Passion in the Berkshires

The trim little Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass, was fairly bursting with sculptured emotion last week. Some figures wept, some prayed, some chewed their nails. Another sat on a pedestal and seemed to scream.

Even those who thought some of the bronze, wood and marble figures a bit stagy admitted that they were masterfully carved, with an unfailing simplicity of line and form. Ivan Mestrovic, the man who made them, was there himself to help install the show.

About half the pieces on exhibition had been seen before at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum (TIME, April 14, 1947), which had never before exhibited a one-man show of a living artist. The rest, all done withinc the past 20 years, had been brought from Yugoslavia by his brother Petar. The hit of the Metropolitan show was a 5 1/2 ton Pieta done in the muscular, dramatically contorted tradition of Michelangelo, and too big to transport to Pittsfield. The Berkshire exhibition emphasized Mestrovic's carved wooden bas-reliefs and single figures whose intensity made Hungarian Sculptor de Strobl's vaster ideas look blown up (see below).

A shepherd boy who inherited his father's passion for whittling, and grew up to be one of the best sculptors alive, Mestrovic has two closely related reasons for staying away from Yugoslavia: 1) he knows what the inside of a jail looks like (the Fascists jugged him at the start of the war, released him only at the Pope's request); 2) he is no Titolitarian.

Mestrovic has finished nine major pieces in the past year. When a reporter asked him last week what he did for relaxation, the sculptor looked puzzled for a moment and then blurted, "Work!"

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