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Flannagan (born 1898) is an outstanding figure. He works in complete independence and his capacity for creating within the limits of sculptural form is exceptional. The abstract and expressive character of the form is always foremost, though his work is never without the interest representative of nature or human nature, often present in a delightful way. A young animal, a child, a woman, are among this sculptor's familiar subjects. His Cat is an abstract design of distinction. It is developed within the circular boundary of a field stone, and sculpturally has the character that the Chinese have reserved for their hardest materials. At the same time it presents to the observer, in its familiar reality, the figure of a cat asleep in a characteristic attitude. His Mother and Child represents a universal human relationship tenderly felt and made memorable afresh in a finely realized sculptural embodiment. The closely related figures are developed in a design of rounded forms and rise together from the unworked base of the stone, firmly held within the felt boundaries of the original block. The intensity of sculptural expressiveness and the intensity of psychological significance reinforce each other and present themselves as an inseparable unity. Flannagan works effortlessly and swiftly. He has a gift of intense visualization and sufficient skill as a craftsman to work out his images directly, as if he were drawing. "My aim is to produce sculpture with such ease, freedom and simplicity that it hardly seems carved but rather to have endured so always. I should like my sculpture to appear as rocks, left quite untouched and natural--or, as has been said, inevitable," he says. He often uses field stones and adapts their weathered surfaces to his conceptions. This does not mean that the shape of the stone dictates his design, but rather that his creations keep close to the effects of elemental nature and are suitably expressed through the medium of elemental shapes. Flannagan studied painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and is self-taught in sculpture. It is interesting to note, in passing, that he is almost alone among representative moderns in American sculpture as being American born and educated. Robert Laurent was born in 1890 in France but came to America as a child. He was educated in this country, in France, and in Rome. Cutting directly in stone, he produces sculpture that combines the qualities of grace and power, sculptural simplicity and sophistication. He has made fertile experiments in cutting semi-abstract forms. Among his most important works are the alabaster Bather, in the Brooklyn Museum; Awakening, which is a life-sized nude, and a small bronze Kneeling Figure, both in the collection of the Whitney Museum; and the widely publicized Goose Girl, in Radio City Music Hall, New York. The Kneeling Figure, in replica, is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. This artist has solved every aspect of his problem as a sculptor with a truly Gallic power of analysis and has constantly broadened his means of expression. "To be good, sculpture must function from all angles whether viewed from the sides, bottom, or top," he says. "It must combine form, personality, expression of life. The sculptor must study nature, then gradually learn to eliminate its intricate detail, retaining only the elemental qualities, the real essence of the object. When he can do this he is a genius," he adds idealistically. Heinz Warneke (born 1895) produces vital, clearly realized forms which reveal a capacity for thorough and painstaking observation and an uncompromising craft integrity. His lovely Water Carrier, in French stone, represents a half-kneeling girl with a great jar on one shoulder, and is carried out with a largeness and simplicity that convey the feeling of timeless form. The conception is akin to that of Metzner or of Maillol. There is no conscious separation of the expressive values of abstract form and of subject form. Every anatomical fact is taken into account, the stress is laid upon the planes that carry the rhythm, whatever action there may be, and the inner meaning. His Wild Boars, for instance, accentuates the ungainly but eminently practical shapes of the heads to convey to the spectator their ploughlike function and the relative unimportance of the bodies in contrast. The Newborn Calf is a work of delicate veracity. The Prodigal Son, a recent production, is heroic in scale and monumental in conception and is pervaded with a quiet and self-contained atmosphere of religious reverence that is rare in contemporary works. Alfeo Faggi is Italian by birth and education. Before he came to this country first, in 1913, he had turned spontaneously from the neoclassic tradition in which he had been trained, to direct cutting in stone and to the formation of a personal style with the character of Italian Primitivism. His Inferno gates executed for the Museum of the University of Chicago, his Head of a Japanese Poet, in the Art Institute of Chicago, and the St. Francis in the Museum of New Mexico, in Santa Fe, all express a quality of spirituality. The St.Francis Francis is organized in silhouette form and its character is expressed in the terms of linear rhythms. Both the Prodigal Son by Heinz Warneke and the St. Francis by Faggi represent the American feeling for simplification of form and are interestingly in contrast with the work of Eric Gill, of England, for instance, who is a religious artist. Gill is a professional monument maker, a Roman Catholic and a medievalist, interested in restoring the lost character and function of architectural sculpture as they were in the Romanesque and Gothic periods. His work is a demonstration of the abstract organization of concise volume and space relationships, while that of the Americans is more vividly a record of personal experience without being either traditional or literary. Polygnotos Vagis (born 1894) was a shepherd boy on the Greek island of Thasos, and before coming to America at sixteen, he knew nothing of the meaning of sculpture and almost nothing of its appearance. He began cutting directly in stone before he had received any instruction, and he has produced a large number of works of high rank on the basis of an education which included two weeks at Cooper Union before the war and a brief period at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York after his return from the war. Georgio de Chirico, the Surrealist painter who is a fellow-countryman, says of him: "From Greece he has brought and kept the sentiment of true form and measure, the love of profound poetry, always balanced, full of mystery and charm, which characterized his distant ancestors. . . . Vagis is always obsessed by images of the human figure. His sculpture, carved of wood or stone, is always a powerful evocation of the human being in all that it may have of monumental form. The beauty of the material is always of great importance to Vagis too." Aviation, his magnificently modeled study in the Brooklyn Museum, shows that his instinct for creating antique forms can be given very modern expression. The Cycle is representative of his present work. José de Creeft (born 1884) is Spanish. Throughout the period of the modern revolution, he was in Paris, where he came into contact with Picasso and other revolutionaries and lived and worked in an atmosphere charged with excitement. His own work changed gradually from a traditional to a modern character, and its range reflects a capacity for experiment in the essentials of expression. He has produced what one Englishman has called "tea-party Buddhas," and grotesque primitive figures, in the process of arriving at the uncompromising nonnaturalistic creations of which the Black Head is an example. This artist testifies that he often receives the image of his creation complete in an instantaneous flash, when, for instance, he comes upon a piece of material of a particularly suggestive shape or glimpses a person who appeals to him particularly as a sculptural subject. This first clear conception is modified as he works only by the sustained discipline that is required of the workman in stone. Maurice Sterne is better known as a painter, but he has executed public commissions of importance in sculpture and has produced work in this field over a long period, achieving the same atmosphere of quiet authority as in his paintings. Ahron Ben-Shmuel, Romauld Kraus, Oronzio Maldarelli, and Harold Cash are outstanding for qualities of strength and directness. Samuel Cashwan is foremost in a group of sculptors experimenting, in the Detroit region, with modern techniques. Warren Cheney of California, now a professor of art at Randolph-Macon College, in Virginia, is another vigorous carver in stone. Fletcher Clark, of Kansas, has worked extensively in wood, employing characteristic wood forms and natural sap veins effectively as design elements. Milton Hebald, still in his teens, is a conspicuous figure among socially conscious New Yorkers. He has cut groups of vigorous, freestanding figures from cross sections of oak, making the coarse, tough grain count towards the effect for which he works. Chaim Gross, another New Yorker, cuts heavy, blocklike figures, both in stone and in wood, and often represents the locked forms of athletes. The spectator is almost always conscious that he designs his sculptures around a central axis, with a lifting, spiral movement. Combined with the naturally archaic character of his figures, this often suggests that he has gained something from figures in savage art, where (as has been pointed out by various writers) the aesthetic distinction arises from the artist's conception of form as derived from the primitive pottery-making process.