Art: Maker of Images

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Pablo Picasso, 77, whom most people think of as a painter, is quite possibly the most original sculptor in history. Not content with carving and modeling, Picasso sculpts by a third method: combining. He will make a bull's head out of a bicycle seat, with handle bars for horns, or a pregnant goat from a palm branch (for the back), a wicker basket (for the belly) and flowerpot udders, or a monstrous monkey, using a toy automobile for a head, a beach ball for a body. Cast in bronze, the results are more invigorating than inspiring, but they can help anyone to see better into the physical world.

Jacques Lipchitz, 68, did for sculpture what the cubists did for painting: he broke up forms into multifaceted geometry. But the cubist method seemed to him to stop, ultimately, at crystallization. Accordingly, he decided "from the crystal to build a man, a woman, a child." This tension between geometric and biological forms is what has most distinguished his work ever since. It makes him one of the most admired and least understood sculptors, for Lipchitz' geometric parings and biomorphic bulgings combine to give a brutal and confused effect, like that of a life-and-death struggle in a gunny sack.

Alberto Giacometti, 57, is a hungry sort of spaceman who eats away the forms he makes, leaving space supreme. "I see reality life size," he once remarked, "just as you do." But his portraits got smaller and smaller. He would carry them in his pockets, like peanuts, to the Paris cafes, and crush them with a squeeze. After World War II, Giacometti suddenly began producing tall, straw-thin stick men reminiscent of ancient Sardinian bronzes. His sculptures can be seen almost all the way around and dominate space instead of filling it. These new figures were universally acclaimed, but Giacometti went on destroying most of them. For the past year he has finished nothing.

Giacomo Manzu, 50, is the great modern throwback to the Renaissance. Trained as an ornamental plasterer and raised among the Renaissance sculptures of his native Italy, Manzu loves the old. His famed Cardinals are still as shellfish in their enclosing robes and miters, but Manzu himself denies that they are conservative—he calls them "my abstractions."

Alexander Colder, 61, made sculpture move. Thirty-one years ago, in Paris, he started stringing cards of various colors on a coat-hanger form and let them dangle and twirl. Finally, Calder settled on free forms, flying leaflike on the ends of metal branches strung from wire. "Mobiles" were born, and their cheerful bobbing and spinning helped many an observer find and appreciate other motions in nature. To turn from a pond or a tree tossing in the wind to look at an outdoor Calder, and then back again, can be one of the most rewarding experiences in modern art.