Totem & Taboo

When the spirit moves him, Montreal Sculptor Robert Roussil, 24, does not fuss around with preliminary sketches; he snatches up hammer & chisel and attacks the raw material as it stands. Last summer he saw an oddly shaped tree, a tall pine with a forked trunk, and the spirit moved. By the time all the chips had fallen, Roussil had an impressionistic piece sculptured in the totemic form: a father standing in front of a kneeling mother holding a child. He called it Family Group.

Last week Sculptor Roussil hoisted his 12-ft., 700-lb. piece into a truck and drove it to Montreal's fashionable Sherbrooke Street for exhibition in the Art Centre. He arrived late and, finding the Art Centre closed for the night, he casually left his statue out on the lawn.

When passers-by saw it the next morning, they gaped and gasped: the father's massive figure was unclothed. Within a few minutes a crowd of several hundred had gathered, and somebody called the police. The cops elbowed their way through the onlookers, took a horrified look themselves, and carted the statue off to the municipal jail.

Montreal has long kept a cautious eye on art in the raw. This time was no exception. When a photographer arrived at the jail to take a picture of Roussil's statue, the police dutifully draped a towel around the father's ample loins (see cut). But their hearts were not entirely in their work. Said one policeman: "There is nothing wrong with this. It is nature. Even the Vatican has pure physiques of this type."

Roussil, a war veteran who supports his wife and one-year-old child by working as a part-time steeplejack and carpenter, .was not too much disturbed. Said he: "I guess I'll just leave it there for now. It seems to have a nice home." By week's end it looked as though the hubbub had won his Family Group a more promising home. An art dealer offered to put the statue up for sale in his gallery.

-In 1878, after irate citizens had banished from exhibition a plaster cast of the Discobolus, famed Roman copy of a Myron statue, because the discus thrower was nude, Novelist Samuel (The Way of All Flesh) Butler wrote a satirical ode to the city:

Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face

to the wall; Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at

naught,

Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth. O God! O Montreal!

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