Bronze Buster

Will Rogers, who was a willing victim, once called Sculptor Jo Davidson "the last of the savage head-hunters." Last week 187 of his trophies, the work of 41 years, went on exhibition in Manhattan's American Academy of Arts and Letters. Together they made a procession of the 20th Century's famous men, and a few of its women.

Among the historic heads were those of Wilson, F.D.R., Madame Chiang Kaishek, and Gandhi. ("What a dome," recalls Davidson, rubbing his stubby hands, "what a dome that Gandhi had!") The writers included Conrad, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, G. B. Shaw, D. H. Lawrence (whose thin, bearded face Davidson had made indomitable as a plow), Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, and 1947 Nobel Prizewinner Andre Gide, looking like a Roman Senator in marble. Helen Keller was portrayed with her thinking hands upraised. Charlie Chaplin's vain, subtle face bowed in a corner. Einstein's uncombed locks stood forever snarled in bronze. John D. Rockefeller Sr. pursed withered lips. Ernie Pyle grinned shyly from a pedestal. And there was also a bust of an emaciated, fanatically intense young artist in a floppy tie, who, on close inspection, turned out to be Frank Sinatra.

Davidson was getting ready to study medicine at Yale when one day he picked up a lump of clay and "knew right off" he wanted to be a sculptor."But when I switched over to art," he says, "the world lost a promising surgeon. I mean someone useful as well as ornamental." Now a squat 64, his round brown eyes stare frankly at the world from above a salt-&-pepper beard which is bushy enough for a Lower Slobbovian. "I shaved it off in 1917," he remembers, "and Great God! For three weeks until I could grow it back, I was the Invisible Man!"

Davidson's approach to his subjects is as simple, and complex, as it is human. "I never have them pose," he says. "We just talk, about everything in the world. You see, sculpture is another language altogether; it has nothing to do with words. And the minute I start to work I feel this other language between me and the person I'm 'busting': a language of form. I feel it in my hands. Some of my busts are novels you might say, and some short stories. The one I did of D. H. Lawrence was a short story, because he died a week after I began it.

"Sometimes the people talk as if you were their confessor. . . . Now I naturally get an immediate impression of a person, but sometimes the impression changes as the person talks to me. It's very surprising, the words that come out of a mouth."

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