Sculptiong Eden

The raw elegance of Igor Mitoraj's neoclassical figures graces nearly every major European city. And he's reflected that style at his studio, set among the olive groves and vineyards near the legendary Italian marble quarries of Carrara, which inspired Michelangelo, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi. GINI ALHADEFF visits the Polish sculptor's Tuscan paradise

GINI ALHADEFF

For a cosmopolitan sculptor, Igor Mitoraj seems diffident in the company of strangers. At a party last year given in his honor by a New York collector, the Polish expatriate

wandered quite by himself among the Giacomettis, the Degas, and the Ted Turners. With one gallery, sometimes two, in every major European city, Mitoraj seems as detached from the glamour of all this as he is from the work of most contemporary artists. He would rather indulge his nostalgia for classicism than tackle the various other grease poles of postmodernism.

Fellow artist Princess Marina of Greece says of her friend of fifteen years, "Every artist is happier where his studio is." Though he has a house in the country on the outskirts of Paris and a place in Switzerland, Mitoraj's studio is in Pietrasanta, a somnolent town by the legendary marble quarries of Carrara. One local artisan is convinced that more marble was excavated here in the last decade than from the time of ancient Rome until ten years ago. Most of it is probably satisfying the American glut of lugubriously grandiose postmodern buildings, but recently the place has again attracted young artists such as Saint Clair Cemin and Athos Ongaro.

Mitoraj's is a static, arrested vision of the anatomy bloodless and dispassionate.

Mitoraj first went to Pietrasanta in 1975. Other artists had told him of the town, and he had formed a romantic vision of it: "I imagined tall cliffs of white marble rising from the waves. I could see Henry Moore working and the splinters flying into the sea." Instead of that, Mitoraj found artisan farmers and sculpture studios in the fields, in the midst of olive groves and vineyards. At first, he was so dismayed by the hardships of working with marble that he very nearly left, never to return.

But three years ago he built his house and studio in what were once the offices of the man who in the sixties had lured Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi to Pietrasanta. He planted rosebushes, rosemary, orange trees, cypresses, olive trees, datura, and a camphor tree, and rebuilt the house and studio using scavenged materials: terra-cotta bricks from the 1600s for the floors, and old doors. One of the walls in the studio is made of rock which is covered in musk and appears to have erupted through the wall like lava. It is Mitoraj's way of violating elegance by building in the destruction and decay it might have taken nature several centuries to achieve.

Gregory Hedberg, director of the New York Academy of Art, an institution famed for liking its art anatomically correct, and which will give Mitoraj a second exhibition next spring, says that "his pieces, with that rough feel, appear dug out of the ground, as though they were ancient Roman bronzes."

But up close the pieces show another face of modernism. Mitoraj's is a static, arrested vision of the anatomy, bloodless and dispassionate. Many of the figures appear to have been reconstructed by a video camera that ran out of electronic memory at an arbitrary point in the process of "remembering." (Not surprisingly, Mitoraj has two paintings by Nam June Paik, who has since the sixties made art with television sets.) Centurione, which the Roman couturier Valentino commissioned for the piazza that faces his headquarters, is a neck, a chin, a mouth, a nose, an eye, a socket, and a skull open to the sky above. It is a startling combination of monumental ity and absence.

Mitoraj did not leave Poland for political reasons, and it does not seem likely that the recent victory of Solidarity will lure him back soon. He is afraid present-day Poland will irrevocably shatter what he calls his "personal mythology." Meanwhile, it seems Pietrasanta has replaced the Polish countryside for Mitoraj, in spite of its serene indifference to both art and kitsch. It has seen everything: Michelangelo's David and its numerous copies, Moore's reclining figures, and Madonnas, John Waynes, popes, saints, and even, recently, an eleven-meter likeness of Iraq's dictator, Saddam "Supergun" Hussein. The town keeps its secrets. All Michelangelo got is a cafe named after him and a commemorative plaque. Mitoraj hopes to do better.

On warm summer nights, the current mayor likes to take the air sitting on the piazza in his boxer shorts. He may prove to be more sympathetic than his predecessors to the cause of art.