Art: Brenda's Book

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Into the files of the Library of Congress last week went a book by Brenda Putnam, the daughter of the librarian-emeritus. Written with no eye to enshrinement, The Sculptor's Way* was worth the attention of anybody who ever carved a bar of soap or monkeyed with Plasticine.

Brenda Putnam learned to sculp at the National Cathedral School in Washington and later under James Earle Fraser, Libéro Andreotti and Alexander Archipenko. Brown-eyed, dark-banged, slight and lively, she has worked and taught for years in a roomy studio on Manhattan's West 22nd Street. Summers, she and her father, Herbert Putnam, knock around in a sloop at North Haven, Me. Most of the last three years she has devoted to her book.

Called "Teacher" by her onetime pupils, Sculptor Putnam aimed to enlighten the layman and at the same time to provide a technical guide for students, especially girls, who seldom get a chance at apprenticeship in a sculptor's studio. By a happy omission of professional cant and a handsome use of good drawings and photographs, she puts across pleasantly much that a manual would desiccate.

Best thing in The Sculptor's Way is Author Putnam's pellucid outline of human and animal anatomy. An acknowledged expert on the subject, she believes that sculptors should know it thoroughly before they go in for compositions in mere "mass" or abstraction. Her favorite point: that any animal's bony structure is essentially the same as man's. A horse's hocks are his heels; birds have knees.

Besides her own chapters on bas-relief, composition, portraiture, drapery and the techniques of enlarging and reducing, Sculptor Putnam gracefully includes chapters on ceramics by Carl Walters, on stone and marble carving by Robert A. Baillie, on wood carving by Gleb Derujinsky and on bronze casting by Anton Basky. Her advice to sculptors: learn to be poor and keep in good condition.