Avant-Garde Sculpture (I)

While Rodin was still being the most famous sculptor of the moment, a number of progressive younger artists were calling his art in question. The academic and official style was firmly founded in middle-class taste and Rodin’s works belonged to it but, at the same time, his pathos style and the literary nature of his bronzes were making a way for other principles. Rodin influenced with two elements: first, his treatment of the torso and second, his victory over symbolism. In addition to this, some critics added the importance of Egyptian sculpture. An example of the mix of these influences is The Mediterranean, by Maillol, that can be considered pure sculpture.

One of the things that led modern sculptors to break with the rules of the Western art tradition was the discovery that the images of the primitive people in the colonial empires of Oceania and Africa were not merely exotic curiosities, examples of naïf art or barbaric fetishes, but creative works with the same consideration as the classical models. These products were known in Europe since mid 19th century.

The first European artists to study Oceanian an African objects as works of art were not sculptors but painters: Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Kirchner. They adopted these models in both their paintings and their sculpture works, with images with short legs, thick thighs, long torso and big heads. Some artist adapted the models while others just imitated them. Examples of both trends are Modigliani and Brancusi respectively.

Modigliani created heads of women inspired by an elegant refinement of African and Buddhist art were in a style very much his own. Cut from ashlar stones stolen in public building, they should all be regarded as sculptured fragments of architecture. His production included pillar-like heads, kneeling caryatids and standing nude women.

Brancusi did not manage to make so personal an adaptation. Since he did not want to imitate certain African figures too openly, he split them into fragments. In some way he tried to adapt primitive modernity to the modernity of the technical era.

Cubism
Picasso did his personal approach to sculpture from the Cubist language. His idea was to hold view of each element from different angles of the surface parts with regard to each other as a last manifestation of Rodin’s impressionism. It served to intensify the multiple broken gleams of light on the bronze.

In the case of Picasso works of sculpture, the term that should be used is construction. For the themes a new category has to be defined, for nothing here is represented as corresponds to tradition, such as a human figure or an animal or an allegory of them or even a still life. Other characteristic is that this sculpture has no base and can neither stand nor lie, but hangs on the wall and in this sense it is more like a picture than a relief. The origin of these sculpture may be the papier collés used by Picasso who one day decided to substitute the material by lead and wires. Picasso could have collaborated with Julio Gonzalez when beginning with these works.

These sculptures extend into our real space, for they let the eye penetrate into what is in reality the invisible space of the object (the first sculpture Picasso did was a guitar). For these works Picasso was inspired in African art. He took from this, apart from the idea the assemblage of concave and convex shapes. The objects represented are not useful but they are the plastic representation of them.

Futurism
The artists of this movement dealt with came to modern sculpture by way of academicism and Rodin. They found their inspiration in their knowledge of archaic and non-European sculpture, together with the added stimulus of modern painting spearheaded from Paris.

Futurist sculpture had a different origin. It is the manifesto of a total break with the past. The creation of forms was preceded by theories and principles. This art was seen as matter whose emanations of energy and flashes of movement would be swept up into the surrounding atmosphere.

The characteristics of the movement are evident in Umberto Boccioni, with his Development of a Bottle in Space and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. For him movement could be as beautiful as any manifestation of classical art. His figures are influenced by Rodin, Gaudi and Cubism. Its representation of movement in space marks no advance on the breakdown of movement in the chrono-photographs. He kept to the traditional concept in which the volume of a body is a modelled mass, more or less closed.

More influential than the works were the ideas for a sculpture of the future which Boccioni set in their manifesto. Some ideas are: Sculpture needs to find new sources of emotion, not copy the academicism. The objects will be given life through their extension into space tangible, systematic and plastic. Sculpture will be produced by the systematized vibrations of light and the interpenetration of planes. Transparent planes of glass or celluloid, sheets of metal, wire, electric lights inside and out, will go to indicate the planes, trends, tones and halftones of a new reality. Colouring can step up the emotional force of the images. The materials do not need to be the traditional, but the artist can mix as many as he wants in each sculpture, if with it can gain movement.

Other authors related to this movement are Duchamp-Villon, Brancusi, who has a very personal sculpture and Archipenko. Brancusi can not be held responsible for the Art Deco style, but he is for the pseudo-mythical and quasi-mystical trimming in which his works have been wrapped. Archipenko stands out as the highest of the higher sculptors. He is famous because of his sculpto-paintings.

Dadaism
Marcel Duchamp was a middling painter with an ingenious turn of mind that has made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. After the first experiments of Cubism and Futurism, he took the front fork of a bicycle with its wheel, set it upside down on a studio stool and signed this object construction with his name as a work of art. This new concept of art was promptly taken over by individual artists in other countries.

The artists of the Dada movement in Germany (Arp, Ernst, Schwitters) and later of French Surrealism produced relief pictures. The use of unartistic materials and unpainterly strong colours forms apart of their art of dispute. The same as classical freezes were painted in bright colours, they coloured their creations. Aiming at creating a work of art as a harmonious whole, assemblages and relieves of outstanding beauty were constantly produced in spite of their intention to shock.

Constructivism
Tatlin created the link between Picasso and the Russian constructivism. They gave the western artistic revolution a new direction influenced equally by icons and Russian folk art, and the combination of cosmic speculations and radical living revolution. Tatlin took a radical step from representational to non-representational sculpture. The bits of wood, metal and glass that he assembled represent nothing; they are material forms in space. Some of his works needed the walls as a support but others were suspended in space by curved metal rods or wires spanning the corner of the room. He called them counter-reliefs or wounter-corner-reliefs.

Other artists involved in this movement are Gabo and Pevsner. Gabo used materials that gave the impression of transparency, particularly in his busts. Pevsner reproduced Picasso’s cubists painting of female nudes as transparent relief constructions, using curved celluloid surfaces.