In his “Family Life,” the group of man, woman, child, Archipanko deliberately subordinated all thought of beauty of form to an attempt to realize in stone the relation in life that is at the very basis of human and social existence.
Spiritual, emotional, and mathematical intellectuality, too, is behind the family group of Archipanko. This group, in plaster, might have been made of dough. It represents a featureless, large, strong male—one gets the impression of strength from humps and lumps—an impression of a female, less vivid, and the vague knowledge that a child is mixed up in the general embrace. The faces are rather blocky, the whole group with arms intertwined—arms that end suddenly, no hands, might be the sketch of a sculpture to be. But when one gets an insight it is intensely more interesting. It is, eventually, clear that in portraying his idea of family love the sculptor has built his figures with pyramidal strength; they are grafted together with love and geometric design, their limbs are bracings, ties of strength, they represent, not individuals, but the structure itself of family life. Not family life as one sees it, but the unseen, the deep emotional unseen, and in making his group when the sculptor found himself verging upon the seen—that is, when he no longer felt the unseen—he stopped. Therefore the hands were not essential. And this expression is made in the simplest way. Some will hoot at it, but others will feel the respect that is due one who simplifies and expresses the deep things of life. You may say that such is literature in marble—well, it is the modernest sculpture.[66]
The group is so angular, so Cubist, so ugly according to accepted notions, that few look long enough to see what the sculptor means; yet strange as the group was it undeniably gave a powerful impression of the binding, the blending character of the family tie, a much more powerful impression than groups in conventional academic pose could give.
In considering the extreme modern movement in sculpture it must not be forgotten that groups and figures just as strange have been done in the past—that even queerer and more grotesque things have been used to adorn churches and altars.
True, those sculptures and carvings are naive and primitive, but may not the naive and primitive be closer to life and to life’s great truths than the sophisticated and classical?
That is the question.
The answer of the moderns is that the swing of the pendulum in art is from the naive and primitive through the more and more conventional to the fixed and lifeless mold of the classic and academic, then back again to the naive, traversing the romantic, in its course, both ways.
