Art: Self-Taught Sculptor

In 1915 Warren Wheelock was building himself a log cabin in the North Carolina mountains. He needed a pair of andirons. That was not too hard for a commercial artist who had designed glass ovenware, safety razors and compacts. He took two sticks of oak and whittled out a dachshund (for casting into iron). He liked his firedog so much that he kept on whittling, and by 1922 he was a full-fledged sculptor. On display in Manhattan’s Robinson Galleries last week went a Wheelock retrospective show that started with the dachshund andiron, ended in 1940 with a crisp, stylized figure of Washington at Valley Forge.

Self-taught Sculptor Wheelock, short, ruddy, 60, left high school to volunteer for the Spanish-American War, drifted into commercial art via teaching. Industrial design is still one of his side lines, but many a museum is proud to own his sculpture. He uses no model, chalks out his figure on a chunk of wood. Then he takes a homemade hickory mallet, pounds his carving chisel along the lines he wants to make. He never cuts too deeply—”possibly because I was born with a puritanical conscience.”

Warren Wheelock does both abstract and realistic sculpture, regularly switches from one to the other. Typical is his Lincoln series. The Intellectual Lincoln (1924) is a cross between an abstraction and a totem pole. The Meditative Lincoln (1930) is a seated abstract figure that might equally well be Rameses II. Realistic from shoes to stovepipe hat is The Tragic Lincoln (1934), his sombre Lincoln on Horseback (1940—see cut).

No believer in repetition, Sculptor Wheelock keeps on experimenting. His lively, engaging pieces range from a plump, belligerent figure of Fiorello LaGuardia to an abstract, pinafored Little Girl, from a bat-swinging Babe Ruth (Sultan of Swat), all curves and planes, to a shiny, swivel-hipped Black Dancer. “When a man stops adventuring,” says practical Warren Wheelock, “he stops being an artist.”