Bronze Realists

The hottest "underground" figure in the international art world is a 28-year-old Dutch sculptor who has never exhibited in a big-city museum or gallery, and is not even an abstractionist. He is Kees (rhymes with bays) Verkade, who makes small, unpretentious bronzes of athletes and urban dwellers -hardly the thing, it would seem, to cause a tremor in these days of earth works and conceptual art. Yet within the past year Verkade's works have been eagerly sought and bought by private collectors from Holland to Hollywood.

Verkade has a gift for freezing an action at its most expressive moment. Connoisseurs with the special expertise of Hank Greenberg's son Glenn praise the split-second accuracy of his baseball players. "The guy," says one admirer, "has a stroboscopic eye." But Verkade goes far beyond mere reportage. He has an instinct for attitude and gesture that invites comparison with Degas and, in another medium, Daumier. He can catch the slump of an old man's shoulders as he sits alone on a park bench, waiting for nothing; the sweet awkwardness of a young mother holding her baby.

Spreading Word. Verkade wanted to be a commercial artist in advertising, but failed the entrance exam at Amsterdam's Rietveld art academy. After a brief fling with abstract painting, he turned to figurative sculpture at the Royal Academy in The Hague, then started out in a tiny studio near Haarlem. One day last summer, Photographer David Douglas Duncan saw Verkade's bronzes, was impressed, bought some and began telling collector friends about his discovery. Word spread quickly. During one three-week period, Verkade received orders from America for nearly 40 statues.

Verkade is one of a whole group of busy sculptors whose realistic bronzes seldom get a big play on the art pages, but continue to sell. The Remingtonesque cowboys of Wyoming-bred Harry Jackson are snapped up as fast as he can turn them out, at prices in four and five figures. David Aronson's neo-Gothic gargoyles, angels and prophets regularly sell out in editions of eight and twelve.

Captured Moments. The most ornate stylist in this group is Italian-born Bruno Lucchesi, whose vibrant Tuscan peasants and East Village hippies are currently on view at Manhattan's Forum Gallery. Like Verkade, Lucchesi has a stop-action photographic eye and delights in off-center, cantilevered poses that seem to defy the laws of gravity. He too specializes in capturing moments of everyday human drama. One work in his current exhibition shows an old woman lying on her deathbed with a grief-stricken young girl stretched out across her legs. "It's a tribute to my mother, who died last year," the sculptor explains. "The other person on the bed is really my soul, I guess."

Lucchesi's sculptures are as Italian as Verkade's are Dutch. He works up his figures with a quattrocento Florentine passion for detail, and flings off flying draperies with the airy exuberance of a Bernini. The son of a Tuscan shepherd too poor to send him to art school, he learned his first lessons from the monuments in cemeteries, later managed to study in Florence. There he met and married a Brooklyn girl; and when they came to America in 1957, he began to exhibit in his father-in-law's picture-frame shop in Greenwich Village.

Lucchesi is proud of the antique effects he achieves with his small figures. "Doesn't it look 400 years old?" he asks of one. It does. But like Verkade and the other bronze realists, Lucchesi gives a personal, 20th century turn to the august sonorities of a traditional style.

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