Blue Britons

Since World War II, British sculptors have gained more fame as a group than all of their forerunners put together. Their grand old man is Henry Moore (TIME, Sept. 21), but other stars of the movement are still in their 20s and 30s. Among the youngest and newest to fame are two modelers of heavily textured, postsurrealist, gloomily playful figures: Eduardo Paolozzi, 35, and Elisabeth Frink, 29.

A dungaree-clad London housewife, Frink had her first exhibition while still in art school. Last week her tabletop bronzes were on view at Manhattan's Bertha Schaefer Gallery. At first glance, many looked like mud attempting to fly; they were that energetic and that saggy. The combination said something blue about man's estate, the approved tone of most contemporary sculpture. But Frink's ostensible purpose has nothing to do with moral messages or with ideals of any kind, not even plastic ones. "Somebody makes a metal armature for me," she explains, "and I start covering it with quick-drying plaster. I work very fast, often trying to combine the form of a bird with the form of a man. I'm absorbed in forms. When I do a bird, it's not a bird to me, but the form of a bird. Not that there is any right form exactly; it comes different every day."

The son of Italian immigrants, Paolozzi was born in Edinburgh, but got his start as an artist by chumming with surrealists in Paris. He prowls junk yards and factory dumps for his materials, which he assembles elaborately. Paolozzi begins by pressing his bits of industrial detritus into soft clay, which he then fills with soft wax. Then he combines hundreds of small wax forms to build up his figures. A cogwheel may do for a navel, a phonograph pickup for an arm. Finally cast in bronze, they become mysterious idols of fusion and confusion. Explains Paolozzi: "My occupation can be described as the erection of hollow gods with the head like an eye, the center part like a retina . . . the legs as decorated columns or towers, the torso like a tornado-struck town, a hillside or the slums of Calcutta . . . I am creating an image which does not exist. It's like walking into a room in a dream and seeing objects which you want to create."

The monsters from Paolozzi's studio bring close to $10,000, and the august British Council has picked 30 of his works as Britain's only sculpture entry in next year's Venice Biennale. They represent man scrambled, irrevocably.

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