ABSTRACT
In the world of the arts, where a sense of irony combines with a sense of history to make such rhetoric an object of ridicule, the vocabulary of grandeur has long ago passed into disrepute. With an audacity akin to General de Gaulle's, Mr. Jean Ipousteguy turns his back on the vernacular of the moment and places his work in a universe of discourse remote from its concerns. Like all modern attempts at traditional high style, Mr. Ipousteguy's looks down on contemporary experience as if from a great height—from the elevated altitude of a mind absorbed in history, tradition, and mythology. Clearly Mr. Ipousteguy has learned a great deal from Cubism about the analysis and synthesis of monolithic form. One feels in Lachaise's sculpture the pressure of a private exultation, but in Mr. Ipousteguy's sculpture the pressures seem to derive from the artist's exalted sense of a cultural heritage.
