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THE AMERICAN-SCANDINA FI AN REVIEW 
always been the sculptor, though circumstances have forced upon him 
the role of the decorative painter. 
During those early workaday years in New York, Hammer found 
time to study sculpture at the school of the Beaux Arts Architects with 
Solon Borglum and at the National Academy School with MacNeil 
and Calder. His real teachers, however, were the carvers and sculptors 
of the Gothic period in the North, in France, and in Germany. It 
was here that he found his true inspiration, in the works of the great, 
anonymous artists who decorated those miracles of medieval genius, 
the Gothic cathedrals. One sees in Hammer’s later work the dis¬ 
ciplined spontaneity that characterizes the best Gothic sculpture. 
His early work, done mostly in clay and plaster, is realistic. The 
busts of Bjornson and Herman Bang and the Old Man’s Portrait be¬ 
long to that period. This is very interesting work, full of life and char¬ 
acter, and of great emotional expressiveness. But it does not reach the 
heights of his later work, Portrait of a Lady, for instance, or Girl’s 
Head in Limestone, The Hawk, and others. These pieces have all the 
vitality and character and emotional power of the earlier work. But 
they are quieter, more restrained. The jagged edges of actuality have 
disappeared. An abstract quality has been achieved through an ex¬ 
tremely interesting conventional treatment. 
The problem of conventional treatment is always a difficult one 
in any art. There is the artificial con¬ 
vention, the convention imposed from 
without, which bears no relation to the 
problems of the art. There is the con¬ 
vention resulting from the shallow 
fashions of the time, or based on the 
habits and mannerisms, and the faults 
even of some popular master. And 
there is the convention based on an 
understanding of, and obedience to, 
the conditions and limitations of the 
art, the possibilities of the material, 
and the nature of the problem in hand. 
Sculpture at its best is necessarily an 
abstract art. It rests on a series of 
generalized conceptions, a sort of plastic 
mathematics which establishes the bal¬ 
ance and relation of its volumes. In 
this it is like music. Sculpture and 
music, the most expressive of the arts, 
are perhaps the most mathematical. 
The development of Hammer’s later 
St \ 7 le Came in response to the specific Woman's Portrait in Limestone 
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