Art: Stone Men

Gallerygoers in half a dozen U.S. cities will soon find themselves face to face with a strange and disturbing race of men—huge, monolithic, slab-sided figures in stone and bronze, their heads little more than squared blocks, arms often missing or merged with their torsos. They are the work of Vienna-born Fritz Wotruba, 48,, Austria's leading sculptor and one of the few major new art talents to emerge from postwar Europe. Last week a 300-ton display of Sculptor Wotruba's monumental figures opened at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, the first stop before starting on a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S.

Beyond Stonehenge. At first sight some of the figures could be mistaken for a fortuitously arranged pile of curb stones. But others were recognizably human in shape, seeming to crouch as if frozen in eternity. Most dramatic were the men of stone and bronze, who appear to be literally walking, their heavy legs striking the ground with earth-shaking strides (see cut). Taken together, they suggest a strange yet disquieting voyage back to the mysterious ruins of Stonehenge and beyond.

Wotruba aims at metaphor, not visual likeness. Like most other modern sculptors, he has jettisoned the tradition that sculptors must turn out figures so lifelike that blood almost flows in the marble veins. Wotruba gets inspiration from the stone block itself. As a result, his figures are roughhewn, still bear the sculptor's chisel marks. And they remain emphatically stonelike, with a sense of the prehistory mystery which man has long attributed to curiously shaped boulders and strange stone outcroppings. This gives an awesome touch to Wotruba's figures, as effective in their blunt massiveness as the matchstick-thin figures of France's Alberto Giacometti.

After Hitler. As a sculptor, Fritz Wotruba would have long since become a world figure if it had not been for Hitler and World War II. The son of a poor Czech tailor, Wotruba was put to work at 14 as a metal worker, took art lessons at night. Although he was 18 before he finally became a sculpture student, by 23 he had sold a major work, Monumental Giant, to the city of Vienna. But what was the beginning of a brilliant career was cut short by the arrival of Hitler, and the Nazi campaign against what they called "decadent" art.

Wotruba went into exile in Switzerland in 1939, remained there during the war years, which, he now feels, he spent largely "accumulating powers, as in a reservoir, so they could be used later." Back in Vienna after war's end, Wotruba became director of the sculpture school at Austria's Academy of Fine Arts, in 1952 had a one-man show at the Venice Biennale. To his students Wotruba insists: "The artist must answer the question—why do I live? This provokes the answer: art is an attempt to justify human existence. Whether it's beautiful or ugly doesn't matter. Art still has to prove that human existence is worthwhile." Wotruba's stone men and women, in their mute but eloquent silence, seem to be stumbling toward the answer that it is.