Boats & Bombs

Modern art, like any other, reflects the preoccupations of its day. For example: bombing. Picasso's big, brutal painting, Guernica, successfully symbolized destruction from the air, and last week a first-rank sculptor was meeting the same challenge in bronze. Ossip Zadkine, 60, had been commissioned to commemorate the 1940 Nazi bombing of Rotterdam. He did it in terms of a single, fearful, upward-reaching figure.

Zadkine's father was a riverboat builder in the Russian city of Smolensk, and the sculptor's ambition has always been to make his works "as beautiful and perfect as a well-built boat." That simile would never have occurred to classical sculptors, who took the human body as their measure of perfection. It partly explained the mixture of respect for his materials, trim severity and bargelike bluntness in Zadkine's art.

When he was 16, his father sent him to England to learn "good manners." Young Zadkine came home with long hair and a volume of Plutarch, persuaded his father that Paris was the appropriate place for him, and sculpture the right profession. Except for a World War II sojourn in Manhattan, he has lived in Paris ever since, a tweedy, pipe-smoking little man hammering away at sculptures that were often twice his size. Over the years, his Montparnasse studio has become forested with carvings, and they have spilled over into half the museums of Europe. Recently, he was honored with the Grand Prize for sculpture at Venice's vast "Biennale" exhibition.

Like most Zadkine sculptures, his new memorial for Rotterdam combined the soft, delicate architecture of flesh with slashed and squared-off chunks derived, at least in part, from cubist painting. The figure billowed like smoke from blocky underpinnings. The arms, as if elongated by its terror, writhed upwards to hold back the sky in a futile, contorted gesture of self-preservation. The statue looked like a cross between Atlas and a frightened child, which was perhaps just what its subject required.

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