In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Leonardo, Vol. 15,No.1, pp. 37-39, 1982 Printed in Great Britain THE SCULPTURES OF A PHYSICIST Pierre Auger* OO24-094X/82/010037-03$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. 1. The duality of the visual arts and the natural sciences had been studied by so many talented writers that one is tempted to say, as did the French writer Jean de La Bruyere (1645-1696) at the beginning of his book 'Les Caracteres': 'Everything has been said and we have come too late ... ' (see also Refs. 1and 2). But much of what has been published on the duality is, in my opinion, wrong or, at least, short of the mark. To give more impact to my short essay, I shall concentrate on the question: How can one person be both a scientist and a sculptor (even a moderately good one!), since the basic principles and the methods of the sciences and of the arts are so different, if not opposed? I shall try to answer this question. During about the first half of my working life, I was only a physicist. My vivid responses when I contemplated artworks and the exchanges I had about them with other art lovers and, sometimes, with practicing visual artists, writers and composers were'of highest importance for the spiritual aspects of my life, but they did not induce me to try to make artworks of my own. My artistic interests, in order of preference, were music, prose works, painting, architecture, poetry and, lastly, sculpture. The order may have been influenced by the dominant roles of music, books and painting in my family circle in France. I found that sculpture in museums and galleries was generally presented badly; the long rows of marbles seemed to me cold, even terrifying, and not conducive to the emotional contact needed for a deep appreciation ofartworks of any kind (see Ref. 3). 2. Well, what happened to me? A fortuitous circumstance made me quite suddenly aware of my possible aptitude to make sculptures. In 1938I was spending a few months at a scientific laboratory at the top of the Swiss alp Jungfraujoch , studying intensely with two colleagues the properties of giant cosmic ray showers impinging on the Earth from outer space. One day at lunch I chatted with a geophysicist who had a large tank full of wax that he use? to make models of glaciers in order to study their movements under gravitational force. He showed me his installation and gave me a handful of soft wax to feel how the material yielded when pressed. We had been chatting about mountain animals, such as sledge dogs, and, quite unconsciously, I molded the head ofa dog. He said, 'Ah, you are a sculptor'. 'Oh, no!', I replied. He t~en suggest~d that I mold something else, for example a chimera, that IS, a monster compounded of incongruous parts. I molded one that both he and I felt was rather interesting and, *Physicist. 12 rue Emile Faguet, 75014 Paris, France. (Received 4 Nov. 1980) 37 from that moment, sculpting has given me much satisfaction. Upon my return to Paris, I made over the years a number of small pieces from wax entitled, for example, 'Mother and Child' and 'Return ofthe Prodigal Son'. The pieces are about 25 cm tall, and in 1978I decided to have them cast in bronze (for many years, when holding one of my wax pieces, I had the feeling that it was made of bronze); now my collection amounts to 15 bronze pieces. 3. On analyzing my process of making sculpture, I found there occurred a kind of harmonious convergence between an idea, or several ideas, and a sensual, tactile feeling for molding wax. Visual aspects of a piece were secondary to me. they essentially led me to make corrections to what I had first made in order for the piece to correspond to my initial idea or perhaps the mental image of it. In the case of the piece 'Bird' (Fig. I), the initial idea came to me while I was looking at a collection ofsaddles in a museum displaying horse riding equipment. I Fig. I. 'Bini, bronze, 25 x 15x 8...

pdf

Share