SCULPTURE
Dora Gordine
DORA GORDINE'S exhibition at the Leicester Galleries shows her genius in its full range of achievement. Her profound sense of pure form in sculpture, heedless alike of realism and of exaggerated abstraction, is united with the subtlest delicacy of modelling, and these qualities combine to endow her bronzes with an abnormal power, an almost uncanny life, which only the sculpture of the greatest civilisations of the past has been able to produce.
Take, for example, her " Pagan." The strong primitive limbs of this statue, with their deep erotic appeal, are heavy with a concentrated weight of solid sculptural form. The legs are tightly pressed together, but the arms move, and the gesture in which they have been seized is like the most significant movement of a suddenly arrested dance. Over the face plays n scarcely perceptible smile, and the peaceful, intent features seem to suggest that the whole mind of the figure is bent on listening to the harmonious life of the body within. Nothing is exaggerated, there is no hint of dramatic strain, for this figure is like a strange force of nature, perfectly self-contained, and obeying no laws save those which it derives from its own sense of harmony and perfection.
The " Smiling Torso " has the same static rhythm as the " Pagan," but it is pulsing with an even greater vital exuberance. Every curve and every muscle is charged with joyful expression, and—what is extraordinary in a fragment—this Torso is beautiful from whichever angle it is viewed. As a composition, it is a triumph of three-dimensional form.
The drawings of Dora Gordine have these same sculptural qualities, which many painters may envy and emulate—an absolute sureness of outline combined with a perception of depth and fullness, whether these are revealed in single heads or in complete or fragmentary figures. Far from being confined to preparatory sketches for sculpture, they are more in the nature of monochrome paintings, with a precision of draughts- manship and richness of shaded tones that give sensitive expression to every significant aspect of the subject.
Finally, there are the heads, many of them portraits, and each one seems to breathe and to speak with a highly individual character. It is not easy in portraiture to escape the pitfall of photographic realism, and often its over-correction, the leaning to excessive stylisation, leads the artist into neglect of the essential individuality of each model, but Dora Gordine has steered clear of these dangers. A very distinct and different life-history seems to emerge from each of these bronze portraits, and yet they express, like the busts of Houdon, a universality of human characteristics which gives them a purely artistic interest quite apart from their interest and fidelity in the sphere of portraiture as such.
It is a peculiar quality of the greatest sculpture that it is alive to the highest degree without the aid of that realistic detail which often gives to ordinary sculpture the semblance of life which it lacks in itself. Some of the portrait busts of Dora Gordine are so daring in their introduction and treatment of detail that an artist with less imagination might easily have allowed the pure formal qualities to be distracted by trivial insignificant motives. The unrelated mass of wrinkles and furrows on an old man's face is a most striking example of this danger, but Dora Gordine has triumphantly solved it by turning these scattered irregular shapes into a powerful rhythmic flow of definite forms harmonised into a deeply characteristic expression of tragic but dignified old age.
The colour, the patina, is always different, and it emphasises the unique character of each individual work. It is no super- ficial addition of colour to form, for it is deeply burned into the texture of the bronze, instead of being allowed to arise through the accidental corrosions of atmosphere or soil. Colour, as Rodin once said, is the flower of form. It arises perhaps from an instinct to give to a precious object the utmost perfection of finish, but Dora Gordine certainly sees each work from the start in terms of colour as well as form. The Russian soul with its Asiatic affinities loves semi-precious stones and the barbaric splendour of precious materials, and so the Asiatic strain in this artist seems to have enabled her to endow her bronzes with the most gorgeous and varied hues, reminiscent of malachite, turquoise, granite, ancient lacquer or gold.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
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