Studio: international art (82.1921)

STUDIO-TALK

Light is exalted as the great miraculous
healer of man. 0000

The ideas working in chaotic profusion
in the young sculptor's brain, which at
times manifested themselves in a too
strained mannerism, but could also pro-
duce beautiful and sonorous works like
the fine monument on his mother's grave,
gradually emerged from a state of con-
fusion and found more definite aims. The
artist continued to aspire towards the
vast, the stupendous. But above the
teeming confused mass of humanity
Hellenism at last shot up like a forest of
pillars. The Gate of Life proved the
finest flower of his creative instinct. It
is a kind of Love's triumphal arch, erected
above classic columns; about its foot
life rolls its breakers, its surge of suffering
and struggling humanity, like cast-up
sea-weed—a garland of groups symbolising
the battle of life from birth to the tomb.

The war, which long set men other
aims than art, has hitherto protracted the
execution of this magnificent design. But
the sculptor himself has not lost sight of
it. Not a few of its many groups have
already taken shape in full size. In the
Womb of Darkness, here reproduced (page
236), bears witness to the power with
which the sculptor is capable of investing
his figures. 00000

But from symbolism and mysticism,
working his way as it were through clouds
of mist, Rudolph Tegner has gained the
pure, plastic heights of Greek art. As
a half-grown boy he saw Athens for the
first time, and all his later wanderings
have carried him back to the Acropolis,
to Olympia, to Delphi. Even his themes
have now become purely Greek. In
accordance with all that was heroic in
his aspirations, Hercules himself is his
hero. He has taken up the theme of the
famous labours. Here we have his
Hercules and the Hydra, Modernised
mythology this ; a myth in which the
struggles and trials of our own day are
reflected in manifold symbolism. Who
has not a hydra to fight against i The
hero is here seen as in a cave of living
stalactites, besprinkled with venom from
all sides, defending himself with club
and shield against the huge poisonous
reptile. The theme, which may perhaps

234

be traced back to Gustave Moreau, here
swells to a thrilling maestoso of imaginative
power which thrills. 0000
Another Hercules motive shows the hero
with the Erymanthian boar conquered and
arched about his shoulders—a motive
which has its prototype in Greek archaic
art. From the latter the sculptor has
learnt the lesson of concise, severe,
accentuated characterisation of form, the
energy of motive, the style of the face, the
conventionalised arrangement of the hair

" HERCULES WITH THE
ERYMANTHIAN BOAR "
BY RUDOLPH TEGNER