Modern sculpture

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, 1889, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., cast 1943.[1]

Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works.[2][3] He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void".[4] Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".[5]

Pop-Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Land art, Conceptual art, and Installation art
among others.

Modernism

Alberto Giacometti, Cat, 1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gaston Lachaise, Floating Figure 1927, bronze, no. 5 from an edition of 7, National Gallery of Australia
Henry Moore, Double Oval (1966), Henry Moore Foundation
David Smith, CUBI VI (1963) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem

The modern sculpture movement can be said to begin at the

Gates of Hell which included The Thinker.[6][7]

Cubist sculpture, in the early 20th century, was a style that developed in parallel with cubist painting, and the formal experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Beginning around 1909 and evolving through the early 1920s cubist artists developed new means of constructing works of art using collage, sculptural assemblage using disparate materials and traditional sculpture making from plaster and clay molds. Some sources name Picasso's 1909 bronze Head of a Woman as the first cubist sculpture.[8]

André Derain, 1908, photograph published in Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris", Architectural Record, May 1910. Sculpture: Nu debout (Standing Woman), 1907

Artists like

Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens and Ossip Zadkine and others joined the earlier cubist sculptors.[10][11]

In the early 20th century, during his period of cubist innovation,

coulage. In later years Picasso became a prolific potter, leading, with interest in historic pottery from around the world, to a revival of ceramic art, with figures such as George E. Ohr and subsequently Peter Voulkos, Kenneth Price, and Robert Arneson. Marcel Duchamp originated the use of the "found object" (French: objet trouvé) or readymade with pieces such as Fountain (1917).[citation needed
]

Similarly, the work of Constantin Brâncuși at the beginning of the century paved the way for later abstract sculpture. In revolt against the naturalism of Rodin and his late 19th-century contemporaries, Brâncuși distilled subjects down to their essences as illustrated by the elegantly refined forms of his Bird in Space series (1924). These elegantly refined forms became synonymous with 20th-century sculpture.[12] In 1927, Brâncuși won a lawsuit against the U.S. customs authorities who attempted to value his sculpture as raw metal. The suit led to legal changes permitting the importation of abstract art free of duty.[13]

Brâncuși's impact, with his vocabulary of reduction and abstraction, is seen throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and exemplified by artists such as

Frederick Kiesler who were pioneers of Kinetic art
.

Post-1950s

Since the 1950s

Modernist trends in sculpture both abstract and figurative have dominated the public imagination and the popularity of Modernist sculpture had sidelined the traditional approach. Picasso was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge, 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is not known; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman, or a totally abstract shape. The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.[citation needed
]

In the late 1950s and the 1960s, abstract sculptors began experimenting with a wide array of new materials and different approaches to creating their work. Surrealist imagery, anthropomorphic abstraction, new materials and combinations of new energy sources and varied surfaces and objects became characteristic of much new modernist sculpture. Collaborative projects with landscape designers, architects, and landscape architects expanded the outdoor site and contextual integration. Artists such as Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Richard Lippold, George Rickey, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson came to characterize the look of modern sculpture.[citation needed]

By the 1960s

Christo, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and others like John Safer who added motion and monumentality to the theme of purity of line,[15] led contemporary abstract sculpture in new directions. During the 1960s and 1970s figurative sculpture by pop artists and modernist artists in stylized forms by artists such as: George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Arman, Leonard Baskin, Ernest Trova, Marisol Escobar, Paul Thek, Manuel Neri and others became popular. In the 1980s several artists, among others, exploring figurative sculpture were Robert Graham in a classic articulated style and Fernando Botero bringing his painting's "oversized figures" into monumental sculptures. Ceramic sculpture as practiced by Pablo Picasso, Peter Voulkos, Stephen De Staebler, Kenneth Price, and others became an important idiom of modern sculpture in the 20th century.[citation needed
]

Henri Matisse, The Back Series, bronze, left to right: The Back I, 1908–09, The Back II, 1913, The Back III 1916, The Back IV, c. 1931, all Museum of Modern Art, New York [16][17][18]

Contemporary movements

Postminimalist
sculpture.

Also during the 1960s and 1970s artists as diverse as

John DeAndrea explored abstraction, imagery, and figuration through video art, environment, light sculpture, and installation art
in new ways.

Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Works include One and Three Chairs, 1965, by Joseph Kosuth, and An Oak Tree, 1973, by Michael Craig-Martin, and those of Joseph Beuys and James Turrell among others.[25]

Rosalind Krauss identified sculpture in the expanded field, a series of oppositions around the work's relationship to its environment that describe the various sculpture-like activities that are postmodern sculpture, creating a theoretical explanation that could adequately fit the developments of Land art, Minimalist sculpture, and site-specific art
into the category of "sculpture":

  • Site-Construction: the intersection of landscape and architecture
  • Axiomatic Structures: the combination of architecture and not-architecture
  • Marked sites: the combination of landscape and not-landscape
  • Sculpture: intersection of not-landscape and not-architecture

Minimalism

Postminimalism

Contemporary genres

Modern sculpture is often created outdoors, as in

Kinetic sculptures are sculptures that are designed to move, which include mobiles. Snow sculptures
are usually carved out of a single block of snow about 6 to 15 feet (4.6 m) on each side and weighing about 20–30 tons. The snow is densely packed into a form after having been produced by artificial means or collected from the ground after a snowfall.

Kid Robot, designed by Michael Lau, or hand-made by Michael Leavitt.[30]

See also

References

  1. ^ "The Burghers of Calais, (sculpture)". SIRIS
  2. ISBN 0-19-513381-1
    .
  3. ^ "Rodin to Now: Modern Sculpture", Palm Springs Desert Museum.
  4. ^ Giedion-Welcker, Carola, ‘’Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space, A revised and Enlarged Edition’’, Faber and Faber, London, 1961, p. X
  5. ^ Atkins, Robert, ‘’ARTSPOKE: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords, 1848-1944’’ Abbeville Publishers, New York, 1993, p.140
  6. ^ Curtis, Penelope, ‘’Sculpture: 1900-1945’’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 1
  7. ^ Elsen, Albert L., ‘’Rodin’s Gates of Hell’’, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1960 p. 77
  8. ^ Grace Glueck, "Picasso Revolutionized Sculpture Too", New York Times, exhibition review 1982, Retrieved July 20, 2010.
  9. ^ "Gallery".
  10. ^ Robert Rosenblum, "Cubism", Readings in Art History 2 (1976), Seuphor, Sculpture of this Century
  11. ^ Edith Balas, Joseph Csaky: A Pioneer of Modern Sculpture, American Philosophical Society, 1998.
  12. ISBN 978-0-8109-3934-9
  13. ^ "Constantin Brâncuși", Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2008 http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Constantin_Brancusi.aspx
  14. ISBN 978-0-19-512878-9
  15. ^ National Air and Space Museum Receives "Ascent" Sculpture for display at Udvar-Hazy Center [1][permanent dead link‍]
  16. ^ The Guardian, Hillary Spurling on The Back Series
  17. ^ MoMA, the collection
  18. ^ Tate
  19. ^ Rodin Museum, The Three Shades
  20. ^ the Art Story
  21. ^ Klein, Mason, et al., Modigliani: Beyond the Myth. The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2004.
  22. ^ Otto Gutfreund - exhibition in the Municipal House (Czech Radio)
  23. ^ Guggenheim museum Archived 2013-01-04 at the Wayback Machine
  24. ^ Dia Foundation
  25. ^ Tate
  26. ^ NY Times, Umbrella Crushes Woman
  27. ^ Peter Frank, "Site Sculpture", Art News, Oct. 1975
  28. ^ Catherine Howett, New Directions in Environmental Art, Landscape Architecture, Jan. 1977
  29. ^ Lucy Lippard, Art Outdoors, In and Out of the Public Domain, Studio International, March–April 1977
  30. ^ "Art Army by Michael Leavitt", hypediss.com [2], December 13, 2006.
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