Monuments and Mockeries

...No artist of our time was more hostile to the spirit of Dada," yet his oeuvre was in truth "another manifestation of the Dada program...

...The catalogue for the 1969 National Portrait Gallery show of reliefs includes a vignette about the meeting Saint-Gaudens engineered between Sherman and Robert Louis Stevenson at the author's request...

...We have to take on trust, for instance, that Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres-the female torso on whose rump are painted the f-shaped vents of a cello?was, like Marcel Duchamp's mus-taching of the Mona Lisa, a savage blow for freedom in its time...

...The Dadaists are credited with having introduced photography into the medium invented by Picasso and Braque, and in so doing they greatly increased its satirical possibilities...

...another noteworthy piece is the bust of General Sherman, a preliminary study for the large equestrian group that stands at Fifth avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan...

...The term collage has been loosened to include "any image made from a juxtaposition of photographic images by any means and in any medium...

...as Hilton Kramer noted in a 1967 obituary-review, Reinhardt was a tragic figure because his work was "too deeply implicated in the very vulgarities [he was attacking...

...New York remained his permanent base until 1900, when he retired to his studios in Cornish, New Hampshire, now designated a historic site...

...Here, however, we find Reinhardt back at the old stand and, in this company, looking very much the artist, old style...

...Born in Dublin, the son of a French bootmaker and an Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens came to america as an infant and grew up in New York City...

...Some of the replicas are astonishing in their delicacy, such as the large portrait of two children, Mortimer Leo and Frieda Fanny Schiff, taking a walk with a wolfhound...

...He began his working life as an apprentice cameo cutter, which was to have a lasting effect on his work, and, after studying at Cooper Union and the National academy of Design, he completed his training in Paris...

...The Met has mounted a fairly representative sampling of Saint-Gaudens' cameo-like relief portraits and, with the help of some large photographs, of his heroic works...

...His Diana, for example, designed to be the weathervane of Stanford White's Madison Square Garden, is about as impressive as a store dummy...

...Shortly after they were introduced, Stevenson tackled Sherman on his favorite subject...

...Even in the hands of the Surrealists, who sought the "marvelous" and the "magical," mockery is ever present...

...No one could accuse Saint-Gaudens of being influenced by Symbolism, but there is about his intimate work a touch of dreaminess that places it firmly at the turn of the century...

...Perhaps all revolutions look foolish once they have accomplished their objectives, yet it is striking how ineffectual yesterday's art gestures look today...

...another effective piece of this type is Hans Hollein's small shot of an aircraft carrier beached in rolling landscape...

...So there are plenty of double exposures as well as some prints that are not totally photographic-such as silk screen-but whose process involves photography somewhere along the line...

...Elements of this kind are barely touched in by these carving virtuosos...

...In the same way, the misty white cross superimposed on a crowd scene from Birth of a Nation, though beautifully photographed, is a reminder of the mystical excesses that can be seen any day during the annual Washington Square Outdoor art Show...

...a case in point is the Metropolitan Museum's current show (through September 23) of the work of augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), drawn almost exclusively from the Met's own collection...

...at worst, his subjects seem to be wondering which of the servants to knout next...

...It features a poem the author wrote for another american artist friend, Will Low: "Life is over, life was gay/We have come the primrose way...

...the vessel looks as if it had been left behind, like a dinosaur, by some unname-able cataclysm...

...among the few exceptions to Saint-Gaudens' prevailing blandness is his portrait of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, who had written a complimentary article about the sculptor's standing Lincoln...

...although he was a competent carver, most of the white marble pieces on display (copies of bronze originals) were made by the Piccirillis, a family of Italian craftsmen...

...When the General asked who Stevenson was, the sculptor explained that he had written Dr...

...This stance might be expected to produce noticeable muscular tension even in a female body, but here it is done with hardly a ripple...

...the author, as frail men so often are, was an accomplished armchair tactician...

...It is amazing that Singer Sargent?represented here on a medallion?admired Saint-Gaudens' work, for it lacks precisely the spark that made Sargent himself so much more than a society portraitist...

...Together they suggest there was something very delicate and sensitive about him...

...James Mellow has pointed out that Saint-Gaudens was almost obsessed by the details of clothing, and that was never more obvious than in the drapery folds on this figure, which crinkle like seersucker...

...Many of the pictures are ingenious puzzles whose chief appeal lies in figuring out the components used and enjoying the visual puns...

...Consequently, it is hard to take seriously higher class equivalents like Henry Callahan's composition of the lower part of a female nude imposed on a landscape of aix-en-Provence...

...The Civil War hero's wrinkles apparently caused the artist as much anxiety as did his uniform...

...Both men were serving the same kind of customer, yet Sargent made his sitters look interesting as well as rich...

...More a picture than a sculpture, it makes one wonder how so tentative and gentle an artist could have succeeded so spectacularly in a medium for which he seems to have been temperamentally unsuited...

...Heads and hands are smoothly modeled, yet the bodies are sometimes treated in so linear a fashion that, from a distance, the barely incised white marble plaques look like over-exposed photographs...

...The gilded nude balances by one foot on a small sphere, her other leg flowing free behind her, as she assumes the traditional posture of drawing a bow...

...Whatever the medium, the sculptor's figures are, with few exceptions, done in very low relief...

...Its reverberations are still being felt deep in the recesses of Brooklyn, where no wedding is complete without a shot of the happy couple embalmed in a wineglass...

...Faithful copiers as the Italians were -they even reproduced Saint-Gaudens' strange spatial error of making the girl seem to be on a larger scale than the boy, despite her standing slightly behind him-their superior skills could not help but improve on the sculptor's technique...

...To judge from this show, Saint-Gaudens was best at portrait reliefs...

...The 1940 collage of shredded newsphotos by ad Reinhardt is startling for quite different reasons...

...His modeling was often fussy and uncertain...

...t is now critically fashionable to talk about "reading" works of art, and in the case of the Museum of Modern art's current survey, "Collage and the Photo-Image" (through September 11) the verb is literally correct...

...While Stevenson's classic works are too vigorous to be called fin de siecle, the poem certainly is tinged with the melancholy and spiritual exhaustion of the period, and the sculpture echoes these qualities...

...The man who wrote that is no fool," observed Sherman, agreeing to meet him...

...they, on the other hand, knew how to subordinate details like the brocade pattern of the child's dress to the larger forms...

...This sculptor, who prospered by doing public monuments and portrait busts, produced the statues of abraham Lincoln that Daniel Chester French didn't do...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...Now it looks like the prototypal art student joke...

...With the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to Rome for two years, returning home in 1872...

...Saint-Gaudens did nicely by Stevenson in what is now a famous plaque, of which a number of variations exist, both rectangular and circular, like the one exhibited here...

...Besides inspiring the Surrealists, de Lautreamont's seminal vision of a sewing machine and an umbrella sitting side by side on an operating table had a tremendous impact on the medium of photography...

...Hyde, which in play form was then enjoying great success in New York...

...The writer, who was to die of tuberculosis seven years later, is shown in profile, propped up against pillows, with a book in one hand and a cigar in the other...

...This artist's reputation peaked in the '50s and '60s when he was taking a vociferous stand against the galloping crassness of the art world while at the same time producing his famous nearly black paintings...

...a similar blandness characterizes amor Caritas, a caryatid-like angel, also gilded, whose upraised arms support a plaque on top of her head...

...Coiffed and chokered in the Queen alexandra of England style, she shows a firm, long-nosed profile that must have imposed its character upon the artist...

...he seemed to lack the megalomania of the true sculptor, the driving need to create noble obstacles...

...One of the few occasions where it seems more than technical futzing is in Edward Steichen's overlapping skyscrapers, which at least make a mildly interesting design of rectangles slanting diagonally in upward perspective...

...If most of his female portraits are pure, however, it is more the innocence of uncooked dough than that of otherworldliness...