Lucky Manship

Born the seventh child of a seventh child on Christmas Day, Paul Manship was told he was lucky. At 14 he was painting a still-life of a green glazeware milk jug when his brother told him the jug was brown. Lucky Paul Manship was color blind. He wasted no time switching to clay. After three years in Sculptor Solon Borglum's studio and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he rambled through Spain (1908). Next year he won the Prix de Rome. From 1916 to 1925 he was too busy to hold a one-man show, to act Bohemian. He won nearly every U. S. prize for sculpture, every commission he competed for. He speckled the U. S. with his expensive marbles and bronzes, every one slick as a new dime. Hard work cast him like one of his bronzes into a chunky man with a bullet head and a military mustache. He joined the Social Register, Manhattan's Century and Coffee House Clubs. Earning some $60,000 a year, he lived in solid style. He worked in a sack suit and smock, talked little about the theory of art. Once a year he took out his restlessness in travel. His exhibitions were non-portable: a heroic statue of Lincoln at 21 before Fort Wayne's Lincoln National Insurance Co. building; an Indian hunter fountain in St. Paul's Cochran Memorial Park; a war memorial at Rome's American Academy; many a set piece in U. S. museums. Now 47, Paul Manship is a complete career man, with a socialite wife and four children. Last week for the first time in eight years he gave an exhibition, in Manhattan's Averell House, for charity. Most space was given to sculptures of animals.

The animals are part of a memorial gate to the late Paul James Rainey, famed big game hunter. Cleveland coal & coke scion (TIME, Oct. i, 1923). Rainey was the first to hunt African lions with dog packs, the first to make a wild animal cinema (1912). In 1925 the Rainey family offered the Bronx Zoo a huge (35 ft. high, 42 ft. wide) bronze double gate as a memorial to Paul, commissioned Manship to design it.

Working in his Paris studio, Paul Manship gave a year to the sketches for Paul Rainey's gate. He mapped American brown bear and deer in the foliage grillwork at the top, a lion, leopard and baboon on flanking bronze trees. In plaster he made little models of the animals, then bigger and finally over life-size models. He made a plaster double gate 4 ft. 5 in. high, fitted animals in scale into the design. Then with a pantograph* he made a replica 13 ft. high, then stepped that up to the full 35 ft. by 42. He sent this model to Brussels in 1931 to be cast into bronze. It is still in Brussels. But in his big white Manhattan studio, as clean as a hospital operating room, Manship had his models. He polished them up for last week's show and the glossy white plaster animals, bigger than life, looked down serenely from their pedestals on Manhattan critics.

Observers noted increased simplification in Manship's sculpture. The bear was the final recognizable shorthand for bear; four lines and some undulated modeling showed the bulging throat and front. Finer lines indicated the fur of a buck's tail and earlobes, a fawn's underside. The lion had a mane like a bunch of grooved bananas. Lion and leopard claws were shown by grooves the shape of paper clips. Ridging like the outside of a conch shell rendered mottled baboon fur. Generalized close to abstractions, the plaster animals each had a taciturn individuality, a secret smile of life.

Other Manship sculptures on show:

A plaster replica of Fort Wayne's 13 ft. Lincoln sitting on a tree stump with hound, book and axe.

Small scale bronze birds for the detail of the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gate: storks, a flamingo, a goliath heron, an owl.

A heroic bronze Diana, shrewdly balanced by bronze draperies, with a running wolf at her feet.

A small bronze Salome, yellowly limp and poised as Indo-Chinese sculpture.

Diapered Sarah Jane Manship, aged 3 mo. (now four years), in marble.

Not shown was the huge fountain for Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. Last week in his studio, ignoring his first one-man show in eight years, Paul Manship and two apprentices were still crawling over this fountain's central figure of Prometheus. Over a studding of nails, the apprentices were slapping on plaster up to the nailheads, then pulling out the nails. Flying Prometheus is balanced, like a man learning to swim, on the fountain's pedestal. He is bolted together at shoulders, legs and waist because he is too big (15 ft. long) to get out of Manship's studio whole. In June the figure will be delivered, ready to be cast in bronze and set up in Rockefeller Center's sunken plaza facing Fifth Avenue, the latest of Paul Manship's permanent exhibitions.

*A scaling machine. From a fixed pivot, a rod is scraped over one profile of the model in front of it. The rod's extension describes a much larger profile, is used to cut an enlarged replica out of a shaped mass of plaster.

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