Sculpture

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Carving

Many early 20th-century sculptors emphatically rejected the pointing machine in favour of direct carving to which a distinct moral value was frequently attached. For the Romanian Constantin Brancusi the choice of material and the meaning of the sculpture were intimately combined. This led him to use a radical simplification of form, which has had an enormous impact on subsequent sculpture. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a French sculptor working in London before the World War I, wrote that “every stroke of the hammer is a physical and mental effort”. Eric Gill related carving to a religiously inspired attempt to revive a craft tradition and claimed to see no distinction between the carving of figures and of letters. Henry Moore spoke of the importance of “truth to material”. Barbara Hepworth maintained that her sculptures were always conceived for a particular material and preferred hand work to power tools because “it reveals the quality of thought right down to the final stages”.

With many sculptors the preference for carving was linked with the rediscovery of sculpture that rejected the slick polish of Western academic art, especially as practised on an almost industrial level in the 19th century. Brancusi looked towards traditional Romanian peasant woodcarving; Picasso admired African sculpture, while Moore took inspiration from the art of ancient Mexico. At the same time, some early 20th-century French sculptors such as Joseph Bernard took a distinctly nationalist interest in the stone carving of the great medieval cathedrals.

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Cubism and Constructivism

Unlike carving and modelling, construction is a process distinct to modernist sculpture. Its initial roots were in Cubism, especially collage. From 1912 onward, Picasso made small-scale pieces in cardboard and wood. For the first time the essence of sculpture lay in plane surfaces rather than volume. Russian-born Jacques Lipchitz, working in Paris, used traditional techniques of carving and modelling, but was influenced by this stylistic approach. The Paris-based Ukrainian Alexander Archipenko and the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni both made structures out of metal, glass, and wood to present a multicoloured vision of the flux of contemporary life.

The Russian Vladimir Tatlin took the idea further in his 1915 Corner Reliefs, which were totally abstract constructions. His compatriot Naum Gabo used plastics and other industrial materials in geometric works as did the British Constructivists of the 1950s such as Kenneth and Mary Martin.

Picasso later worked in constructed metal sculpture on a large scale in works such as Woman in a Garden (1930-1931, Picasso Museum, Paris). He was aided technically by the metalworking skills of Julio González, who went on to make his own sculptures in forged and welded iron.

This kind of openwork metal sculpture, exploiting industrial techniques, was further developed by the American David Smith. Works such as La Rêve (c. 1934, Musée National d'Art Modern, Paris) by González or Hudson River Landscape (1951, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) by Smith can be thought of as a kind of “drawing in space”.

The British sculptor Anthony Caro was much influenced by Smith. From 1960 onward he worked on large-scale sculpture in welded and bolted metal, initially painted but later with a rusted finish. These were totally abstract and were not displayed like a traditional sculpture on a plinth or base, but directly on the floor. Caro was highly influential as a teacher. His students, such as Phillip King and William Tucker, made colourful abstract sculpture in impersonal industrial materials such as plastic and fibreglass, which emphatically rejected the “truth to material” ideal of Moore and Hepworth.

Minimalist sculpture again uses industrial materials and techniques as in the hollow metal boxes of Donald Judd and Tony Smith or the sculpture of Carl Andre in which basic components such as fire bricks in Equivalent VIII (1966, Tate Modern, London), are laid on the floor in a simple geometric form. Eva Hesse, sometimes described as a Post-Minimalist, used not rigid materials but string and latex.

Also within the Constructivist tradition has been the introduction of actual movement. Gabo and Archipenko both experimented with this, but the first artist to do this consistently was the American Alexander Calder in his mobiles. These were made from sheets of cut metal joined by wires in such a way that they would respond to gentle air currents. Kinetic Art, a tendency identified in the 1960s, usually employed electrical power as in the work of Takis in which objects swayed or quivered in space under the effect of magnetism.

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The Metamorphosis of the Figure

The human figure has always been central to sculpture and during the 20th century it was subjected to the same transformations (or less kindly distortions) as in painting. Early in the 20th century the French sculptor of Italian birth Medardo Rosso attempted to reproduce sculpturally the atmospheric effects of Impressionist painting by attacking the coherence of structure and surface. Sometimes, as in the work of relatively traditional artists such as Aristide Maillol in Mediterranean (1905, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Frank Dobson, this was for the sake of simplification and classic calm after the emotional turbulence of Rodin and the Romantics. Expressionist sculptors such as Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck sought the maximum emotional impact. More radical were the twisting and liberties with scale for decorative and expressive purpose in some of the figure sculpture of Henri Matisse and Henri Laurens.

Some sculptors sought analogies between one form and another, as seen in Horse (1914, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris) of Raymond Duchamp-Villon (animal and motor car) or female figure and the landscape in much of Henry Moore’s work, especially his reclining figures. In works such as His Majesty the Wheel (1958-1959) Eduardo Paolozzi endowed the figure with an aura of urban decay. The bronzes of Germaine Richier fused human and insect.

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The Sculptural Object

It was the Dada Marcel Duchamp who in New York in 1917 first exhibited (or attempted to exhibit) an industrial object as though it were a piece of sculpture, with Fountain, an upturned urinal. The Surrealists, never respectful of artistic skill for its own sake, saw no essential distinction between the art of sculpture—as practised by the academically trained Surrealist sculptor Alberto Giacometti as in Palace at 4 a.m. (1932-1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York)—and objects they might put together or even find in the Paris flea market.

After World War II many artists looked back to the Dada object. In the United States Jasper Johns cast objects such as light bulbs and beer cans in bronze. The French sculptor Arman produced accumulations of everyday objects.

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Questioning the Object

The necessity for the sculptural object was open to question or satire. In 1958 in Paris Yves Klein exhibited Le Vide, a completely empty gallery space. The German artist Joseph Beuys saw sculpture as a process rather than an object; furthermore, it was a process that could be used to transform the whole of society along more co-operative and environmentally sound lines. He frequently employed material such as fat and felt, which lacked the stability of traditional media and regarded political agitation as a form of sculpture. In the late 1960s conceptual artists such as Joseph Kossuth and the Art Language group were to open to question the whole necessity for art to have an object at all. The result was that sculptors who, only a few years previously, had appeared as radical innovators, now seemed traditionalists. Steam (as used, for example, by Robert Morris) and sand (as found in the work of Barry Flanagan, for example) could now become sculptural materials, as could miming to an old record (Gilbert and George, The Singing Sculpture, 1970). In the arte povera of Jannis Kounellis the sculptural object could even include living creatures such as horses or a dancer. Land Art such as the Spiral Jetty (1973) of Robert Smithson could for most only be experienced through film and photography.

It could certainly be proposed that much recent work that happens to be in three dimensions is more concerned with the production of powerful and memorable images or intriguing ideas than the creation of objects. Whether such works as the preserved shark of Damien Hirst, the cast of the interior of a house by Rachel Whiteread, or Two Eggs and a Kebab (1992, private collection, London) by Sarah Lucas qualify as sculpture is a fine point of definition and almost certainly not the most interesting question about them.

Additional material by John Glaves-Smith.