Word: metalled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...trees swarmed with black urchins and the crowds along the road shouted "Vive le Roi!" as Leopoldville welcomed young (25) King Baudouin to the Belgian Congo's steamy, metal-rich and thriving jungleland. Resplendent in white-and-gold uniform, Baudouin was the first Belgian monarch the Congo had seen since 1928, when grandfather Albert I visited a far less prosperous and bustling Congo...
France was most heavily represented, with seven artists, and made the poorest showing. Its entries were mostly tasteful, but merely tasteful. Germany did better. Hans Uhlmann offered abstract metal sculptures that look gay as birds yet precisely engineered as bridges. Fritz Winter's contrastingly gloomy canvases showed what dim-lit richness a few masterfully placed bars and smears of color can assume. The British contingent was all grim, and saved from dullness only by the brilliant horror pictures of Francis Bacon (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953), who can make a painted face seem to shout out loud...
Rome's Alberto Burri even managed to be pleasantly shocking. His "pictures" consisted chiefly of ripped, patched and pasted burlap. Sculptor Mirko (last name, Basaldella) exhibited four metal abstractions in four separate styles, each startlingly successful. His Chimera has the still aliveness of an ancient Chinese bronze; his Architectonic Element is a single sheet of brass cut and bent to take the light as elaborately as a great scarred cliff...
...Whitney's show underlined a curious gloom in U.S. sculptors today. Mostly they weld metal figures of a tormented yet unsympathetic sort. Forbiddingly invested with knobs, prickles and outright spikes, the figures imprison a bit of free air and defy anyone to invade it. David Hare's sculptures were a happy exception to the grim parade. Long dour as the rest, Hare has now invented a new and carefree impressionism. His Sunrise creates an effect of light and loftiness out of a rock, some steel bars and cut bronze sheets tinted with gold. Another exception was Richard Lippold...
...background is certainly evident in the precision he gives to the execution of his work and the mathematical balance applied to composition. Furthermore, the materials he uses, wire and sheet steel, are products of a technologically advanced culture. However, for the most part these materials are welded into flowing metal metaphors. In contrast to painter Ferdinand Leger or the constructivist sculptors who have also integrated science and aesthetics, Calder is not primarily concerned with industrial or mechanical shapes. His design, as the titles "Spider" and "Big Worm--Little Worm" suggest, stems from nature. Beyond direct observation of natural phenomena...