Arline Wingate: Ninety-One And Still Chipping Away

A recent visit to the sculptor Arline Wingate in the East Hampton house where she has lived for the last 45 years serendipitously coincided with her 91st birthday: a dainty birthday cake with pink and green icing sat on the kitchen table, baked by her dealer, Arlene Bujese.

The long-lived Arline/Arlene affiliation has been a happy one, according to Ms. Wingate. This summer Ms. Bujese's gallery gave her a 60-year retrospective of work dating from the early bronze and marble figures of her classical roots through her more abstract, cubist, faintly surrealist, and often very witty later sculptures of natural and human forms.

Ms. Wingate had lighted a fire in her huge, sculpture-filled white brick living room, formerly a garage to six cars and a fire engine on a large estate, but the interview took place in her cozy kitchen with Mr. Su Su, an impeccably pedigreed ash-blond Pekinese, lounging in her lap.

Hated Smith

A sprightly, diminutive redhead, the sculptor was born and grew up in New York City. After dropping out of Smith College, which she hated, she studied at the Art Students League and with Alexandre Archipenko in New York. She then moved on to work and study in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, and Rome.

Her sculpture has been widely exhibited at the Metropolitan and Whitney Museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Heckscher Museum, the Petit Palais in Paris, Museo des Belles Artes in Buenos Aires, and the Ghent Museum in Belgium, to name but a few.

Her work is also in the permanent collections of many of the above institutions, as well as in other museums throughout the world including the Parrish Museum in Southampton and East Hampton's Guild Hall.

Silvia Sydney, Harpo Marx, George Gershwin, and Prince William of Sweden number among the celebrities she has sculpted; a rather large pastel drawing Gershwin made of her while she worked on his bust hangs in her living room.

The Prince

"Doing Prince William's portrait was fabulous," she said, getting out a photo of herself looking like the young Myrna Loy, the Prince, and the striking larger-than-life head she did of him that calls Boris Pasternak to mind.

"I met the Swedish royal family here on Main Beach. They picked me up, actually, and begged me to come to Stockholm with them. When they threw in the sculpting job as an added incentive, my husband finally agreed." Two bronze castings are displayed in Swedish museums.

"I've also taught," she went on, mentioning classes at Southampton College and private sessions, most recently with her landscaper, who is learning to work in papier-mach‚. "I even taught Noguchi something, when I was very young."

"Usually sculptors have a lot of hair, I've noticed; Noguchi was one of the few bald ones. I recognized him in an art supply store on Canal Street that then was to artists what Bergdorf Goodman was to women who cared about clothes."

"He asked me if I could tell him how to do a patina - a technique for making plaster look like bronze - and I did. I laugh to think about it, me teaching one of the greats when I should have been learning from him. I never saw him again."

As one of six American women sculptors to participate in "New York Six," an exhibit installed at Le Petit Palais in 1950, she also met Giacometti.

"He was a cute little guy with plenty of hair who asked to meet me, and told me how much he admired my work. It takes a big artist to do a thing like that - I was completely unknown."

"David Smith and most of the other male artists at the time, even those who came to parties at my house, treated women artists as if we were half-witted children," she added with asperity.

Moves Nimbly

"Only Mark Rothko, another great, was different. He never missed one of my shows, and always left his name. I was a pygmy compared to him, but the real giants are different; often they are very special people."

Ms. Wingate reached for her cane - she recently broke her hip but gets around quite nimbly - and took her visitor on a tour of her two studios, one off the living room for viewing, the other, looking out on the back garden, strictly for work.

There are stocky nudes in bronze and marble - she was "into short, fat people for a while" - distributed among lyrical flower shapes, austere, towering amphora-like bottles, and tender little terra cotta figures. A small heart-shaped bronze face gazes at us as gravely and mysteriously as a primitive stone deity.

A small rosewood head, a huge abstract "put-together" piece of black steel and white styrofoam, little marble owls, bronze and steel "fragmented" torsos, a plaster cast of a "Broken Heart," and a surreal "Garden of Torsos" are also displayed indoors.

Outside, on spacious lawns under spreading trees, whimsical congregations of mushrooms and occasional weeds are scattered about. Massive abstract and figurative sculptures stand at respectful distances, impressive, austere, almost Druidic in their agelessness. Both primitive and intensely modern, they are haunting works.

"Art is in my blood," said Ms. Wingate, back in her kitchen again. As a child in Westchester she turned her playroom into an art gallery, and covered one wall with an enormous mural.

Later, in her New York studio, she "just worked and worked and never stopped. I feel I am obsessive and impulsive, influenced mostly by nature, lyrical and feminine. But don't call me a sculptress - there's no such thing."

In 1934 she married Clifford Hollander, an investment banker. "Even though he was on Wall Street, he was a very nice guy," she said. "Really sociable, as opposed to me. After working 10 hours a day, I wanted to stay home."

The couple lived on the Upper East Side and had a son, Richard, now a businessman married to Bruce Clerk, a fashion magazine editor. They have a son, Dick, who works in computer technology.

"I was spoiled," she said, "We had a wonderful life and the best of everything. I can still remember when you could get a damn nice dinner for a dollar and a half on Madison Avenue and 85th Street, a lovely dinner. You can't get a bag of peanuts for that now."

"I haven't been to New York in close to 10 years," she added. "It got me depressed. I'd stand on Madison Avenue and cry, besieged by such strong memories. It's just not my city any more." Ms. Wingate's husband died 25 years ago.

"All I want to do now is stay home and work and not be distracted by things like having the chimney fall down, as it did recently," she laughed.

"If you work all day you get pretty pooped. I haven't been to a cocktail party for five years. I watch a little TV and read a lot to relax - well-written junk, nothing too philosophical, please. I'm only an intellectual when it comes to art books."

Although she now weighs only 89 pounds, Ms. Wingate is getting her energy back, doing her exercises, and driving herself to therapy sessions. "I started driving when I was 8 so I can really drive," she said. "I drove an ambulance during the war."

Ms. Wingate's broken hip, until it heals, has forced her to sculpt sitting down. "I never thought I could do it, but I'm learning. Usually I stand for hours, and walk all around my work."

A lovely blue-gray slab of Carrara marble rests on a stand in her studio, along with a small hammer and a set of little chisels.

From it a face is emerging, the raised profile of a woman heading into the wind, hair streaming back, ear delicately shaped. She seems to have the indomitable spirit of the figureheads on the prows of old clipper ships, not unlike the spirit of her creator.

Ms. Wingate attributes her longevity to good genes-her grandfather died at 99 - to luck, to living sensibly, and to the pure air of East Hampton.

More than anything else, however, she credits an abiding passion for her work, and the fellowship of a good dog.

"He knows we're talking about him," she said as Mr. Su Su rolled his beautiful, dark brown eyes.