Beauty & Bongos

On the sprawling U.C.L.A. campus this week, an audience of 500 guests from the Los Angeles area and university patrons gathered while Chancellor Franklin Murphy dedicated the campus' new 4 1/2-acre outdoor sculpture court, which contains 27 examples of 20th century works. No other campus in the U.S. can boast one like Los Angeles'. In an outdoor setting lush with sycamore, pine, eucalyptus, jacaranda and coral trees, U.C.L.A. students can now stroll and study among Archipenko's Queen of Sheba, Calder's stabile Button Flower, four Matisse bas-reliefs, a Chadwick, Henry Moore's Reclining Figure and many, many more.*

The garden was conceived by Chancellor Murphy when he arrived at U.C.L.A. from the University of Kansas in 1960. "I have always believed," says he, "that beauty, in whatever form, especially art, needs to be part of the daily life of people." Though there was no single location at that time right for a sculpture garden, U.C.L.A.'s academic explosion provided one. Working with landscape architects and engineers, Murphy carved out a site on the new North Campus. The garden nestles amid a cluster of spanking new buildings--the business-administration and social-science centers, a research library, the theater-arts building (Macgowan Hall), and the Dickson Art Center, with its galleries, studios and classrooms.

Where Murphy needed help was in assembling the sculpture. Actress Anna Bing Arnold (who performed in the 1930s under the stage name of Anna Kostant) contributed Anna Mahler's show-bizzy Tower of Masks for the entrance to Macgowan Hall. In 1964 the U.C.L.A. Arts Council and Regent Norton Simon bought Lipchitz' Song of the Vowels. The bulk of the collection came from the estate of David E. Bright, a Los Angeles industrialist who died in 1965. Bright left the Moore, a Hepworth, another Lipchitz, and two pieces that are far and away the most popular with the students. One is an Henri Laurens reclining nude, called Esquisse d'Automne, whose raised arm and leg form what has already become one of U.C.L.A.'s most popular benches. The other is a clean, shiny pile of aluminum cubes by David Smith entitled Cubi-XX, which not only wins high marks on esthetic grounds but, as students have discovered by pounding on its several sides, also makes a dandy two-tone bongo drum.

* Few of the castings are unique, but all are from series authorized by the artists. For instance, Archipenko's Queen of Sheba is the third of eight castings: Matisse's bas-reliefs are the sixth of ten; Moore's Figure, the fifth of seven.

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