AND ANOTHER THING
Sombre personal reflections on being busted
PAUL JOHNSON
No: I have not been caught by customs, like Taki at Heathrow, with the stuff hang- ing out of my back-pocket. I have had my head cast in bronze. The sculptor, Gerald Laing, is one of those brave and gifted souls — they are more numerous than they were a few years ago, thanks be to God who are trying to recover the beauties and techniques of European art from the rav- ages of 20th-century modernism, now at its last gasp. This new renaissance has not been easy. Many skills, passed on by exam- ple from generation to generation, and steadily improved until they reached their apogee in the late 19th century, had virtual- ly ceased to be used and were certainly not taught in the schools. With one or two exceptions, modern textbooks prove use- less. Gerald was lucky to find an old copy of Modelling and Sculpting the Human Fig- ure by Edward Lanteri, who was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art a century ago, which taught him a lot.
He was luckier still to come across the Roman bronze-caster George Mancini, at the end of his working life, when he was at last ready to divulge the secrets of his art at his foundry in Fulham. Mancini was brought to London before the first world war by Lord Kitchener, to cast garden stat- uary. One of his last works in Rome was a giant equestrian statue of Garibaldi: Mancini, the sculptor and the architect of the base all had lunch in the belly of the horse before it was sealed up. He used exclusively traditional tools, such as bow drills, scorning modern welding and grind- ing techniques, which make corrections to the bronze possible, preferring instead to get a perfect cast. Thus Gerald, by learning from him, became part of the grand tradi- tion.
The process of being busted was absorb- ing from start to finish. Gerald came to our house to model my head, lifesize, in clay over a prepared armature (support), using wooden tools and measuring calipers. He astonished me by the speed at which he worked and the rapidity with which my head and neck took shape. After three sit- tings he had completed what seemed to me a stunning likeness. Then he took the clay head down into our garage and made a plaster of Paris mould of it in two parts. When the mould was opened, the clay was automatically destroyed.
Gerald took the mould back to his beau- tiful little castle on the Black Isle, in the
Moray Firth, where he has his foundry. He cast the mould into a reinforced plaster positive image, identical to the original clay model. These casts can be easily handled and stored indefinitely. His next step was to make a flexible rubber mould of the cast (in two halves), reinforcing it with a plaster jacket. Then he removed the inside plaster model, and coated the interior of the rub- ber mould with a layer of melted wax, to the desired thickness of the bronze (about three-eighths of an inch). The cold wax, hollow and the same shape that the bronze would be, was removed from the rubber, and four feeds (wax rods as thick as a fin- ger) fixed to the bottom edge of the wax and joined together as a wax cup. Then he dipped the wax in a slurry and coated it with ceramic powder, leaving it to dry. This coating process was repeated ten times until he had a ceramic shield over the wax, inside and out, about a quarter-inch thick.
The climax started when the whole thing was placed, cup downwards, in a kiln, and heated rapidly to 750 degrees, being held at that level for 20 minutes; the wax melted and ran out, leaving the mould empty, dry, sterile and hot, in exactly the shape •he wanted the bronze to be. Meanwhile he heated a crucible of bronze ingots in the furnace to a temperature of 1200 degrees. When this was hot enough he rushed the mould from the kiln to a pit in front of the furnace and inserted it into a bed of sand with the cup uppermost. The final move was to use tongs to lift the crucible from the furnace, clear any dross from the sur- face of the molten metal, and pour the rest into the mould through the cup. Once the metal cooled, he broke away the ceramic `Congratulations! It's a 650-pound boy!' shell, cut off the feeds, cleaned the metal, drilled holes for the bolts to secure the bust to its base, and began the process of patina- tion by using corrosive chemicals and heat. Once satisfied with the seaweed colour of the bronze, he was off to his next assign- ment, to do Pavarotti for Covent Garden.
The bust now reposes in a corner of our drawing-room. My wife thinks it is a bit stern, adding, 'But then you are like that, aren't you?' Gerald believes in total accura- cy: no flattery. The impressionistic way he has done my hair reminds me of Alessan- dro Aligardi (1598-1654), especially in his marble heads of torchbearers, angels and so on; the face recalls the bravura of Louis- Francois Roubiliac (1702-62), notably in his terracotta bust of Pope in Birmingham's Barber Institute, or his marble bust of Swift in Trinity College, Dublin. So there is a touch of both the baroque and the rococo in the handling, and I am delighted with it all. I hope Pavarotti is equally pleased when his head emerges from the pit. What I can't decide is how to light it. Canova favoured wax candlelight, but then he was thinking in terms of marble, for which it is undoubtedly the best. But it is a bit imprac- tical nowadays. I haven't yet solved this problem.
What prompted my sombre reflections was the thought of all the waste produced by modernism. We have lost two genera- tions — half a century — of true sculpture in the pursuit of ugliness and, despite the efforts of Gerald Laing and a few other new masters, some skills have been lost, though I hope not for ever — in drawing and painting no less than in sculpture. We now have to make up for the time we have so profligately squandered in this century, by ensuring that our schools of art are properly run by people who have the requi- site standards of technical expertise, only then can students rejoin the mainstream of European art, which has been flowing underground for so many decades. That is why I support the admirable efforts of this journal's art critic, Giles Auty, to bring about a counter-revolution in British art, which will topple the frauds and con-men from their innumerable positions of power, and expel the barbarians who have domi- nated our academies, galleries and cultural institutions for so long. If that means spilling a little blood, as well as melting wax, I for one will not shrink at the prospect.
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