Part Four

American sculpture today can be roughly divided into three parts: 1) mottled green statuary dedicated to the conquest of public parks, 2) sexless nudes created to rule over marble fountains, and 3) welded-steel monsters resembling giant insects, which have lately invaded the art galleries. Last week Manhattan's Alan Gallery was staging a different kind of show: Sculptor William King's portrait busts and full figures, done in bronze, painted clay and wood. They had an air of happy improvisation and swift caricature.

While the sculptor had made no effort to counterfeit human flesh, he spared no pains to capture the moods and posturings of his sitters. The show as a whole resembled a party of average yet somehow fascinating folk, frozen in deep sleep by a sorcerer.

Sculptor King, 29, looks more like a college student than a sorcerer. Raised in Florida ("a fine place until you're 15"), King found his career through a lucky series of frustrations. Bored with his engineering course at the University of Florida, unable to afford Columbia's School of Architecture, unable to get a union card to play jazz clarinet in Manhattan, he found himself at Cooper Union Art School in 1946, and three years later got a Fulbright fellowship to study sculpture in Italy.

King now lives on Manhattan's Bowery and likes it, though he confesses to finding "something sad" in the atmosphere. "The drunks around outside," he remarks, "worry night and day about all the things they have to worry about, and that's the hardest kind of work."

King's great strength is that he derives inspiration not from art but from human beings. The wit and sophistication of his sculpture springs not from esthetic theories but from his perceptions of the whole of life--the still serenity of a Negro trumpeter between numbers, the electric melancholy of an adolescent girl, the sense of union of an engaged couple, the wistfulness of Miss Bowman (see cut}.

Among the men jazz fan King most admires is Clarinetist Benny Goodman.

Benny's music, King explains, is"earthy, yet on a high level."That goes for King's cheerfully lifelike sculpture as well.

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