Art: Maker of Images

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Fact is that Moore is part of a new outburst of sculptural activity that history has not seen since the Renaissance. As in ancient Rome, where statues gestured along every bare boulevard as the fur-clad Goths came rampaging in, the modern world is heavy with sculpture. Park strollers the world over are familiar with the saber-brandishing, chest-scratching pigeon roosts that glorify individuals. Such images are still being produced, but noticed less. They stand in the long shadow of their forebears, the Greek, Roman and Italian Renaissance masters, who did the same thing probably as well as it can ever be done. Increasingly, park strollers and museumgoers are confronted with strange new forms: distorted shapes that puzzle, pocked half-shapes that depress, weird forms that inexplicably move the viewer; objects made of spikes and pipes and wire, of curled tin, discarded hot-water tanks, or bent typewriters welded into caricatures.

Images for Spirits. For just as the rough Goths made a break from the classical tradition that eventually led to the Gothic style, so modern sculpture has shattered old molds in search of a new spirit. It is not so much concerned with people as with symbol. Its practitioners are not figuremakers but shapers of space. The grandfathers of this new art were savage idol-carvers of Africa, Central America and the South Seas, who did not regard sculpture as representation or the finished product as "beauty." They were concerned with making images that spirits could inhabit.

The moderns, too, think of sculpture as expressing (and therefore in a sense containing) a certain spirit, although they consider it personal and not supernatural. The first great modern to skindive into the silent, other-worldly realm of savage sculpture was Rumanian-born Constantin Brancusi. He emerged to make some of the most powerful carvings that the 20th century has so far seen. Jacob Epstein, the U.S. expatriate, followed a parallel path for a while, but his essential humanism made him wary of abstraction. Exploring a similar bent but a different source, Julio Gonzalez found in Spain's harshly medieval ironwork a medium and a technique that foreshadowed many of today's proliferating sculptor-welders.

These men are gone, but they opened new areas that even now have not been fully explored. But already the new spirit has produced a handful of sculptors who, along with Henry Moore, can be ranked as modern masters. As a group, the great living sculptors are no group. Each seems to yell, after the manner of impulsive children: "Look at me!" It is never "Look at us!" Their works have no obvious common denominator; they cannot be lumped, as the anonymous masters of Gothic or Romanesque sculpture are lumped, under the label of a school or a style.