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— Barnett Newman, 62, better known as an abstract expressionist, has recently attracted attention with his sculpture. His 26-foot-high Broken Obelisk, now standing outside the Seagram Building, was built at the Lippincott Environmental Arts fabrication plant in North Haven, Conn. Newman supervised each step of the process, had to draw a sloping line across the top of the inverted obelisk to show workmen exactly where to cut. Then the base was "flame cut"—i.e., burned with a cutting torch, in order to leave a grainy pattern of vertical lines.
City Scale. What Tony Smith and fellow monumentalists want to create is architectonic mastodons, varied enough to refresh the eye after the stark grids of city walls and streets, strong enough to war with jet-generation girders, large enough to command space-age piazzas. Out of the present confusion, Smith believes, a single, unifying style will emerge: "Art is becoming a tangible reality to the public. People are beginning to pass this stuff on their way to work. As art becomes public in this way, people will develop a judgment about it, a sense of universal style."
The Met's Tom Moving agrees, points to Eero Saarinen's St. Louis Gateway Arch and the new Picasso in Chicago (TIME, Aug. 25) as evidence of the trend toward monumental sculpture. "We're slowly coming back," Hoving believes, "to sculpture as something to be interested in. It's part of the conversational environment. As more cities solve their problems, they will want to make things look better with sculpture." But if sculpture is going to take its rightful place in the modern cityscape, it will have to acquire for itself the very qualities of scale, materials, tools and technology that made the city itself great.
Rust & Shipyards. "Napoleon could pay for big works; so he got big works," says Sam Green. City governments and corporations are already beginning to play a similar role. Chase Manhattan Bank thinks nothing of setting aside $100,000 a year for sculpture and paintings for their banks. Sculptor James Wines has finished an ll-ft.-high piece for Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., in Nutley, N.J. In Los Angeles, Alcoa's huge new Century City complex will be complemented by a 30-ft.-long, 8-ft.-high Peter Voulkos.
Industrial companies have also learned to contribute generously to the cost of building new sculptures. Les Levine, whose transparent Star Garden was shown at Manhattan's Modern Museum this spring (TIME, May 5), built his work with $2,000 worth of plastics and labor donated by American Cyanamid. Businessman Don Lippincott is the angel behind the North Haven plant where Broken Obelisk was fabricated, invested $100,000 in it so that sculptors could produce works for civic groups and industry. U.S. Steel supplies Lippincott with its new Cor-Ten steel, which weathers to a russet brown, at a generous saving. Bethlehem Steel let Robert Murray use its San Pedro, lif., shipyard to build his Siton Duet.