Dark Visions Of Primal Myth

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These cloth shells also have their distinct grace. Several figures of circus performers, riding on iron-wire wheels, refer to Giacometti's famous charioteer and, through that, back to common sources in Etruscan antiquity; the precarious poise of the acrobat's body is part of Abakanowicz's general imagery of human vulnerability and risk.

She loves series and variation. The biggest single work at Marlborough is Embryology, 1978-81 -- a whole landscape of some 600 stuffed burlap "rocks," ranging from mere pebbles to big boulders, an extraordinary array that suggests cocoons and gravid wombs as well as stones. Her chief metaphor, as Brenson (who wrote the catalogs for both shows) points out, is "the enchanted forest," which "can be traced back to animistic peoples for whom trees and forests were fearfully and delightfully alive." The tree trunk refers to, and sometimes becomes, the human torso. The "mutilated Eden" of Poland's forest turns into a metaphor of human loss and survival. In the Marlborough show are four bronzes, each 10 ft. to 12 ft. high, called Hand-Like Trees, whose vertical trunks do resemble arms: their looming profiles recall Rodin's standing Balzac, and their vigorous modeling around a split core provokes a distant memory of Matisse's bronze Backs.

To get the full impact of what Abakanowicz can do with this primal image, one must see her sculptures at P.S. 1. These are all part of the same series, titled War Games -- 16 sculptures so far, a growing family. Each piece is a trunk, a dead tree salvaged from the dying forests of the Mazury Lakes region, 200 miles north of Warsaw. Abakanowicz works these trunks to a degree -- stripping the bark, smoothing out some excrescences with chain saw and hatchet and applying some surface treatment -- but she does not carve them beyond that. Each wrinkled bole with its splayed limbs and fissures keeps its tree-ness and does not become mere timber, raw material. Abakanowicz preserves the body of the tree, and then she fits this body with metal shells, prongs and armatures, sometimes binding it as well with strips of burlap like mournful bandages. Thus you find yourself looking at something large, somber, mutilated and of irresistible physical power. Brenson points out that the War Games pieces are all, in some degree, elegiac; they convey a mourning for < violated nature, because nearly all the forests of Poland have been cut down and sold off as timber to Scandinavia since World War II.