Modern Sculpture Art History

Modern sculpture arose in tandem with similar artistic trends in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Like artists working in other media, sculptors of the modern era tended to share interests in abstraction, materiality and questions of form.

Modern sculpture heralded a range of new materials and new techniques, from monumental factory-made steel sculptures to plastics. Modern sculpture thus displays multiple and diverse approaches and ideas.

History

Scholars argue over the time period and definition assigned to the term "modernism." However, many begin the modern era with the Realist movement of the 1850s, exemplified by the works of the painter Gustave Courbet. Realist artists concerned themselves with then-contemporary social issues and strove to represent the here and now rather than grand historical themes and idyllic countrysides.

In the early twentieth century, artists began to investigate questions of form and representation. Form refers to the artwork's appearance, which includes questions of size and scale, volume, line, shape and color. Representation is what an artwork symbolizes, what it means. While many sculptors played more and more closely with pure abstraction (when an object does not represent anything but itself), others like Duchamp played overturning common perceptions of everyday objects.

Most scholars end the modern era in 1945, at the end of World War II. However, many artists continued working with modernist concerns of form and material for decades afterwards.

Auguste Rodin

Modernism often signifies a break with the past and a celebration of the new. Though many consider the sculptor Auguste Rodin as the father of modern sculpture, Rodin upheld traditional artistic conventions. He sought training in French art academies (though remained mainly self-taught), respected the academic art tradition and firmly emphasized craftsmanship.

Rodin's expressive style, frequently realist subject matter and ability to render deep psychological states clashed with the trends in figure sculpture of his day. Academic sculptors of the mid-to-late 1800s created smoothly surfaced monuments usually depicting a particular allegory or moral, with finely detailed decorative elements. Rodin dispensed with idealized figures and allegorical subjects, creating figures of living people with deep emotion, as in his late-career "Monument to Balzac" of 1891-98.

Pablo Picasso

Revolutionary in painting and printmaking, Picasso also fundamentally changed sculpture in the early 1900s. In 1911-1913, Picasso created the first collage "Still-life with Chair Caning," which incorporated drawn and collaged elements. In collage, Picasso interrogated notions of art-making and representation: instead of drawing chair caning, Picasso simply applied a wallpaper printed with a wicker pattern (commonly used to paste on chairs and tables for decorative purposes). Not only a representation of something else (wicker), the wallpaper was also inarguably itself--a revolutionary approach when more traditional artists concerned themselves with accurately rendering an illusion of the natural world.

When Picasso began making sculptures from bent and assembled pieces of metal, this again signaled a major change in sculptural practice. Instead of carving stone and wood or modeling clay, Picasso constructed a sculpture from disparate parts. This began the modern sculptural technique of assemblage (also called "construction").

Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought a men's urinal, turned it upside down, signed it "R. Mutt, 1917" and submitted the urinal to a New York exhibition run by the Society of Independent Artists. Though the Society's board (of which Duchamp was a member) purportedly made the exhibition open to any artist submitting work, the board rejected the urinal. Duchamp immediately resigned, without identifying himself as the creator of the object, calling the Society's board hypocritical and not truly modern.

With the urinal, titled "Fountain," Duchamp claimed that art comes from the artist's idea, and not the mind: a factory-made product can be "art," if an artist calls it such. Duchamp began a series of "readymades," his term for sculptures constructed from found objects, and began a tradition that artists continue to work with.

Constatin Brancusi

Differing from Picasso's constructions and Duchamp's readymades, Constantin Brancusi continued to work with traditional sculptural techniques of carving and metal-casting. Brancusi's interest in form as well as his simple and elegant abstractions have made him a prominent figure in art histories of modern sculpture.

Brancusi arrived in Paris from Romania in the early 1900s. By 1908 Brancusi mainly worked with "direct carving," a process where the artist takes a block of stone or wood and carves into without preparing with sketches or preliminary clay figures. For Brancusi, direct carving more closely connected the artist and his psychological state with the material and artwork itself. In his "The Kiss" (1916), for example, Brancusi carved two figures embracing from a single block of stone with a series of incised grooves. "The Kiss" emphasizes the physical and emotional closeness of the couple through its material.

References

• H.W. Janson, "History of Art: The Western Tradition" 8th ed., 2009
• Mark Getlein, "Living with Art," 8th edition, 2006
• Wanda Corn, "The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity," 2001.