Twenty Years After

Thirty years ago there were three U. S. sculptors known to every student: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, George Grey Barnard. The Grand Central Art Galleries last week gave the only survivor of the trio, 71-year-old George Grey Barnard, his first one-man show in 20 years. One glance around showed that George Grey Barnard is still one of the great sculptors of the U. S.

Stocky, barrel-chested. mop-haired Sculptor Barnard worked for 15 years on a project that has caused many of his esthetic friends to wince: a full-scale plaster model of an enormous War memorial arch which is yet to be translated into blue labradorite, embellished with a colored mosaic rainbow, rows of grave crosses in artificial perspective and an elaborate icing of gigantic white marble figures (TIME, Nov. 10, 1930; Nov. 27, 1933). Working like a beaver (his son estimates that he handles nearly 500 pounds of wet clay a day), he has been a recluse since the Armistice. Careful inspection showed that, however erratic the War memorial might be as a whole, most of the individual figures are fit to rank with the best work Sculptor Barnard has ever done. So were two of his newest works in last week's show: An eight-foot bearded Christ with muscular arms upraised in supplication (the model was a football coach); and a gigantic figure of Mother Earth and Child, eventually to be cut in black granite and gilt.

Sculptor Barnard was born in Bellefonte, Pa., started life as a taxidermist. Starving in Paris, he earned the jealous admiration of Auguste Rodin when he was a student in his twenties. With his chisel he has made at various times enormous sums of money. He once estimated that his Lincoln statues brought him over $260,000. Three of his countless pieces give him a secure place in any history of Art: Adam & Eve, now on the John D. Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills; the gaunt standing Lincoln intended for Westminster Abbey, now in Manchester, England; the nude reclining Pan, once the largest single bronze ever cast in the U. S., on the Columbia University campus.

Because the State of Pennsylvania refused to pay on time for a series of heroic statues Barnard had designed for the Harrisburg Capitol, he took a bicycle trip through southern France, assembled an extraordinary collection of medieval sculpture. Selling most of it to dealers, he made enough to keep his 15 workmen employed in his huge studio near Paris. With what he did not sell, he started the finest private collection of Gothic and Romanesque sculpture in the U. S. This he placed in a private museum next to his studio in upper Manhattan, opened to the public. Later John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated money to buy the entire collection for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fortnight ago came news of more Rockefeller munificence: a gift of $2,500,000 to build a complete Romanesque abbey for the collection and The Hunt of the Unicorn, a $1,100,000 set of 18th Century tapestries to adorn it.

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