge sculpture exposition at Battersea Park by his Primavera of 1959, a spiky piece that would illustrate the open-ing of The Waste Land, “April is the cruellest month, breeding…” It is nonetheless a concept more characteristic of John House, whose work all stems from the idea of growth forms that seized his imagination when he discovered the pine and cypress cones of Rome upon his arrival in 1957. “Everything started here,” he gladly acknowledges; “Rome is an extremely stimulating place and acted for me as a catalyst, its nuts and pods supplying the seed I needed, the embryo notion from which

what I do has developed.” Born at Niagara Falls in 1926, House graduated from Harvard in 1949 and at once made his way to Cranbrook, attracted by Milles and Saarinen. There, after teaching at the school and studying at the academy, he took an advanced degree in 1953. Coming to Rome as a tourist with the intention of casting something here, he found the way of life so indispensable that he accepted a position at the OverseasSchool until he could find his feet.

It did not take long. He learned from Robert Cook how to model in wax and soon he was on his own. Collaborating with a Swiss architect, he contrived to sustain himself with “church work,” providing everything from crucifix to candelabra and obtaining satisfaction from the inevitable unity ensuing. Last year came a one-man show at the Galleria L’Attico introduced enthusiastically by G. C. Argan, dean of Italian art critics. And this year came a commission to create I Cavalieri for the Hilton Hotel on Monte Mario. Ingeniously he adapted his germinal image to conform with the conditions imposed. From the bursting pod issued errant knights in phalanx, their shields the separate shells of its husk, their lances the life-force within. For, as House says of the Roman contingent, “What ties all of us together is a need for some connection with realism.”

“My ideas started in Rome,” avows Elbert Weinberg, whose Bridal Flowers link him with House and Hadzi as his Jacobs do with Hebald and Cook. Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, he studied there at the art school before taking his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1951 and his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Design in 1955. He first arrived with a Prix de R o m e in 1951 and found a natural inclination toward the Baroque encouraged on every hand. Returning on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 after three years of teaching at Cooper Union, he liked Rome better than ever and found it so congenial to his work that he decided to make it his home. Here he created all but five of the thirty-eight pieces for the exhibition held last spring at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston.

Just as most of his commissions are religious, most of Weinberg’s subjects are Biblical. He prefers Eve to Penelope, Abraham to Icarus, and Salome to Medusa. Angels abound as nowhere else but in Rome, something of the Roman walls may echo in his Jericho, and his proverbial Keepers of the Fig Tree are redolent of local Rococo. But it is his series of brides, capped by the rather abstract Bridal Flower of 1962 from which the head has altogether disappeared, that constitutes for me his best achievement. Rome here is sublimated with valid modern Baroque that proclaims the poet in Weinberg. After his departure from Pomona College, Jack Zajac followed Weinberg with a Prix de Rome in 1954, the year that Hebald visited Hadzi at the Academy. Born in 1929 at Youngstown, Ohio, Zajac had begun as a steelmill hand and became a promising painter. It was in Rome that he switched to sculpture. “The foundry is only half of it,” he explains. “There is all the artisanship and a lot of peripheral things besides. I think the Mediterranean cries for sculpture. Physically this place is so beautiful that man’s tampering with it seems to complement it.” It was as a sculptor that he returned on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 after teaching for a time at Pomona and as a sculptor that he settled here for good in 1962.

Zajac is related to Weinberg through his Depositions and to Hadzi through his Goats, the element of fruitful sacrifice serving to reconcile his Christian and pagan subjects. Both involve an attempt to communicate suffering through the contortions of a whole form rather than by grimace alone, in which respect they suggest the Laocoön in the Vatican, Lessing notwithstanding. Zajac recently embarked upon another series, Ram Skull with Broken Horn, combining aspects from the earlier pair. He finds the idea and makes the image elegant as well as somber. “Triumphant though damaged”: such is this ram with the crumpled horn that lives in the house that Jack built. To express this complex condition Zajac has taken a giant stride beyond his early work into that perilous but fertile domain where improvisation contends with

composition, abstraction with representation. When the balance is just and the process successful, the results afford another brave instance of renewal, a dual renewal affecting both the artist and his theme.

And still they come. Some arrive as fellows at the Academy-Philip Grausman last year, Stephen Werlick and Robert Birmelin and Lawrence Fane the year before. Among them are those who will return to America as Anthony Padovano did, those who will stay as Hebald did, and those who will go home only to come back as Zajac did. Others, like Gilbert Franklin and Marian Jacob, come as visitors to the Academy, much as Hadzi had done before them. Still others, following the examples of Cook and House, arrive independently of the Academy. Such a one is Peter Rockwell, born at New Rochelle, New York, in 1936. A product of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he came to Rome in 1961 on a Henry Schiedt Fellowship and has already made his mark. His first show here, of twenty-five pieces evoking a favorable comment from E. Schloss Burckhardt, caused Weinberg to exclaim: “He’s the most Baroque of us all!” One thing is certain: Rockwell will not be the last of that line which crosses the Atlantic in the wake of Story’s brazen hussy …

ARTS MAGAZINE/October 1963