Art in the Elements : California Is the Perfect Place for Collecting Outdoor Sculptures, Which Can Make Even a Modest Garden Look Like a Corner of Versailles

Antique dealers have ingenious euphemisms to cover up the flaws of their stock. A porcelain vase with a seismic fissure from rim to foot is described as having “a hairline crack.” Furniture that looks as if it has been kicked around by a football team for practice has “honorable scars.” (The phrase is masterly; it almost suggests that, like a war hero, the furniture is all the more acceptable for having been knocked about a bit. Give that highboy a medal!) As for garden statuary, the key word is “weathered.” This may cover anything from a Neptune who has lost his trident plus several useful parts of his anatomy to a bust of Caligula with the Roman nose worn down to a button. The Venus de Milo is weathered to the extent of two arms.

In Britain, weathered may mean what it says. If you leave a stone or marble statue out in hail, snow and driving rain for centuries on end, you can’t expect it to look as if it has just been released from the sculptor’s studio. But in Southern California, these climatic hazards are negligible. The only real danger is an earthquake--such as the one that reduced Forest Lawn’s facsimile of Michelangelo’s David to distinguished rubble in 1971. (The great thing about facsimiles is that you can always order another, which is exactly what Forest Lawn did.)

If an earthquake comes, garden statuary is going to be among the last things we worry about. But assuming that the Big One spares us for a while longer, outdoor sculptures are an ideal thing for Californians to collect. They don’t take up room in the house. You don’t have to dust them--unless you are the sort of person who polishes the laurel leaves. And, of course, they enhance the garden no end. Even a modest little plot can look like a corner of Versailles when it is graced by a marble nymph or naiad.

For those who do intend to collect garden statues--or just to acquire a single showpiece--Sotheby’s is holding its first-ever sale of “antique garden statuary and architectural items” May 28 on the 40-acre grounds of the firm’s new salesrooms in the English countryside, Summers Place, Billingshurst, Sussex, an hour’s drive from London. The weathered objects made to embellish aristocratic gardens and homes of the 18th and 19th centuries are expected to sell at prices from $250 to $25,000.

A life-size white marble statue of Apollo, signed C. Cauer and dated 1808, may bring up to $6,000, Sotheby’s thinks. The nude god, for whom no one has ever carved a fig leaf, has his arms raised as if greeting the sunrise or registering shock at his osteopath’s bill. A marble garden chair resembling a Renaissance throne, flanked by sphinxes (circa 1870), is expected to fetch $3,000. One of the most appealing sculptures is a 19th-Century white marble group of a bitch and puppy by Francis Cucchiori, estimated to sell for $5,000 to $8,000.

From the estate of the British theatrical director Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont (1908-73), who was described by novelist Anthony Powell as “the virtual dictator of the West End stage” and by Noel Coward as “a dear,” there will be four heraldic stone lions, each five feet tall. A white marble fountain (circa 1880) is from the estate of the late Anne Hull Grundy, better known for her collection of jewelry that’s now in the British Museum.

Sculpture for indoors, as well as outdoors, is a subject oddly neglected by collectors, who seem to go more for two dimensions (paintings) than three dimensions (sculpture in the round). In recent years, however, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s sculpture collection was richly increased by the young curator Peter Fusco, until he was snapped up by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Those planning to start a sculpture collection could start by reading “European Sculpture” (Dutton, 1970) by David Bindman, then a young scholar, now tipped to be the next professor of art history at London University. Rupert Gunnis’ “Dictionary of English Sculptors” (Odham’s, 1953) is a hugely enjoyable work by an authority who first began studying sculpture when he was a schoolboy.

Increasingly, too, Americans are rightly taking an interest in the American heritage of 19th-Century sculpture. Peter Fusco recommends, as introductory reading, Wayne Craven’s “Sculpture in America” (Crowell, 1968) and William H. Gerdts’ “American Neo-Classic Sculpture” (Viking, 1973). One of the best-known American sculptors, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, came into new prominence in 1985 with an exhibition of his works at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and with two new books: “The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens” by John H. Dryfhout (University of New England, $60 clothbound, $29.95 paperback) and “Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint- Gaudens” by Burke Wilkinson (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $22.95). For the Met exhibit, Saint-Gaudens’ statue of Adm. David Glasgow Farragut was brought inside from its outdoor site in Madison Square Park.