Images of Metamorphosis

By ROBERT HUGHES

Frank's is an art of subject matter. And its basic subject -- the sensation of inhabiting a body whose surface is enveloped by air, water or earth -- is put before us allusively. In the exhibition of some 140 works that runs through the summer at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., most of the pieces are figures or heads. But they are complex, swathed in images of metamorphosis. One of Frank's recurrent themes from classical mythology is that of Daphne, the daughter of a river god; pursued by an amorous Apollo, she turned into a laurel tree to protect herself. The elements of that myth -- eroticism, physical change and an invocation of the antique past -- pervade Mary Frank's work as a whole. Bodies be come landscape, human anatomy wavers into that of animal or plant, and the structure of flesh undergoes a sort of fossilization. Her aim is to recomplicate sculpture: to make objects that cannot be taken in at a glance, that demand thought and gradual digestion.

This process begins with Frank's preferred material, clay. Her larger recumbent figures, like Lovers, 1974, are pieced together from a dozen separate elements, each made of a clay sheet fired in the kiln. The manipulated sheet, rather than the solid lump, is the basis of her formal syntax. The clay can be molded. It sags in pleats and thick drapes. It can be rapidly scratched, poked and cut. It retains an air of spontaneity, for Frank knows where to leave a shape before it loses its sketchlike character. Harder sculptural materials, like wood, metal or stone, connote resistance and planned decision. But clay accepts fleeting impressions, and incorporating these into sculpture is very much the purpose of Mary Frank's art.

But there is something more to her use of clay than the immediacy and malleability of the raw material. As the show's guest curator, Hayden Herrera, points out in her warmly sympathetic catalogue essay, clay is "the oldest material for art and an emphatically primitive, even primal substance." (The first sculpture of a man, as every reader of Genesis knows, was made from clay when God modeled Adam.) Clay is earth, and Frank's figures of sprawling nudes and entwined lovers, tenderly dislocated, are clearly meant to be seen as emanations of the earth, concretions of place and appetite. On occasion her liking for the organic goes too far. She has a habit of incrusting the skin of the figures with artsy-craftsy fern patterns and other vegetable decor, to their detriment. But her references to an archaeological past are almost always successful. The biscuity surface of the sprawl ing bodies alludes, though not blatantly, to the plaster corpses of Pompeii, just as the division into parts refers to the cult of the antique fragment -- a hand here, a fragment of leg there, a split face.

It is possible to make a long list of Frank's sources and assimilations. The splayed, unideal awkwardness of the figures, and the way they appear half buried in the ground, can be traced to Degas's bronzes. The softly modeled, bulbous heads with their almost genital mouths come straight out of Picasso in the early '30s, as does the sense of cubist rotation; and so forth. But such a catalogue would not take account of Frank's originality.

That resides in her talent, perhaps un rivaled among sculptors of her generation, for creating icons of touch, for making apparent the feelings of the body through sculptural form. She is a completely erotic sculptor. Nearly everything in the flow of her forms, their smoothness, their open disjunctures, their oneiric self-sufficiency, partakes of sexual feeling. It does so without a trace of violence or condescension.

Born in London in 1933, the only child of a painter named Eleanore Lock-speiser, Mary Frank came to New York during World War II. At 17, she married the photographer Robert Frank. Although she had no formal training as a sculptor, she did study drawing in Manhattan during the '50s under Hans Hofmann, the doyen of abstract expressionist teachers. More important for her work, however, was a stint as a dance student with Martha Graham: the sense of significant gesture in Graham's choreography does seem to have affected the movement of Frank's own sculptures. The best of them possess the unfolding completeness of dance. Her work, in fact, is an ambitious metaphor illustrating the continuity between intelligence and sensation, between mind and body, between body and the world it inhabits. Because these continuities are not everyone's property (and never have been), one might see Mary Frank as a kind of archaic fabulizer, spinning myths about a lost Arcadia of the senses. But the quality of her work disputes that. For all her mannerisms, her sculptures leave the viewer with an exemplary confidence of feeling, an authenticity rare in sculpture today. -- Robert Hughes

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