Between Transcendence and Brutality: American Sculptural Drawings from the 1940s and 1950s. - book reviews

Even more colorful and painterly than Dehner's are the ink, gouache, and wash drawings by Herbert Ferber. A sculptor with a degree in dentistry, Ferber also made paintings that he exhibited independently of his three-dimensional pieces. While a few of his drawings, such as Un-titled (1947), are carefully shaded visions of abstract sculptures, there are also figural studies, including the composite Portrait of a Sensualist (1947), and color compositions such as Untitled (1958), which featured red and yellow shapes against a pale-green background. The small color drawings are among the richest and most lyrical works in the exhibition; by comparison, the three small bronze sculptures by Ferber that were also included seem far less inventive and free.

While many of Ferber's drawings function independently of sculpture, almost none of Seymour Lipton's do. His ink, pencil, and Conte crayon studies are meticulous renderings of projected three-dimensional pieces, often including a horizon line and indications of a base. He drew certain sculptures repeatedly, imagining how they would look from different angles and altering the shapes and relationships of elements within them. Although individual works are tight and dry, variations such as the two drawings titled Study for "Sorcerer" (about 1950) give interesting access to the artist's working-out of a particular sculpture. As the exhibition also featured four Lipton metal sculptures, Sorcerer among them, the close connection between his two- and three-dimensional activities was amply demonstrated.

Like Lipton, Isamu Noguchi was a "sculptor's sculptor" who used drawing primarily as a means to sculptural ends. Unlike Lipton's worked-up studies, however, Noguchi's pencil drawings are more like sketches or doodles: numerous realized and unrealized images of elements or pieces are often juxtaposed on a single sheet, such as Fifteen Studies for Sculpture (1947). When I catalogued these drawings for the Noguchi Foundation, I was amazed both by the volume of ideas he generated, particularly during the 1940s, and by the small percentage of those ideas that were actualized in three dimensions. The fragility of his favorite materials during that period--thin slabs of slate and marble rather than welded metal--certainly made it more important to refine forms on paper before making irreversible cuts in the stone. Noguchi also developed drawings from which he could create maquettes directly; on the graph paper of a Worksheet for Sculpture (1945) he sketched elements of slab constructions that were then cut out, mounted on cardboard, and used to make small models of pieces that could be scaled up into stone. By means of this process, Noguchi effected a logical and literal translation of two dimensions into three. When the worksheets were backed later with black paper, the cutout spaces emerged as bold calligraphic shapes that are appealing in their own right.

Noguchi used drawing to investigate specific sculptural possibilities rather than to lead him in radically new directions. For Theodore Roszak, on the other hand, it was a series of gouache drawings that helped precipitate a mid-1940s move from machinelike constructions to welded metal structures. Like Bourgeois, Dehner, and Smith, Roszak was a painter before turning to sculpture in the 1930s, and drawing remained one of his primary modes of expression. Like Lipton and Noguchi, he made numerous studies related to particular pieces, but unlike theirs his drawings are neither dry nor tentative, but bristle with energy and a sense of organic growth. Study for "Spectre of Kitty Hawk" (1945) is a ferocious hybrid of animal and vegetable parts, while Study for "Thorn Blossom" (1947) suggests postnuclear crosspollenization run amok. Four small steel sculptures by Roszak, for three of which there are studies in the show, were also included and, as with the Ferber pieces, they are somehow less impressive than the drawings. And one of the most powerful Roszaks is Nova (1950), which is not a study for a sculpture but a tangle of spiky forms exploding from the center of the sheet.