XIII Sculpture
Developments in sculpture do not always parallel those in painting.
In comparison painting is so facile that it lends itself easily to experiments, responds quickly to moods and fancies. In short, painting is more susceptible—more volatile.
Not that the painter and the sculptor are different human beings, but the mediums whereby they express themselves are so different, and the demands for their work are so unequal, that sculpture usually lags behind in new ventures. The sculptor, however great his desire, cannot afford to make the experiments the painter makes, or at the best he can only embody his new ideas and aspirations in uninviting plaster casts.
He is bound by some of the conditions that hamper the architect, one of which is difficulty in finding a patron who will take the risk and pay the expense of innovations.
The reaction in sculpture has been from the classic along two opposed lines:
A. Back to nature.
B. Purely creative.
The movement back to nature, to a closer observation of life, even to the rendering of the human figure with brutal frankness, is exemplified in the work of Matisse, work so ugly—to most people—it seems a grotesque caricature of the human form, but the human form today is never so symmetrical, so perfect as in classic sculpture, and one suspects the Greeks themselves idealized their young men and maidens.
Long before Matisse, Rodin started the “return to nature.” His “Age of Bronze,” 1877, was so literal a transcript it was denounced as a cast from life; sculptors and critics refused to believe human fingers could model so perfect an impression. His “Saint John,” “Eve,” “Bourgeois of Calais,” “Le Penseur,” “La Belle Heaulmière,” to mention only a few, were all created in a spirit diametrically opposed to the classic—yet Rodin is a most intelligent lover of the classic.
Per contra, most of Rodin’s marbles are a fine mixture of the classic and purely modern—of the classic and the romantic.
The point here is that in some of his bronzes he exhibits as clear and merciless an observation of nature as Matisse or any other modern. It may be said once for all that in the number and variety of things he does, in the manner in which he links past and present, Rodin stands quite alone among sculptors. If he has little sympathy with the extreme sculpture of the hour it is because life is short and in his life time he has covered so vast a territory, responded to so many impulses, ancient and modern, he is not unnaturally reluctant to embark upon new experiments or interest himself vitally in what others are doing.
The best American sculpture, even more than American painting, is solidly virile-impressionistic, notably the work of such men as Barnard and Borghlum. Davidson has one foot firmly planted within the confines of Post-Impressionism, but he has by no means cut loose from the past. His “Decorative Panel” in the Exhibition was purely post-impressionistic, a work of the imagination, while his figures were virile-impressionistic.
It is only by comparing the work of these new men with that of St. Gaudens, French, MacMonies—to mention no others—that one begins to rightly understand what is meant by the “reaction to nature.”
There is plenty of pure observation and plenty of fine imagination in the work of those three men, but there is also much of the purely classical, and not one of them showed or shows any desire to break with tradition, while the very essence of the modern movement is a disregard, conscious or unconscious, for tradition; in many of the new men there is a violent revolt against the domination of the past.
It is when we come to the work of Brancusi and Archipanko that we find the most startling examples of the reaction along purely creative lines.
Nature is purposely left far behind, as far behind as in Cubist pictures, and for very much the same reasons.
Of Brancusi something has been said already.
Of all the sculpture in the International Exhibition the two pieces that excited the most ridicule were Brancusi’s egg-shaped portrait of Mlle. Pogany and “Family Life” by Archipanko.
Both are creative works, products of the imagination, but in their inspiration they are fundamentally different.
In his symmetrical oval head with the spiral masses where the neck would be, it is apparent the sculptor’s interest is in the play of line and relation of masses, no profound human problem troubled him. That there is a relation between the strange shape of the head and his theories of life and art no serious observer of his other work could doubt, but his unusual technic over-shadows other interest.
In his “Family Life,” the group of man, woman, child, Archipanko deliberately subordinated all thought of beauty of form to an attempt to realize in stone the relation in life that is at the very basis of human and social existence.
Spiritual, emotional, and mathematical intellectuality, too, is behind the family group of Archipanko. This group, in plaster, might have been made of dough. It represents a featureless, large, strong male—one gets the impression of strength from humps and lumps—an impression of a female, less vivid, and the vague knowledge that a child is mixed up in the general embrace. The faces are rather blocky, the whole group with arms intertwined—arms that end suddenly, no hands, might be the sketch of a sculpture to be. But when one gets an insight it is intensely more interesting. It is, eventually, clear that in portraying his idea of family love the sculptor has built his figures with pyramidal strength; they are grafted together with love and geometric design, their limbs are bracings, ties of strength, they represent, not individuals, but the structure itself of family life. Not family life as one sees it, but the unseen, the deep emotional unseen, and in making his group when the sculptor found himself verging upon the seen—that is, when he no longer felt the unseen—he stopped. Therefore the hands were not essential. And this expression is made in the simplest way. Some will hoot at it, but others will feel the respect that is due one who simplifies and expresses the deep things of life. You may say that such is literature in marble—well, it is the modernest sculpture.66
The group is so angular, so Cubist, so ugly according to accepted notions, that few look long enough to see what the sculptor means; yet strange as the group was it undeniably gave a powerful impression of the binding, the blending character of the family tie, a much more powerful impression than groups in conventional academic pose could give.
In considering the extreme modern movement in sculpture it must not be forgotten that groups and figures just as strange have been done in the past—that even queerer and more grotesque things have been used to adorn churches and altars.
True, those sculptures and carvings are naive and primitive, but may not the naive and primitive be closer to life and to life’s great truths than the sophisticated and classical?
That is the question.
The answer of the moderns is that the swing of the pendulum in art is from the naive and primitive through the more and more conventional to the fixed and lifeless mold of the classic and academic, then back again to the naive, traversing the romantic, in its course, both ways.