Bronze Garden Sculptures

ART:BRONZE SCULPTURES OF RENOIR AND GUINO

by Vivien Raynor

RENOIR dallied with sculpture early in his career, but the bronzes for which he is famous were not modeled until just before his death in 1919, at the age of 78. Nudes, mainly, they are as recognizably the master's work as his canvases - the models and poses are the same, the surfaces even evoke his brushwork as it was in the late years. At the same time, the figures - Aphrodites all, even when posing as washerwomen - are very like Maillol's, having similar proportions and the same heavy, tubular limbs.

The likeness isn't exactly a matter of influence, for while Renoir admired Maillol, and the sculptor, 20 years his junior, saw himself as the painter's spiritual son, each in his own medium had long been pursuing the classical ideal. Not that the ideal was entirely a figment of the ancient Greek imagination: Maillol contended that Mediterranean towns abounded in chunky young women with short torsos, small, wide-set breasts and sturdy legs.

Even so, the relationship between the sculpture of the two men is more than one of shared affinities; there was a third party without whom Renoir would probably not have achieved prominence as a sculptor at all. The story, known hitherto only in outline, is spelled out in the small show of sculpture, photographs and memorabilia called ''An Encounter With Four Hands'' that is at the Facade Gallery, 1044 Madison Avenue at 79th Street through Dec. 1.

Renoir, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, needed help for his last- minute foray into sculpture. His dealer, Ambroise Vollard, proposed Maillol as the obvious choice, but as a mature sculptor busy with his own work he could hardly be expected to take on the job. However, he was able to recommend his assistant, a 24-year- old Catalan named Richard Guino, who was as adaptable as he was talented.

Apparently, the rapport between Renoir and Guino was instantaneous and it led to almost uncanny intimacy that lasted two years before the younger man left to resume his own career. Renoir had only to indicate what he wanted with a pointer and his surrogate would comply. It wasn't just a matter of making images to specification or transposing them from two to three dimensions: Guino manifestly became Renoir - or was possessed by him. He was succeeded by another sculptmr, Louis Morel, but the spark could not be ignited again.

Guino went on to achieve a minor reputation as a figurative sculptor - his art was shown in Paris only last year - but his contribution to Renoir's reputation remained obscure until the beginning of the 1970's. It was then that the artist, poor and ailing, sued the Renoir estate for 50 percent of the past and future royalties on the bronzes, and, by definition, for a share of the credit. The court took nearly a decade to settle in his favor and the present show is by way of a celebration, for the eight small bronzes it contains are the last to be taken from Guido's plasters, which now will be given to museums.

Nevertheless, Renoir remains the star and Guino his ghost. The bronzes, including bather-washerwomen, standing nudes, two studies of an idealized blacksmith and the famous portrait of Madame Renoir in a hat, together with letters from Renoir, Vollard, the son of Cezanne and other notables, all keep the attention focused on the great Impressionist.

And if interest flags, there are the fine black and white prints by Willie Maynard, who is known in Paris as a fashion photographer. Dating from the 1930's to the 50's, they depict the artist's sons, Jean and Claude, and models such as Gabrielle, among other celebrities, and, of course, the estate, Les Collettes, at Cagnes-sur- Mer, which Renoir bought primarily to prevent the destruction of its thousand-year-old olive trees. It doesn't take much to imagine either the lizards scuttling among the stones in these drowsy summer scenes or the bouillabaisse that was one of Madame Renoir's specialties.

Meanwhile, all Guino gets is a picture of himself standing in the garden dwarfed by a large-scale Venus. But on the whole, that's a better fate than being thrown to the revisionist wolves, who, for their own reputations, would strive to inflate his.

Also of interest this week: Boris Anisfeld (Shepherd, 21 East 84th Street): Boris Anisfeld died in 1973 at the age of 94. Born in Russia, he arrived in this country via Vladivostock in 1918, only to be regarded by the American Federation of Arts as a source of Bolshevist contagion. Fortunately, this didn't deter the Brooklyn Museum from proceeding with the traveling exhibition it had arranged for the artist. Primarily a theatrical designer who had been with Diaghilev and Fokine, Anisfeld continued in that field, working specifically for the Metropolitan and Chicago operas. But from 1928 on, he taught art at the Chicago Art Institute, where his students included Robert Indiana and Jack Beal, and where, in 1958, he had a major retrospective of paintings. Ten years later, he exhibited his ballet and opera designs at Lincoln Center, but his early Russian works remained in a warehouse until 1979, when a small number were exhumed for a show at the University of Connecticut's Benton Museum. The present exhibition covers the same St. Petersburg period, but with 51 paintings and drawings, it is considerably larger.

Not to beat around the bush, Anisfeld was a minor painter who is interesting because of his background and because of the influences he reflects, which were more Germanic than French. Two scenes of bathers beside large expanses of water (1905 and 1906) and ''Alder Grove'' (1907) suggest Impressionism as interpreted by Gustav Klimt and, in fact, the alder painting subsequently appeared in a Viennese ''Secession'' show. In landscapes and figure compositions of the teens, there is a sense of Fauvism strained through the Bridge and Blue Rider movements. Black-and-white illustrations of 1910 are art nouveau; ''Portrait of M. V. Zamietchek'' of five years later bears traces of Cubism. On the other hand, the full-length studies of the artist's wife and daughter, which presumably were done after he had settled here seem like a reversion to Russian academism, despite the tribal carving acting as a backdrop in the daughter's portrait. As a colorist, Anisfeld alternated between the murky and the wild; as a draftsman, he was occasionally forceful, as in the odd, Boschlike head of a boy in pencil (1905), but more often commonplace, as in the red chalk nudes and in the Boldinilike hands in most of the oil portraits. The presence of some theatrical designs serves only to compound the fragmentation and it would seem that final judgment should be reserved for when the artist's whole output can be seen. It's not enough to go down in history as an emigre trailing clouds of White Russian romanticism - one of many to have their careers disrupted by history. (Through Dec. 31.)

New Drawings (Castelli Graphics, 4 East 77th Street): Andy Warhol's ''Dentures I and II'' don't steal the scene in this selection of new drawings by gallery artists. But executed countless times life size, they certainly remain uppermost (and lowermost) in mind. At the other extreme, is one of Richard Serra's tarlike rhomboids, a vertical and incredibly complicated Frank Stella that's a brightly colored amalgam of cut-up prints and expressionistic drawing - the forerunner to a new series of prints called ''Cones and Pillars.'' New though they are, quite a few images resemble those already seen, such as Paul Waldman's pastel of a leafy plant hanging in a gray vacuum and Robert Morris's all-black statement, ''Firestorm Consuming a City.''

Unprecedented for this spectator, though, is Robert Cumming's color wash and charcoal drawing of a woodpecker the size of a bull terrier, working on a tree trunk, and Sandy Skoglund's acrylic that's as fluorescently bright as any of her photographs. This features a large man's head in a kitchen that looks like the one where all the trouble started in ''Ghostbusters.'' Among the most pleasing works are Jasper Johns's two ''Untitleds,'' one a watercolor in earth tones on paper, the other in black and colored inks on plastic. Both are bisected arrangements of plain and striped shapes, but the filmy-looking ink-on-plastic has a faintly Neo-Expressionistic air, perhaps because of the loosely applied washes and the inclusion of a skull and crossbones and the German and French words for glacier. Ed Ruscha asks, ''Mind if I laugh in your face?'' across the image of a skylight, and another photographer, Eve Sonneman, offers a decorative female head with spirals for hair. Finally, there is Roy Lichtenstein's jaunty collage- drawing for ''Brushstroke Sculpture,'' a piece that now is in the airport of Columbus, Ohio. A show of 39 drawings by 27 artists, there's something for almost everyone. (Through tomorrow.)

Lila Katzen (Rosenberg Gallery, 20 West 57th Street): At the end of his long introduction to Lila Katzen's new sculptures, called ''Ruins and Constructions,'' Donald Kuspit asks if one can say that Katzen's work is ''full of guile, of the serpent's subtlety.'' But of course one can. One can even accept the critic's view that the sculptor's interest in Mayan art is a sign of her ''militant feminism,'' providing one can stifle the feeling that her inspiration is rooted no farther south than the resorts of Florida. Katzen's shapes are essentially the same as before - scrolls, spirals and ribbons - but instead of Cor-ten steel, they are now cut mostly from textured and polished bronze. Also, they are set on bases painted to look like stone cylinders and blocks with low reliefs of vaguely Pre-Colombian motifs. If there is subversion thrumming in this show, it's been marvelously well buried under a flashy, good-humored surface. (Through Nov. 24.)

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by Vivien Raynor