Water & Bronze

SCULPTOR Carl Milles, 80 years old this week, is a monument to the fact that monuments can be lovely. His conservative colleagues, e.g., Paul Manship, Oronzio Maldarelli, stick to classical patterns, yet come no closer to Praxiteles than a mannequin looks like a man. More radical sculptors such as Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, on the other hand, often go in for deliberate ugliness of a sort calculated to give ordinary park strollers the heebie jeebies. Milles' monuments are both conservative and alive, both popular and poetic.

Today, in the parks, gardens, and public squares of more than a dozen cities in Sweden and the U.S., his works (see color pages) delight thousands with visions drawn out of childhood and classic mythology--glistening, spray-misted glimpses of slim bronzed gods, gamboling mermaids, sea-green babes.

A self-taught sculptor, Milles left his home in Sweden at 22 to become a gym instructor in Chile, but he got no farther than Paris. There he de cided to make sculpture his career.

For a time he stayed alive by working in a coffinmaker's shop and as a street hawker of cheap souvenirs.

But he had the fortune to become an assistant to France's great Auguste Rodin. When Milles joined the faculty of Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1929 to teach sculpture (until 1950), he was already recognized as Sweden's greatest living sculptor.

Milles' fancy is not every man's taste. Though traditional, he is not traditional enough to keep some from ridiculing his exaggeratedly lean figures. One St. Louis art commission member thought Milles' The Meeting of the Waters (above) looked like "a wedding in a nudist colony." Modernists have found Milles wanting in imagination to move beyond the aura of Rodin, and lacking in Rodin's great power. For his part Milles sees little to praise in modern sculpture. "Their work is too stiff," he says. "They take a spiral and make a hole in it. I can do that myself."

Now one of art's snow-maned elders, Carl Milles, though a U.S. citizen, lives in Rome with his 81-year-old wife Olga. He still accepts new commissions and diligently puts in a six-hour day in his studio in the American Academy. "Great art has to be youthful . . . I am still a boy," he explains. One of Milles' latest undertakings is a large memorial group for Kansas City's Nelson Gallery. Recently, an inspection committee from the museum showed up to see the nearly finished work. "Why are there angels?" one asked. Replied Milles: "Don't you think God sends his people down to see what we are doing?" One angel was scratching its leg "because." said Milles. "there are so many mosquitoes down here." The committee, Milles reported, was thoroughly satisfied with his explanations.

Milles describes his creations as the stuff of dreams, and he would like to execute "2,000 more dreams." But he concedes serenely that there is not that much time. "I am sorry I must go." he says. "It is too bad that when you know the most and can do the most, you must go."

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