Hewn out of Wax

The first show of the new art season at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art will cover all three floors, more space than the museum ever gave for a one-man exhibition. The size of the show is all the more impressive because of the artist it will honor. He is Bernard Reder, 64, an enormously imaginative New York sculptor whose name is scarcely known to the general public.

Bernard Reder has, in a sense, been perennially out of fashion. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he has always disliked modeling in clay, preferring to work with hammer and chisel. Even today, though he now models in wax, the material that gives him the most spontaneity, he still approaches each work as if it were to be hewn out of a mass. "I am a sculptor," says he, "who enters the volume: always I conserve the block." This concept of "volumetricity" is basic to his art. Each statue, says Reder, must be seen from all sides and not just frontally. The big Whitney show, which will open late in September, will give viewers scope to circle Reder's sculptures freely.

In the Trenches. "Everything I am," says Reder, "I owe to Czernowitz," the Ukrainian city where he was born, the son of a Jewish innkeeper. Czernowitz, now Russian but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a town that thrived on folklore and legend, and even the grim periodic pogroms added to the sense of drama. At 17, Reder was drafted into the Austrian army, spent World War I in the trenches as one of the most wretched and incompetent of privates.

He never went back to secondary school, decided instead to become an artist, put in a year at Prague's Academy of Fine Arts. Reder earned a meager living doing statues for the Czernowitz cemetery until a fresh outburst of anti-Semitism drove him away, and for the next 20 years he was never to settle in one place for long. He worked in Prague and in France, where he became the devoted friend of Sculptor Aristide Maillol. He escaped to Spain when the Nazis swept into France, only to be thrown into jail for illegal entry. Released without explanation, he got to Cuba and from there to New York. His troubles were far from over. Two or three museums bought sculptures from him; a few major group shows exhibited him; sales were so few that at one point Reder and his wife had scarcely enough to eat. Even today a $10,000 Ford Foundation grant provides a good,chunk of his living.

Sense of Whimsy. Hardship never crushed Reder's sense of whimsy. His people may be half bird; he invents preposterous musical instruments, designs costumes and headdresses that are pure fancy. His ideas come from almost anywhere--from the Old Testament, from Rabelais, from the memory of a statue of Napoleon (see color) or of a dwarf back in Czernowitz with a large head. "All I know is that when the time comes, the idea is there. It comes from my stomach, from my blood. And I never ask my blood why."

What seems mere improvisation is a careful and wholly Rederish sense of how each part of a sculpture should balance and play against the others. The Dwarf is not just a bittersweet sculpture of a sadly deformed human being: the strings of the cat's cradle start the viewer's eye on its voyage; the great hands and arms fix the circumference of the block, which is thus both open and closed at the same time. In Aaron, which is 8 ft. high, the shafts around the tepee-like tabernacle are balanced and continued by the symbols of the tribes of Israel that grow weedlike out of Aaron's back. Aaron the man is always there, his head the highest part of the sculpture, but design is never sacrificed to theme. The eye of the beholder becomes restless, and that is as it should be: it darts in among the folds of the robes, leaps from point to point, sweeps upward and then down again--as if the bronze itself were on the move, bursting with secrets to tell.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.