Word: fazzinis
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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...show pointed up Fazzini's great range. He is equally at home carving realistic portrait busts and academic church images, or turning out expressionistic figures cruelly twisted for dramatic effect...
...portraits are generally of Fazzini's friends, carved as gifts to the sitter. Unflattering, they have some of the force and bite of the best old Roman busts. His apparent method is to catch a friend's fleeting but typical expression, as the camera can, and emphasize it almost to the point of caricature...
...church images are weaker, interesting chiefly for their elegance. Done on commission, they are Fazzini's livelihood...
...expressionistic sculptures Fazzini carves for glory; they sell badly. Some are more than half abstract, and Fazzini's bullying of the body into geometrical shapes can be hard to take. But Fazzini uses his freedom with figures to make them look alive from every angle. They seem to be in motion, often have the fiery spiral lift that Michelangelo, with infinitely greater subtlety, achieved. "The body in sculpture," Fazzini says, "is not something that breathes air as I breathe. It must live by itself, outside of physical death...
...cabinetmaker, Fazzini carved furniture in his father's workshop as a boy. At 16, he began studying sculpture, earned a four-year government scholarship almost at once. Married, he avoids company, spends long days alone in his cluttered studio off the Via Margutta (Rome's Greenwich Village), chain-smoking, pondering, taking up the chisel only at moments when he feels sure...