1000 Scupltures of Genius. Patrick Bade

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СКАЧАТЬ late nineteenth-century world of thought put forth a number of attempts to explain the world, and the recognition of the power of irrational or hidden forces, whether in Freud, Nietzsche, Jung, or Marx, gave rise to artistic manifestations. Paul Gauguin, who explored (and exploited) the stylistic and iconographic world of the South Pacific islands, is an example of this anti-bourgeois trend. Even before Darwin, the world of animals had great appeal among the romantics. Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species (1859), linked homo sapiens to the animal world genealogically, and during his time and earlier one could read of the importance of animals and animals’ spirits in the works of Romantic poets and prose writers; animals were recognised as knowing and passionate, and their emotions linked to those of humans, a theme already explored by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Le Brun, and other artists. The sculpture of Antoine-Louis Barye express this interest in the passions of the animal world, in a vivid trend also explored by painters such as George Stubbs, Eugène Delacroix, and Henri Rousseau.

      The late nineteenth century was a time of great cultural and societal change, and some artists seemed to respond to this and produce an art as revolutionary as the new ideas in science, philosophy, and psychology.

      Auguste Rodin, for example, moved in the direction of modernism in the later nineteenth century, but many sculptors in different countries favoured a more studied, academic, and traditional approach. Throughout Europe and America, traditional, academic sculpture found an admiring public, and many of these works still dominate their public sites, from the so-called Eros by Alfred Gilbert in London’s Piccadilly Circus, via Edvard Eriksen’s Little Mermaid in the harbour of Copenhagen, to New York’s Statue of Liberty by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. This last colossal work is a remarkable specimen of academic Classicism, produced at a time when even the less avant-garde American school was ready to explore a variety of manifestations of early modernism.

      The twentieth century was marked by a new subjectivity of thought, and old paradigms gave way to new. Einstein’s theory of relativity overthrew more static beliefs in physics. The atonalist musical composers overthrew the old common system alive for four hundred years and shifted aural attention away from the keynote and musical scale. Psychoanalytical thinkers continued to undermine confidence in conscious thought and reason.

      Even economists introduced new ideas of subjectivity into economic thinking, and saw prices as the result of shifting sentiment of supply and demand rather than based in firm factors such as the costs of production.

      All of this was part of a new mentality that saw a dynamic universe, and artists shared in this new vision. Cubism is the most obvious participant of this novel thinking, and the focus on fragmentation, changing view point, and the re-assessment and re-evaluation of traditional artistic ideals continued to be widespread in the twentieth century.

      From the abstractions of Umberto Boccioni and Jacques Lipschitz to the work of David Smith and Donald Judd, there was a nearly unbroken line of shared modernist taste. Yet such modernism was not without opposition in the twentieth century.

      Indeed, even early in the century, in the midst of paradigm shift away from academic art and towards modernist solutions, the tragedy of World War I occurred, with tremendous loss of life bringing little change in advantage for either side. The war left a generation disillusioned, and the artistic movements of Dada and even Surrealism can be traced to this fall in confidence and darker vision. They even questioned the value of modernism itself, a challenge that would continue to the end of the century in the work of the post-modernists, who found in Dada a spiritual forerunner.

      The abstract features of modernist thinking were also challenged by the Pop Artists in the 1950s and 1960s, who used everyday objects (or facsimiles of them) to comment on, among other things, modern consumer society.

      Indeed, today’s sculpture often finds expression in the form of ephemera that are raised to the level of high art: the found object of the early twentieth century is being renewed in the art of contemporary installations.

      What is needed now is for architectural sculpture to return. Long banished by most modern architects, sculptural ornamentation has all but disappeared, to the detriment of society. The sense that form should follow function leaves little room for sculptural ornamentation, which had long been the jewel in crown of architectural construction. Perhaps a new generation of architects will once again embrace the use of carved or moulded ornament as a way to convey a sense of grace, beauty, and nobility.

      Antiquity

      1. Anonymous. Iris, west pediment, Parthenon, Athens (Greece), c. 438–432 B.C.E. Marble, h: 125 cm. The British Museum, London (United Kingdom). Greek Antiquity.

      As the ancient Greek city-states grew and evolved, the literary arts developed somewhat in advance of painting and sculpture. At about the time Homer was creating his epics, Greece saw the flourishing of the stylistic era identified as the Geometric period, lasting from about 950 to 750 B.C.E., a style dominated by rigid forms and in which the fluidity of the human figure was only just beginning to show itself. As the Greeks were increasingly exposed to foreign customs and material culture through trade, they were able to adapt and alter other artistic styles. The art of the Near East and of the Egyptians helped to shape Greek art of the Archaic period (c. 750 B.C.E. to 480 B.C.E.). During this time the Greeks began to infuse their figures with a greater sense of life, as with the famous “archaic smile” and with a new subtlety of articulation of the human body.

      The remarkable evolution of Greek sculpture during the fifth century B.C.E. is unparalleled in artistic history. Innovations achieved during that time shaped stylistic development for thousands of years, and belong not to a people in one moment but to all of humankind. The development of weight-shift in a single standing figure and the concomitant torsion and subtlety of bodily stance were major aspects of this new style, but equally significant were the perfection of naturalistic forms, the noble calm, the dynamic equilibrium of movement, the harmony of parts, and the regulated proportions. All of this came to characterise the art of what we know as Classicism. The sculptors Polykleitos, Phidias (the sculptural master of the Parthenon project), and Myron worked in slightly divergent but compatible modes to achieve an art of moderation and perfection.

      The fourth century B.C.E. saw an expansion of the artistic goals of the previous generations of Greek sculptors. Lysippos and Praxiteles softened the human form, and a nonchalant grace informs their figures. Artists in this period humanised the gods and added an element of elegance to their movement and expression. Sculptors of the fourth century B.C.E. increased the spatial complexity of the viewing experience: arms sometimes protrude into our space, groups are more dynamic in arrangement, and we benefit from walking around these sculptures and taking in the varied viewpoints.

      The changes of the fourth century B.C.E. can hardly prepare us for the explosion of styles that occurred in the Hellenistic period, a time of exaggerations: extreme realism in rendering details and in capturing moments of daily life; great elegance of the female form, as we see in the memorable Venus de Milo and Nike of Samothrace; and extreme muscularity of male figures in action. The beauty and refinement of the Belvedere Apollo, now in the Vatican collection, stand as a refined continuation of the earlier Greek ideals. On the other hand, the high relief figures from the altar of Pergamon, showing the battle of the gods and giants, are powerful in physique and facial expression, with deep-set eyes, thick locks of waving hair, and theatrical gestures. Later, Michelangelo and Bernini would draw inspiration from the Hellenistic works known to them from Greek originals and Roman copies.

      The Romans always remained to some extent under the sway of the Greeks, but developed their own modes of sculptural expression. The most striking of their early modes, not uninfluenced by Hellenistic models, was during the Republican period (until the second half of the first century B.C.E.). In an unforgettable development of the portrait type, Roman sculptors СКАЧАТЬ