EARLY MODERN SCULPTURE, AND ORIGINS OF MODERN SCULPTURE: PIONEERS AND PREMISES
William Tucker, Early Modern Sculpture (New York, Oxford University Press, 1974).
Albert E. Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises (New York, George Braziller, 1974).
SCULPTURE, LONG THE NEGLECTED HANDMAIDEN of modernism, has commanded ever greater attention from artists, critics, and historians since the 1950s. Serious attempts to deal with 20th-century sculpture before the 1960s can be numbered almost on one hand; and of these early studies, many were limited either by concentration on a national school, usually France, or by a barely disguised set of prejudices and esthetic doctrines.
As has happened repeatedly in modern art and its relations to art history and theory, changes in the impulsions that guide the making of new art have changed our view and understanding of the past. The reevaluation of 20th-century sculpture is only the latest in a long series of such echo effects. Its cause seems to have been the subsidence of Abstract Expressionism as a dominant cultural style and the subsequent appearance of numerous styles and movements that, instead of continuing the transcendental iconology of the 1940s and early 1950s, were based rather on a reintegration of art with the phenomenal world. It is not coincidental that Duchamp’s work and ideas began to move toward their present worldwide, almost oversaturated prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So far as sculpture is concerned, it is particularly relevant that the work of the late David Smith should have attained first an American, then international, stature at the same time. Smith’s achievements in sculpture, reaching extraordinary heights in the last decade of his life, were in fact doubly influential, firstly on younger generations of artists, and secondly on critics and historians. In both instances Smith’s work posed a dilemma, arising from two interrelated issues: his creation of magnificent sculpture within an Abstract Expressionist context possibly more antithetical to the enterprise of sculpture than any previous 20th-century movement; and more centrally, the nonsculptural, antivolumetric, and often virtually pictorial premises for much of his work, including his greatest sculptures.
These dilemmas were to engage the abilities of artists and critics for at least the first half of the 1960s. The artist’s solution, where the issue was squarely confronted, was to reject Smith’s lingering visual anthropomorphism, to filter out his profoundly idealist and transcendentalist impulses, and to replace these elements with a secularized phenomenology of perception: ideated by conceptual, serial, or mathematical prior decisions, as with Judd; or more radically phenomenalized, to the point of being a surrogate ballet, in the empirically orchestrated, visual-bodily-kinesthetic perception of Caro and his imitators.
The consequences for critics and historians were as far reaching, if less dramatically evident. The radical and unprecedented expansion of the character and range of sculptural expression during the 1960s, in addition to the heritage of Smith’s work, was to compel historians as well as artists to rethink the fundamental issues—what sculpture is; what differentiates the modern sculptural tradition from those of the 19th and earlier centuries; what differentiates sculpture from painting, architecture, the decorative arts, or real objects in the ordinary world. Great credit must be given to Greenberg’s early insights into the transformation of the sculptural medium and to his pinpointing of the Cubist years as the beginning of a totally new, modernist role for sculpture (see his “The New Sculpture,” 1948, and “Modernist Sculpture, Its Pictorial Past,” 1952). His ideas were to be applied with fruitful results to Caro, both by Greenberg himself and by Fried; and Rosalind Krauss, similarly drawing on Greenberg’s ideas, was to offer important clarifications of both Smith and Cubist sculpture in her Terminal Iron Works of 1971.
With the exception of Sidney Geist’s superb monograph on Brancusi, William Tucker’s Early Modern Sculpture, first published as a series of articles in 1970, and Albert Elsen’s Origins of Modern Sculpture, originally the catalogue for an exhibition in 1973 at the Hayward Gallery, London, are the two most important treatments of early 20th-century sculpture to appear in recent years in English (Jean Laude’s essay in the recent French anthology, 1913, being the best overall treatment of the subject thus far in any language). Tucker’s book, the earlier in date of composition, is the more idiosyncratic of the two, for unlike the historian Elsen, Tucker is himself a sculptor, and one of the most interesting of the many to have achieved prominence in England during the 1960s. His work is not well known in America, in comparison to that by Tim Scott, Isaac Witkin, and Phillip King, who like Tucker were associated with Caro and the St. Martin’s School of Art in London during the early 1960s; the works by Tucker in the 1972 Venice Biennale were of outstanding interest but attracted relatively little attention at the time. As a critic, Tucker, the artist, asks questions of the past in order to clarify his own identity, his relationship to the past; to establish a view of the modern tradition that will support the concerns of artists in the 1960s. His book divides into discrete units, corresponding to the specific artists he treats, and it can be dealt with in the same order.
Rodin: Tucker makes an interesting comparison between the Age of Bronze, which he sees as the most crucial work of Rodin, and Manet’s Olympia, as being in both instances related to Renaissance models yet in protomodernist fashion affirming surface, the making process, and thus the integrity of their respective media of sculpture and painting. Tucker nevertheless makes a false opposition between Rodin and the Renaissance tradition. He does properly call attention to Rodin’s care in making a work, his responsibility (usually) for carrying it to completion personally, and his inventive treatment not only of the structure of the human figure but also of the surface of a sculpture. Tucker’s position is undermined, however, by what we are now beginning to understand more fully about 19th-century sculptural practices, academic and otherwise. And it is even more vulnerable because of his profound lack of understanding of classical art. To state that the Age of Bronze, or any other sculpture of Rodin, for that matter, is distinguished from past sculpture because its surface is invented, is to overlook the crucial role of, let us say, Bernini in the history of European sculpture. Similarly, to characterize Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, in comparison to Rodin, as “flat, languid, and unconvincing,” is to be simultaneously unaware of the intellectual inventions underlying Renaissance figural style and to make a fatal disjunction between classical style and its iconographic intentions. Although such a misreading is the essence of cultural change and becomes necessary at certain moments in history, it is at best a weak support for the stylistic formalism being presented here; it is comparable to Darby Bannard’s notorious dismissal of Guernica as a work of art because of its supposed failure as a compositional structure.
The problematic relationship of Rodin’s use of iconography as compared to the Renaissance tradition is similarly obscured by such an approach. Rodin’s allusive and emblematic rather than programmatic use of iconography, his exploration of mood, of transitory, poignant, and evanescent states of being, and his invention, along with Medardo Rosso, of a sculptural objective correlative for these states of mind, are what link him indissolubly with the Symbolist world view. Thus to interpret his Balzac as a ‘study of the effects of weight and gravity, as Tucker does in a chapter entitled “Gravity,” is not to appreciate Rodin’s brilliant departure from physical laws as the basis for this greatest of Symbolist monuments. Tucker’s evaluation of Rodin’s partial figures and his late small dancers as abstract, objectlike, and thus relatable to contemporary sculpture is a comparable misreading of their evocations of pathos and transience, both physical and emotive. It also neglects their probable function in some instances as “five finger exercises” on the part of an endlessly fertile artist for whom the molding of clay was as natural as drawing with pen or charcoal.
Brancusi is clearly Tucker’s hero among early 20th-century sculptors, and his extensive treatment of the artist’s works, including an additional chapter on the monuments at Tirgu Jiu, is the core of his book. Tucker acknowledges his indebtedness to Sidney Geist, as must everyone who deals with Brancusi. His interpretation of the works themselves, however, departs markedly from Geist and in the same direction of formal autonomy and relative neglect of iconographic issues that was evident in his handling of Rodin. In keeping with his overall view of process and of making as essential aspects of the modern tradition, Tucker isolates Brancusi’s revival of carving and his attention to the specific physical properties of his materials, whether wood, stone, or bronze, as a key to his importance for 20th-century sculpture. It is in a section entitled “The Object” that Tucker most clearly reveals his formalist bias, where he declares (p. 107): “Sculpture, of its nature, is object, in the world, in a way in which painting, music, poetry are not; thus the ambition of the poem-object, the objet-tableau, continued to be active over a far longer period than that of the sculpture-object, because of the persistence of factors of meaning and representation in poetry and painting” (italics are the author’s). Later, after restating Greenberg’s position on the modernist autonomy of each artistic medium, Tucker applies this autonomy to the situation of modern sculpture and concludes that it was Brancusi who began the modernist sculptural tradition by creating works that are themselves “physically verifiable.”
The “persistence of factors of meaning and representation” (as though these factors were some sort of embarrassing cultural halitosis) is perhaps the central issue on which one would be forced to differ with Tucker, with regard both to modern sculpture as a whole and to Brancusi in particular. There is a regrettable absence in Tucker of any consideration of Brancusi’s iconography and of the meanings he conferred upon a group of carefully chosen themes to which he constantly returned. Tucker also either chooses to disregard, or has no apparent awareness of, the close relationship of Brancusi’s extremely sophisticated primitivism of forms, methods, and content to the intellectual history of early 20th-century art, nor of Brancusi’s unique fusion of Symbolist iconographic allusiveness, Cubist eidetic signs, and primitivist animism.
In his chapter on Picasso’s early constructions, Tucker does not make use of Greenberg’s insights on their central importance for 20th-century sculpture but instead returns curiously to a viewpoint held by many earlier 20th-century critics who saw Cubist works as abstractions: “When one considers the Musical Instrument of 1914, the problem of representation is no longer an issue. The internal ordering of the parts preponderates over the schematic references to reality, so that, although the point of departure may be necessary for the artist, it is no longer so for us. It no longer helps to be able to identify it as a guitar or mandolin; it has become a self-sufficient object” (p. 59). Tucker thus sacrifices the representational function, and in particular the radically new Cubist means of representation, in these constructions to a need to establish a modernist tradition of self-referential objectness. It is a misreading which echoes that of Tatl in in his 1914–17 constructions, though with different, if not diametrically opposed, motives. When Tucker is in direct confrontation with a work of art, however, as in his subtle analysis of Picasso’s Still Life with Fringe at the Tate, or again of Brancusi’s monuments at Tirgu Jiu, he forgets his ideological compulsions despite himself.
In his preoccupation with establishing a formalist tradition for sculpture as the making of works with the quality of objects, Tucker not surprisingly can do little with Giacometti and therefore dismisses his career as “an ingenious but essentially sterile academician” (p. 118), and of having the sensibility of a painter whose works, despite his ingenuity, “cannot conceal the fundamental lack of feeling” (p. 127). Nor is it surprising that Tucker promotes Rietveld’s chairs to the rank of sculpture, or that he finds himself enormously affected by the inspired sculptural qualities of Duchamp’s Bottlerack, notwithstanding his total misunderstanding and dismissal of Duchamp’s other Readymades: “the abstract formal power of the Bottlerack as a total configuration is still unequalled in sculpture” (p.121).
Ironically, Tucker is at his best in dealing with modeled, representational sculpture. His chapter on Matisse is filled with sensitive and intelligent observations, as is his treatment of Degas, with whom he ends his book. Whenever his own acute eye and sense of form are engaged directly, and not through an intervening screen of ideology, he offers remarkable insights into specific works of modern sculpture. Unfortunately, ideology is still apparently Tucker’s main concern, as is shown in his recent series of articles in Studio International where he persists in attempting to make some sort of ultimate definition of what sculpture is, instead of realizing that it is simply any nonutilitarian and symbolic organization of real space.
If Tucker’s approach is that of the artist as critic and connoisseur, Elsen’s is that of the modern art historian, in this instance the leading authority on Rodin, whose contributions to the understanding of that artist’s life and work are impossible to overestimate. But while Tucker often construes the past in the light of contemporary esthetic ideologies, Elsen has a tendency to interpret early 20th-century sculpture from the viewpoint of Rodinian esthetics and the milieu of later 19th-century sculpture as a whole. This approach brings mixed blessings, for while it can lead to some fairly serious misunderstandings of the critical and historical issues in the period he covers—1890 to 1918—it also serves to put the indisputably revolutionary aspects of early 20th-century sculpture in the context of the prior history and practice of the medium. Elsen’s book can, in fact, be best used in conjunction with the original Hayward Gallery exhibition catalogue; the only major difference between the two versions of the text is that in the catalogue, as in the original exhibition itself, there were many invaluable photographs of late 19th-century salon sculpture, often of the most bizarre sort, along with many revealing documents of 19th-century sculptural methods.
Elsen has divided his text into two large sections, the first on iconography and content, the second on form and style. Within these larger divisions are a series of what amount to individual essays on everything from portraiture, the nude, and abstraction, to color, the pedestal, and the relief. There is a considerable overlapping of issues as a result of this approach, which is more like an assemblage of beads on a string rather than a historical discourse. The absence of any truly historical schema is, in fact, as evident here as it is, if in another way, in Tucker. In its place is a tremendous amount of information, amounting to a large fraction of what is known about early modern sculpture, presented rather heterogeneously and at times with an almost breathless haste. There is some doubt as to the audience for which this book was intended. In its original function as a rather ambitious and art-historically orientated catalogue for a public exhibition, one might excuse on the grounds of informality and popular appeal such unfortunate uses of language as: “When Picasso pasted paper to canvas, the history of art came unglued” (p. 128); or, “Bourdelle plugged the hole in relief, for which he had criticized Rodin, but he opened a credibility gap with the revolutionaries by affecting an ancient style (similar to a steam-rollered early classical pediment)” (p. 138). Such breezy familiarity with mixed metaphors may well be suitable for popular audiences, but it seems out of place in a work that is of presumed scholarly seriousness and whose author is currently president of the College Art Association.
At least two important themes emerge, however, from Elsen’s presentation. The first is the surprising degree of continuity of iconographic categories carried over into early 20th-century sculpture from later 19th-century traditions. This continuity is evident both in the persistence of the nude and the partial figure and also in the very titles given to early 20th-century works, although in the latter case the titles often conceal changes in the use an artist makes of a given motif in comparison to 19th-century practice. The emergence of a new sexual candor, the expansion of genre subjects, and the appearance of still life and later of abstraction are seen as the new, 20th-century contributions to sculptural iconography. At the iconologic level Elsen also, correctly in my opinion, pinpoints the rejection of what I would call ut sculptura poesis in favor of the artist’s personal and usually nonverbal experience as the new source of artistic subject matter. It is a transformation from public to private realms of human experience that, it should be pointed out, is at one with the change of social function for sculpture. The sculptural talent that formerly was dedicated to the making of public, social monuments was to shift to the private work, private in meaning as well as in scale and patronage.
In his discussion of style and form, Elsen locates the revolution of modern sculpture in the principle that “the overall quality of a sculpture dictates the treatment, logic, and number of the parts” (p. 67; italics the author’s), rather than the subordination of formal means to prior iconographic intention. Related to this new formal logic is what Elsen elsewhere in the text calls the “new physiognomic,” the intuitive communication of nonverbal ideas by purely formal means so as to give a total expressiveness independent of traditional iconographic signs, gestures, and facial expressions. In at least one instance, that of Matisse’s Serf, Elsen makes the connection between the partial figure and this new expressive method.
It is puzzling, however, that he does not see the deeper range of this idea, as applied not only to the partial figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also to a wide range of early 20th-century sculpture. The Symbolist objective correlative for expression, realized most fully among Rodin’s works in the Balzac rather than in his partial figures, depends precisely on an iconography of nonverbal experience that Elsen himself pointed out, as cited above. Such an anticlassical iconographical method must inevitably lead to anticlassical, often primitivizing, styles. Nor is it any surprise that animals, infants, or any situation of preverbal or awakening consciousness are favorite sculptural themes of the period, from Gaudier-Brerska and Brancusi to Duchamp-Villon. The development of Cubist styles in both painting and sculpture, reducing the range of motifs to anonymous figures and still lives, removes us further from verbal consciousness, particularly to the degree to which such motifs become nominal targets for a nonverbal phenomenology of perception. The appearance of Cubist-derived abstraction completes an iconological inversion of the humanistic artistic tradition.
Perhaps the insuperable difficulty with all writings on the history or criticism of modern sculpture has been to consider it separately from painting, as though in sympathy with the difficulties faced so long by sculptors in creating a basis for their art that would be distinct from both painting and the academicized residue of the classical tradition. But just as artists, not printmakers, make the best graphic art, so it may be for sculpture also. In the same way, that critics and historians should not limit themselves to considering a single medium in isolation hardly needs repeating, yet it has been all too common a practice. The danger is in the encouragement of a formalist approach that is at best descriptive if not openly ideological, and the neglect of iconographic themes that can illuminate form just as well as content.
