Any Resemblance . . .

The three square-headed giants had no eyes and indeed no faces, but they somehow lived up to their name, The Watchers. Elsewhere in Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries last week, a Lion seemed to roar through a megaphone mouth, eerie beasts trotted around on spiky iron legs, and headless winged figures danced an unearthly ballet. The menagerie was the work of a burly, mussed-looking man named Lynn Chadwick, at 46 a major talent in the new wave of British sculptors who followed, but did not take after, the great Henry Moore.

Chadwick first heaved into public view shortly after World War II, in which he had served as a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm. He had by then given up an early ambition to be an architect because he wanted to work on his own without having to meet the demands of clients, contractors and zoning laws. Unsure where his tastes and talents lay, he began by cutting out mobiles, only to find the shapes too "rigid"' for his taste. Like Reg Butler and Geoffrey Clarke, his most notable English contemporaries, Chadwick took to the welding torch.

His sculptures happen to look something like beasts, birds and people, but any resemblance is pretty much coincidental. Convinced that "art school makes you think rather than feel," Chadwick taught himself, and approaches his art much as an action painter would. He tries to suspend conscious thought in developing his forms because "the subconscious has the larger vocabulary." He works rapidly with wire and metal rods, allows his construction to grow almost as if it had a goal of its own. If the construction does not please him, he can correct or discard; if it does, he fills it in like flesh over bones with a plaster made of gypsum and iron powder.

The only mechanical part of the whole process is the making of two or three legs--or perhaps four: "That's a beast or two people." The titles are an afterthought, for Chadwick's purpose is not to express any idea. "Some people want to say something visually," he says. "But I want my work to be considered for itself. What interests me is the physical result, the form, the object rather than the idea." Then why bother with making legs at all? Answers Chadwick: "One must start from somewhere or else there is chaos. And I couldn't stand the strain myself."

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