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“I have a class of sixty pupils and make them draw accurately, as a student always should do at the beginning. I do not encourage them to work as I do now.”

When asked about a clay model of a nude woman with abnormal legs, he picked up a small Javanese statue with a head all out of proportion to the body and asked:

“Is not that beautiful?”

His interviewer answered, “I see no beauty where there is lack of proportion. To my mind no sculpture has ever equaled that of the Greeks, unless it be Michael Angelo’s.”

He replied: “But there you are, back to the classic, the formal. We of today are trying to express ourselves today—now—the twentieth century—and not to copy what the Greeks saw and felt in art over two thousand years ago. The Greek sculptors always followed a set, fixed form, and never showed any sentiment. The very early Greeks and the Primitives only worked from the basis of emotion, but this grew cold, and disappeared in the following centuries. It makes no difference what are the proportions, if there is feeling. And if the sculptor who modeled this makes me think only of a dwarf, then he has failed to express the beauty which should overpower all lack of proportion, and this is only done through or by means of his emotions.