New materials with images

1. Avant-Garde Sculpture (I)
Revision

2. Origins
• 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.

3. Influences
• Rodin influenced with two elements:
– his treatment of the torso and
– his victory over symbolism.
• 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.

4. Influences
• 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
• These 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.

5. First examples
• The first European artists to study Oceanian an African
objects as works of art were not sculptors but painters:
– Matisse,
– Picasso,
– Derain,
– Kirchner.

6. Matisse Picasso Derain Kirchner

7. First examples
• They adopted these
models in both their
paintings and their
sculpture works.
• Images have short
legs, thick thighs, long
torso and big heads.
• Some artist adapted
the models while
others just imitated
them.

8. First examples
• 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.

9. Modigliani

10. First examples
• 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.

11. Brancusi

12. 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.

13. Cubism
• 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.

14. Cubism
• Characteristics:
– 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 because he was a
technique of the assemblages .

15. Cubism
• 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).
• 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.

16. 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,
– modern painting spearheaded from Paris.

17. Futurism
• 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.

18. Futurism
• The characteristics of the
movement are evident in
Umberto Boccioni.
• For him movement could
be as beautiful as any
manifestation of classical
art.
• His figures are influenced
by Rodin, Gaudi and
Cubism.
•

19. Futurism
• 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.

20. Futurism
• Sculpture characteristics:
– 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.

21. Futurism
• Authors:
– Duchamp-Villon

22. Futurism
• Authors:
– Archipenko:stands out
as the highest of the
higher sculptors.
He is famous because of
his sculpto-paintings.

23. 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.

24. Dadaism
• The artists of the Dada movement in Germany
(Arp, Ernst, Schwitters) and later of French
Surrealism produced relief pictures.

25. Dadaism
• Characteristics:
• 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.

26. 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.

27. Constructivism
• 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.

28. Constructivism
• Authors:
– Gabo used materials
that gave the
impression of
transparency,
particularly in his
busts.

29. Constructivism
• Authors:
– Pevsner reproduced
Picasso’s cubists
painting of female
nudes as transparent
relief constructions,
using curved celluloid
surfaces.