John Updike, The Vital Push

Jean Ipoustéguy, born in Dun-sur-Meuse in 1920, may be the most important living French sculptor, yet he remains little known in the United States. Two of his major bronze sculptures, David and Goliath and Man Passing Through the Door, are permanently displayed among the sculptures in the Hirshhorn Museum Garden in Washington, and three marble works were included in the Guggenheim Museum’s fiftieth-anniversary exhibition; however, the striking resonance of his name does not extend beyond professional artistic circles, and his only solo exhibition in the United States took place in 1964 at the Albert Loeb Gallery.

Ipoustéguy’s mature work is baroque and surreal; it may strike Americans as excessively literary. He possesses that distinctly French talent for the elegant aphorism delivered to an interviewer; for example: “Everything is a face, to be looked at, then considered anew”, or “God created gravity to protect himself from the tiles threatening the sky”, or again “Sculpture is not made to function, but to make us function”, and “The object, like the machine, is entirely based on numbers; the anti-object (the art book) proceeds from the interval between numbers.”

Man Passing Through the Door (1966), probably his best-known work in this country (the Hirshhorn Museum has even produced a postcard of it), appears from the front, with its round-eyed robotic head and raised foot extending through the closed slatted doorway, to be a simple joke; yet it is the back of the figure, rendered with solemn detail, rough in places, and strangely touched by the muzzle of a dog moving in the opposite direction, that reveals the sculptor’s strangely powerful, half-smiling force. David and Goliath (1959) offers a more typical example of Ipoustéguy’s style: complex masses whose figurative content is cruelly subverted, together with a bronze texture whose matte and opaque sheen—bright but not polished, like a glazed tile—is corroded as if by acid or time, with seams where the sculptor appears to have deliberately left independent fragments of the shell unsmoothed.

David’s helmeted head is thrown backward as if he were about to scream, yet his face is no easier to read than that of an insect. Goliath’s decapitated body (originally installed at a much lower level, on a natural rocky site in France) has been reduced to an unintelligible jumble of broken stones. The contrast between perfect finish and raw material is a classical figure in sculpture; but in certain works by Ipoustéguy, it seems to testify less to the creator’s hand than to the assaults of ruin or deliberate destruction. The Split Helmet (1958) immediately preceded David and Goliath and resembles a preliminary study. Ipoustéguy once described himself and his career with the words: “I broke Brancusi’s egg”. The appearance of rupture, truncation, and fragmentation also recalls the masterpieces of sculpture, mutilated and damaged, that have reached us from a long era before the Renaissance and its perfect imitations, before modernism and its polished gems, of which Brancusi’s work provides the finest example.