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Poignant Goats. The modern sculptors of the image first school have no fear of the big subject, but they are inclined to view life with mordant eye. Features are squashed until they look like garden hats; figures develop wry distortions and alarming dropsies. Emotion ranges from compassion to morbid introspection and wry humor—anything, in fact, except that calm which the classicists held essential to sculptural beauty. For Sculptress Louise Kruger, 35. birth is depicted in her Newborn Child ($400), a volume of hammered and welded copper that seems all mouth and umbilical stub. Death for Manhattan-born Joseph Antonio Messina, is summed up in his bronze-cast Bird ($550). which was inspired by a dead bird he found on the beach and is typical of the horrid fascination that decay holds for many modern sculptors. Messina recalls: "That morning the wind moved the bird's feathers, so that it looked still alive. In my work I tried to penetrate into it, almost with the idea of finding within a last breath of life." The bird apparently wasted away in Sculptor-Messina's imagination; in its cast form, it is merely a withered skeleton picked clean by the elements. It still evokes the shock of unexpected death, still looks as if it ought to be lying on a beach rather than on a living room table.
Birds of no conceivable feather are a fascination of Richard Stankiewicz (TIME, Dec. 31, 1956), a pioneer of junk sculpture who in recent years has scrounged the scrap yards of Manhattan's Lower East Side for enough raw, rusty material to turn out a whole series called City Bird, Country Bird, My Bird, and one simply No Bird. The Golden Bird Is Often Sad ($2,500) looks like a sawed-off bazooka, but Stankiewicz sees it as "just a big old .introspective bird, standing on one leg, brooding and withdrawn."
Goats have become the special concern of California Sculptor Jack Zajac, 29. When he first saw them trussed up for market in North Africa, he recalls, "I was struck by their tender plea for preservation of life. The lines of the beasts are both sharp and pure, and yet there is something quite voluptuous about them." For Zajac a work such as his Bound Goat ($1,500) needs only a hop and a bound to move from image to symbol. Says he: "These animals are in dreadfully poignant positions. I think my preoccupation with sacrificial animals is because I feel they are universal symbols that recall the Passion. I do not idealize. I want these things to appear tragic; man is."
Strident Prophet. Though many works by the moderns seem like despairing cries in a man-made wilderness, actually a whole new realm has been carved out as the domain of 20th century sculpture. Whether he admits it or not, there is hardly a sculptor in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition who does not owe some debt to the founders: Alexander Calder. whose mobiles first set metal spinning through the air; Jacques Lipchitz, who turned bronze into writhing rope that sketched forms in empty space; David Smith, the dean and still the most inventive of the sculpture welders, whose 9½ft.-tall Fifteen Planes ($15,000) of welded steel plate is a brutal and beautiful image that seems to cry, "Halt!"