Sculpture City, St. Louis: Public Sculpture in the ""Gateway to the West""

Artistically crowned by Eero Saarinen's majesterial Gateway Arch , St. Louis has a diffuse legacy of public sculpture, going back to Harriet Hosman's Thomas Hart Benton , which was unveiled in 1868. The city boasts sculpture by many artistic luminaries, including Rodin, Maillol, Moore, Calder, Lachaise, Canova, Nevelson, Oldenburg, Lipchitz and Serra. McCue ( The St. Louis Building Art: Two Centuries ) catalogues chronologically the sculpture of the museums, parks and streets of St. Louis. His prose is magnanimously descriptive; there is little critical commentthus validating some perfectly awful works and deceptively connoting a ``more is better'' ideology of the city's artistic heritage that does disservice to the better sculptures situated there. Freelance photographers Finn and Binder economically document the art with 92 color and 70 black-and-white photos. On the self-promotion front, we see an inordinate amount of work by sculptor Ernest Trova, who is credited with conceiving this survey. (Feb.)