Tait McKenzie claims that the vibration of life that thrills the spectator and reproduces the pleasure the artist had in creating it reappears in bronze , added to by rich colour and a velvety surface that invites the caress of the hand .sx This he regards as infinitely better than the chaste coldness of white marble or the unsympathetic lifelessness of grey granite .sx This is as it may be , but , in any case , is no argument in support of the use of plastic elements in the production of glyptic results .sx This authentic view , so boldly and uncompromisingly expressed , is of the utmost value in revealing the spirit of the complete modeller .sx He feels so much that he will not allow for any other feeling whatsoever .sx He may prefer bronze to marble , but that has nothing to do with the processes which produce a work of art out of inert materials .sx What he may not logically do is to confuse the methods of production .sx He is a logician and not a dreamer ; he is unlike many artists , especially unlike many carvers .sx There is often a vein of poetical feeling running in the natures of the sculptor-carvers , whether direct or indirect , and this is frequently the case with those who are born artists and craftsmen rather than made .sx Several instances come from Brittany , one of whom is Robert Laurent , who in 1890 was born at Concarneau , in the wonderful Finistere country .sx Very early in life his artistry made itself manifest , but he left France when he was twelve years of age and was taken to the United States , where he became the pupil of Hamilton Easter Field and Maurice Sterne .sx This training , however , had as little to do with his .sx future style as did that of the years 1908 and 1909 , when , on returning to Europe , he studied at the British Academy at Rome .sx Laurent is a Breton , as Rene Quillivic is , and , like him , a carver in stone and wood .sx All natives of Brittany have it in them to become craftsmen , for they are fond of using their hands and of employing primitive tools to the shaping of primitive matter , in which they take a delight varying with the amount of resistance it offers to their persistency .sx Laurent has never used clay ; he has always cut direct in marble , stone and wood , and his work bears the indelible character of such treatment .sx Its making was direct and its appeal is direct , like all work of its class .sx Alfeo Faggi , a fellow sculptor in America , says that the fulness of life can be felt in Laurent's work , that it has brought into art " the sensitiveness , the meta-physical point of view which characterises the art of the Orient .sx " Faggi rejoices in the fact that Laurent's sculpture is naive and free from the facile graces of the Greeks and the Romans , and Faggi hits on one of the greatest beauties of sculpture , its navete , an impossibility in the work of the formalists , possible only to those who start with and maintain the primitive point of view .sx When art becomes formalised it becomes sophisticated , then classical , then academic ; pure beauty , good artifice , but lifeless and still , without pulse ; beautiful line , but no guts .sx Laurent's work has more than beautiful line , it has design , as you may see in his group of the squatting mother and child in alabaster , and the standing mother and child in wood .sx He has suavity of style andgeniality , even in the St. Christopher , while in his heads of women , of which there are many , there is a very pleasing and intriguing softness .sx Modern as he is , Robert Laurent is no cubist , neither is he an abstractionist , finding that for himself the nearer he gets to Nature the better it is for his art .sx He sees forms in Nature , however , which it is the aim of cubism and abstractionism to invent ; he has sculptured a Flame which is one of his loveliest things , but attaches no meaning to it ; he just saw the beautiful thing and fixed it .sx It would be difficult to find in the works of Archipenko , Jacques Lipchitz or Atkinson anything to match its grace .sx No doubt the sculptor thinks it is of no great importance , but its intrinsic beauty is obvious .sx Nature , however , in a more domestic habit has attracted Laurent's attention ; he loves to sculpt animals of the smaller sorts and plants .sx He exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries , in New York , some admirable things of this kind a Young Duck , a Bantam Cock and a Dormouse .sx The duckling is full of humour , the bantam of impudence , while A Hen and Chickens shows the hen full of solicitude .sx The sculptor has imparted to homely subjects a permanent interest which more mighty themes have not enabled others to make convincing , and human subjects are by no means neglected , as The Priestess , Baigneuse , L'Indifferente and Flirtation seen at this exhibition indicated .sx Laurent lives at Brooklyn , and is the Corresponding Secretary of the Society of Artists there and the Director of the Modern Artists of America , and .sx he has exhibited at the Daniel and Montross Galleries , at Scott and Fowles , and at the Sculptors' Gallery .sx The modern feeling of his work is due to the simplification of his method , which in turn is due to his altogether right sense of glyptic form .sx He wastes no stroke in his draughtsmanship and loses no effect of drawing .sx In the Young Duck there is a statement of form in its simplicity that would be difficult to get in modelled work ; it obviously suggests the analytic method .sx In the Girl's Head , looking down , there is an amplitude of facial expression that makes a complete presentation with apparently the simplest means .sx The St. Christopher is achieved in an entirety of detail seemingly , but yet on examination its planes prove to be quite simple ; there is no detail .sx His Mother and Child group yields obligingly to the suave but compelling action of the chisel on alabaster as mahogany does to a knife .sx These are Laurent's chief materials .sx The United States has given a hearty welcome to the foreign direct carvers .sx Gaston Lachaise is another .sx He was born in Paris in 1882 , and studied at the Ecole National des Beaux-Arts .sx His first American one-man show was at the Bourgeois Galleries at New York in 1916 , and this was followed by another two years later .sx He is one of the most original and individual of the immigrant sculptors , and his mature work was seen at his exhibition at the Brummer Gallery , New York , in 1928 .sx It is stylised and expressionist , and most of it is modelled .sx His carvings are in alabaster and marble , and are done directly by himself .sx A girl's head , in marble , shown at the Kraushaar Galleries , is one of the most .sx impressionistic pieces of sculpture since those of Medardo Rosso , but with more form .sx Meanwhile , the native-born are busily engaged in deriving the benefits of the culture on which the immigrants have turned their backs .sx William Sergeant Kendall , Dean of the School of Fine Arts , Yale University , who was born at Spuyten Duyvil , N.Y. , in 1869 , is one of them .sx He joined the Art Students' League of New York , later the Beaux-Arts at Paris .sx He exhibited in the 1891 Salon , and got an Honourable Mention , and a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900 , while at the Pan-American , Buffalo , the following year he received awards for painting , drawing and sculpture .sx His Beatrice is in the Pennsylvania Academy , The Seer , and Psyche in the Metropolitan Museum , An Interlude in the National Gallery , Washington , and Narcissa in the Corcoran Gallery there , while his Cross-lights is in the Detroit Institute , and Intermezzo in the Providence School of Design .sx An original half-length portrait of a Peasant Girl , carved in wood and coloured , was seen and admired at the San Francisco Exposition .sx Kendall is one of the few academic sculptors of the United States who has made essays in wood sculpture .sx Another is Antony de Francisci , while Eugenie Shonnard of New York exhibited at the 1923 Salon d'Automne a Rabbit in ebony as an example of her exercises in animal sculpture in wood .sx Grace Mott Johnson is one of the few consistent animaliers of the United States , and she has also the distinction of being a direct carver in stone and plaster .sx She has made a number of coloured plaster .sx reliefs and panels and plaques of animal subjects .sx Passionately attached to animals since her birth in 1882 at New York , she has pursued them with vigour in zoological gardens and farms , in wild Nature and in the circuses of Barnum and Bailey and the Ringlings .sx She has thus achieved for her work a verisimilitude which makes it convincing .sx She has also travelled in Egypt , and has been a student of the past in many museums , and has been exhibiting her works since 1908 in the principal art centres of America .sx Another woman traveller is Malvina Hoffman , honoured in London as the author of the sculptures on Bush House .sx Her modelled work is well and widely known , and her carved work is as important and significant .sx She is an indomitable worker and spends years in travel , so that she may possess the authentic feeling which only actual contact with types can give .sx It is this travel in the East which has weaned her from the perpetual rehabilitation of modelled classical work .sx Her monuments are , indeed , important , but until she carved smaller pieces she still lacked the true glyptic impulse .sx She works in the little and the great ; the big Bush House group consists of blocks of Indiana limestone weighing 20 tons each .sx The figures are twice life size , and were carved in the rough by a Scotsman in the United States and finished by the artist .sx Her small pieces are very engaging :sx her head of Keats she has worked on for fifteen years ; her racial type busts have occupied less time ; they are in wood and black Belgian marble , which is a fine and suitable substance for such subjects as a woman of Martinique and a Senegalese soldier , while wood isadmirably suited to the presentation of a Rabbi of Hara Srira , and an African Slave .sx As the younger native American sculptors travel more widely afield , instead of studying only at the schools of Paris and other recognised centres , the ideas of the neo-classical period will cease to circulate .sx There are in Middle Europe cities in which modern sculpture takes on a different aspect from that which it wears in the traditional schools .sx Seymour Fox is a native of New York , where he was born in 1900 , and , after studying at the Yale University , went to Vienna and worked under Anton Hanak .sx The impress of that virile artist is to be plainly seen on Fox's work .sx A head in black Belgian marble , which was exhibited at the California Palace at San Francisco in 1929 , is an example of the differential treatment of material , the face being polished and the hair left in a semi-worked state .sx It is in this direction , of seeking not only the well-known masters abroad , but those who are less celebrated , but even more talented and modern , that the young American artist will be able to find himself .sx The methods of a couple of generations are now outmoded , but Middle Europe and Scandinavia are available .sx Among the several Swedes who have settled in the United States , Andrew Bjurman , who was born in 1876 , holds a special place as a sculptor .sx His Spirit of the South-West , shown at the Contemporary American Sculpture Exhibition , is a striking work .sx He has taken a number of prizes in California , and is a member of the Sculptors' Guild of California .sx Trygve Hammer is a Norwegian , born at Arendal in 1878 , and trained at the Christiania Art and Trades School .sx Arriving in the United States in 1904 , he became a student at the Art Students' League and the National Academy under Herman MacNeil , Stirling Calder and Solon Borglum .sx He is a wood and stone carver and metal craftsman , and his Hawk in blue-stone is a striking piece .sx His work is in the Brooklyn and Newark Museums and on the Roosevelt Memorial at Tenafly , N.J. .sx