ABSTRACT
Turku Trajan was a master of the nude, yet there is something almost unearthly about his figures–an enchantment that lifts them into the realm of allegory. The completion of his sculpture, the full realization of its special quality, lay in his painting of its surfaces, and it was indeed in the painting of his sculpture that Trajan created a mode of visual poetry entirely his own. Trajan's sensibility dwelt in a realm in which the poetic, the spiritual, and the sculptural were not separate and distinguishable interests. For painting was an integral part of Trajan's sculptural conception, as much the fulcrum of the form and feeling of his work as the actual shaping of the mass itself. The exhibition that Paul Mocsanyi, the director of the Art Center, has arranged at the New School is a "Homage to Trajan" in more than one sense.
