MARGUERITE MILWARD.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20202, 12 January 1934, Page 9

MARGUERITE MILWARD.

Works of a Much-travelled Sculptor. ( FASCINATION FOR PRIMITIVE. A Chef du Ballet from French Guiana, a Burmese dancing girl, a Chinese child, and a Tibfetan rickshaw coolie lured one’s thoughts far, far away from the sophistication of Mayfair to strange distant lands of primitive savagery last week, writes Gwen Borton Spencer in “ The Queen.” All these exotic types and. more are assembled at the Beaux Arts Galleries in Bruton Place, at the exhibition of the sculpture of Mrs Marguerite Milward—the first she has held in England. Mrs Milward finds a fascination in savage and primitive types. “ The shapes of their skulls excite me,” she declares. “ When I see a new type I long to get to work on modelling the head. The fantastic hairdressing of a camel driver from Mauretania, for example, inspired me with an immediate urge to work. A Cingalese singer thrilled me with the curious shape of her forehead and lips, so I modelled her. I should like to spend my whole life meeting fresh types. Europeans soon pall for me. I have no wish to keep on modelling the same type of skull. I want the stimulus of constant variety.” Mrs Milward has travelled widely in search of this variety in her subjects. After studying for some years in Paris under the great Bourdelle, she went to India, where she joined the staff' of ! Rabindranath Tagore’s College at San- i tiniketan. She was nominally there as j an art teacher, but she found that the j Indian students preferred that she j should teach by example rather than ■ by precept. '1 hey were not much inclined to listen to lectures, but they crowded round her as she worked at her sculpture, and criticised her performance witn T..c utmost freedom—thereby learning, in their own unorthodox -way, what she intended to teach them. While Kirs Milward was at Santiniketan she modelled a head of Tagore, which is shown at this exhibition. She has infused her study of the poet with a deep and mystical thoughtfulness that is singularb- compelling. It is a haunting piece of work that lingers in the memory, Kirs Milward has exhibited at the Royal Academy and with the Glasgow Society of Fine Arts. She is well known as an exhibitor in Paris with the Salon des Artistes Francais, and the Salon des Tuileries. She has spent \ ery little time in England—only about two years in all since she left it to J study art in Paris in 1908. Since her j return here, however, she has modelled ! heads of many celebrated people. The

Right lion. David Lloyd George. Sir Austen Chamberlain, the late Mr Justice M’Cardie, the Dean of Windsor, Mr Leon M. Lion, are among the portrait busts in her present exhibition. Her modelling of the "various ethnographic types is so faithful and exact, that as she says herself, they are fit for “ museum pieces ” for students to learn from. She has the searching eye of the born artist allied to the trained skill of the craftsman. She succeeds in bringing to life an astonishing variety of- specimens of human kind.