Famed Foundry

In the drab suburb of Arcueil, four miles south of Paris, stands an undistinguished building with a partly frosted glass window through which may be glimpsed a plaster angel negligently hung upside down. A bronze shingle on the door identifies the place as the foundry of the Susse Brothers, a name as famous among modern sculptors as Benvenuto Cellini's. Many major sculptors will have their works cast by no other foundry.

Susse's reputation for fine sculpture casting runs back 200 years. Andre Susse, 49, the seventh in the Susse line of foun-drymen, is a meticulous craftsman and connoisseur. Over the years, Susse Brothers has played host and helper to such far-flung makers of sculpture history as Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Henry Moore, Germaine Richier, and the painter-sculptors Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, Dali and Chagall.

Wax & Sand. To visitors last week, the foundry was still the place of weird shapes and leaping shadow that Duchamp-Villon and Brancusi knew well. In one room, sweet-smelling brown wax boiled on a rosy, potbellied stove. In the 100-ft.-long casting shed, coke fires hissed under fat crucibles shaped like medieval cannons, and overhead hoists trundled swaddled casts to their firing-pits. In a finishing room, a workman lay in the arms of a large bronze nude, reverently polishing her nose. In another corner, Marc Chagall supervised the application of a patina to his latest piece. Mustache quivering, Salvador Dali dropped in to examine a bronze book cover that had just been cast.

The techniques employed at Susse are "lost wax" and "sand casting." The lost-wax method of classical and Renaissance sculptors was revived by Susse especially to cope with the intricate broken surfaces of such moderns as Richier, Reg Butler and Giacometti. A plastic mold of the model is constructed and provided with a system of vents. A wax skin the thickness of the desired bronze is then spread over the inside of the mold, and the core is filled up with plaster. Then the wax is melted away through the vents, and molten bronze poured in. When the bronze cools, the mold is broken away, the vents filed off, and the whole piece polished and colored.

For sand casting Susse employs a sand found only in the Seine basin, which becomes almost doughy when moist. It is best for highly polished surfaces. The sculpture is solidly packed with sand, which is then baked dry to make a mold. A second mold is also fashioned, roughly one-eighth inch smaller than the original mold. The molds, shaped in halves, are placed one inside the other and then joined. Finally molten bronze is poured into the thin space left empty between.

The process takes about a week in either case. At the moment the bronze emerges from the cast, the sculptor generally attends, like an anxious father awaiting the birth of a son. The bronze comes out orange, blue, red, yellow or gold. But these colors, caused by the firing, rapidly fade. Besides the usual bronze color, the Susse secret acids can produce mordant greens, equatorial blues and glossy black.

Cylinders in the Kidney. After hours, Andre Susse goes on being helpful to sculptors, financing those in whom he believes, and even arranging exhibitions for them. Like all connoisseurs, he can be opinionated. Recently Susse refused a commission to cast a 90-ft. statue, remarking that, in his opinion, "the Statue of Liberty is not sculpture."* He has cast masses of abstract sculpture in the past decade, now sees a growing return to figurative work. "The abstractionists went as far as they could go," he explains, "and some examples were pretty bad. In a sense they have been forced to rediscover figurative composition. The third dimension, finally, is a human dimension." If Susse is right, the latest message for sculpture may be that of the crashed aviator in the old song:

Take the cylinders out of my kidneys

The connecting rods out of my brain,

The crankshaft out of my backbone,

And assemble the engine again.

* Originated as a gft. model by the Alsatian Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, in 1875, the Statue of Liberty was enlarged to 152 ft. and shaped in copper sections by the Gaget-Gauthier Co. in Paris. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame, designed the supporting construction.

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