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Cubist sculpture
developed in parallel
with Cubist painting,
beginning in Paris
around 1909 with its
proto-Cubist phase,
and evolving through
the early 1920s. Just
as Cubist painting,
Cubist sculpture is
rooted in Paul
Cézanne's reduction of
painted objects into
component planes and
geometric solids;
cubes, spheres,
cylinders, and cones.
Presenting fragments Alexander Archipenko, 1912, La
and facets of objects Vie Familiale (Family Life).
that could be visually Exhibited at the 1912 Salon
interpreted in different d'Automne, Paris and the 1913
ways had the effect of Armory Show in New York,
'revealing the Chicago and Boston. The original
structure' of the object. sculpture (approx six feet tall) was
Cubist sculpture accidentally destroyed)
essentially is the
dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the
language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints
of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic
surfaces.
Contents
1 History
2 Proto-Cubist sculpture
2.1 Africa, Egyptian, Greek and Iberian art
3 Cubist styles
3.1 Alexander Archipenko
3.2 Joseph Csaky
3.3 Raymond Duchamp-Villon
3.4 Jacques Lipchitz
3.5 Henri Laurens
3.6 Umberto Boccioni
3.7 Constantin Brâncuși
4 By World War I
5 Artists associated with Cubist Sculpture
6 Gallery
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
History
In the historical
analysis of most
modern movements
such as Cubism there
has been a tendency to
suggest that sculpture
trailed behind
painting. Writings
about individual
sculptors within the
Cubist movement are
commonly found,
while writings about
Cubist sculpture are
premised on painting,
Joseph Csaky, 1911-1912, Groupe offering sculpture
de femmes (Groupe de trois femmes, nothing more than a
Groupe de trois personnages), supporting role.[1]
plaster lost, Exhibited at the 1912
Salon d'Automne and Salon des We are better advised,
Indépendants, 1913, Paris writes Penelope
Curtis, "to look at
what is sculptural
within Cubism. Cubist painting is an almost sculptural
translation of the external world; its associated sculpture
translates Cubist painting back into a semi-reality".[1]
Attempts to separate painting and sculpture, even by 1910,
are very difficult. "If painters used sculpture for their own
ends, so sculptors exploited the new freedom too", writes
Curtis, "and we should look at what sculptors took from the
discourse of painting and why. In the longer term we could
read such developments as the beginning of a process in
which sculpture expands, poaching painting's territory and
then others, to become steadily more prominent in this
century".[1]
Henri Matisse, The Back Series, bronze, left to right: The Back
I, 1908–09, The Back II, 1913, The Back III 1916, The Back IV,
c. 1931, all Museum of Modern Art, New York City[7][8][9]
Now liberated
from the one-to-
one relationship
between a fixed
coordinate in
space captured at
a single moment
in time assumed
by classical
vanishing-point
perspective, the
Albert Gleizes, 1912, Paysage près de
Cubist sculptor,
paris, (Paysage de Courbevoie,
just as the painter,
Landschaft bei Paris), oil on canvas, 72.8
became free to
x 87.1 cm, missing from Hannover
explore notions of
Germany since 1937
simultaneity,
whereby several
positions in space captured at successive time intervals
could be depicted within the bounds of a single three-
dimensional work of art.[11]
"Some, and they are not the least intelligent, see the
aim of our technique in the exclusive study of
volumes. If they were to add that it suffices, surfaces
being the limits of volumes and lines those of
surfaces, to imitate a contour in order to represent a
volume, we might agree with them; but they are
thinking only of the sensation of relief, which we
hold to be insufficient. We are neither geometers nor
sculptors: for us lines, surfaces, and volumes are only
modifications of the notion of fullness. To imitate
volumes only would be to deny these modifications
for the benefit of a monotonous intensity. As well
renounce at once our desire for variety. Between
reliefs indicated sculpturally we must contrive to hint
at those lesser features which are suggested but not
defined."[12]
"Cubists
sculpture", writes
the art historian
Douglas Cooper,
"must be
discussed apart
from the painting
because it Jean Metzinger, 1912, Landscape
followed other (Marine, Composition Cubiste), oil on
paths, which were canvas, 51.4 x 68.6 cm, Fogg Art
sometimes similar Museum, Harvard University. Published
but never in Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst:
parallel".[14] Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus
(1917)
"But not (http://archive.org/details/einblickin00wa
infrequently the ld), Der Sturm, 1912-1917
sculptor and the
painter upset the
equilibrium of the work of others by doing things which are
out of key or out of proportion." (Arthur Jerome Eddy)[15]
Proto-Cubist sculpture
The origins of Cubist
sculpture are as diverse as
the origins of Cubist
painting, resulting from a
wide range of influences,
experiments and
circumstances, rather than
from one source. With its
roots stemming as far back
as ancient Egypt, Greece and
Africa, the proto-Cubist
period (englobing both
painting and sculpture) is
characterized by the
geometrization of form. It is Early Cycladic art II period,
essentially the first Harp Player, marble, H 13,5
experimental and cm, W 5,7 cm, D 10,9 cm,
exploratory phase, in three- Cycladic figurine, Bronze
dimensional form, of an art Age, early spedos type,
movement known from the Badisches Landesmuseum,
spring of 1911 as Cubism. Karlsruhe, Germany
Avant-garde artists
working in Paris had
begun reevaluating
their own work in
relation to that of
Cézanne following a
retrospective of his
paintings at the
Salon d'Automne of
1904, and
exhibitions of his Paul Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage),
work at the Salon partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x
d'Automne of 1905 27 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The
and 1906, followed theme of Oviri is death, savagery,
by two wildness. Oviri stands over a dead
commemorative she-wolf, while crushing the life out
retrospectives after of her cub. As Gauguin wrote to
his death in 1907. Odilon Redon, it is a matter of "life in
The influence death". From the back, Oviri looks
generated by the like Auguste Rodin's Balzac, a sort of
work of Cézanne, in menhir symbolizing the gush of
combination with the creativity.[19]
impact of diverse
cultures, suggests a
means by which artists (including Alexander Archipenko,
Constantin Brâncuși, Georges Braque, Joseph Csaky,
Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes,
Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Amedeo Modigliani and
Pablo Picasso) made the transition to diverse forms of
Cubism.[21]
Cubist styles
The diverse styles of Cubism have been associated with the
formal experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso
exhibited exclusively at the Kahnweiler gallery. However,
alternative
contemporary views
on Cubism have
formed to some
degree in response to
the more publicized
Salon Cubists (Jean
Metzinger, Albert
Gleizes, Robert
Delaunay, Henri Le
Fauconnier, Fernand
Léger, Alexander
Archipenko and
Joseph Csaky),
whose methods and
ideas were too
distinct from those of
Braque and Picasso Alexander Archipenko, 1912, Femme
to be considered Marchante (Woman Walking)
merely secondary to
them.[2] Cubist
sculpture, just as Cubist painting, is difficult to define.
Cubism in general cannot definitively be called either a
style, the art of a specific group or even a specific
movement. "It embraces widely disparate work, applying to
artists in different milieux". (Christopher Green)[2]
Alexander Archipenko
Joseph Csaky
He arrived in Paris
from his native
Hungary during the
summer of 1908. By
autumn of 1908
Joseph Csaky shared
a studio space at Cité
Falguière with
Joseph Brummer, a
Hungarian friend
who had opened the
Brummer Gallery
with his brothers.
Within three weeks,
Brummer showed the
Csaky a sculpture he
was working on: an
exact copy of an Joseph Csaky, Head (self-portrait),
African sculpture 1913, Plaster lost. Photo published in
from the Congo. Montjoie, 1914
Brummer told Csaky
that another artist in
Paris, a Spaniard by the name of Pablo Picasso, was
painting in the spirit of 'Negro' sculptures.[27]
Csaky wrote of the direction his art had taken during the
crucial years:
Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Jacques Lipchitz
Henri Laurens
Umberto
Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni
exhibited his Futurist
sculptures in Paris in Umberto Boccioni , ca.1912, Spiral
1913 after having Expansion of Muscles in Action,
studied the works of plaster, photograph published in 1914
Archipenko, and 1919, in Cubists and Post-
Brâncuși, Csaky, and Impressionism, by Arthur Jerome
Duchamp-Villon. Eddy, and exhibited at Erster
Boccioni's deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin 1913,
background was in Herwarth Walden, titled
painting, as his Spiralförmige ausdehnung von
Futurist colleagues, muskeln in bewegung. Published 1913
but unlike others was catalogue by Der Sturm in Berlin
impelled to adapt the
subjects and
atmospheric faceting of Futurism to sculpture.[1] For
Boccioni, physical motion is relative, in opposition with
absolute motion. The Futurist had no intention of
abstracting reality. "We are not against nature," wrote
Boccioni, "as believed by the innocent late bloomers
[retardataires] of realism and naturalism, but against art, that
is, against immobility."[16][40] While common in painting,
this was rather new in sculpture. Boccioni expressed in the
preface of the catalogue for the First Exhibition of Futurist
Sculpture his wish to break down the stasis of sculpture by
the utilization of diverse materials and coloring grey and
black paint of the edges of the contour (to represent
chiaroscuro). Though Boccioni had attacked Medardo
Rosso for adhering closely to pictorial concepts, Lipchitz
described Boccioni's 'Unique Forms' as a relief concept, just
as a futurist painting translated into three-dimensions.[1]
Constantin Brâncuși
By World War I
In June 1915 the young modern sculptor Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska lost his life in the war. Shortly before his death he
wrote a letter and sent it to friends in London:
The movement had run its course by about 1925, but Cubist
approaches to sculpture didn't end as much as they became a
pervasive influence, fundamental to the related
developments of Constructivism, Purism, Futurism, Die
Brücke, De Stijl, Dada, Abstract art, Surrealism and Art
Deco.
Gallery
Paul Gauguin, Soyer
amoureuses vous serez
heureuses, relief
Antoine Bourdelle, 1910–12, La
Musique, bas-relief, Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées, Paris
Pablo Picasso, 1909–10, Head
of a Woman (Fernande),
modeled on Fernande Olivier,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York
Constantin Brâncuși, 1912,
Portrait of Mlle Pogany,
Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia. Armory Show
postcard
Constantin Brâncuși, 1909,
Portrait De Femme (La
Baronne Renée Frachon), now
lost. Exhibited at 1913 Armory
Show, published press clipping
Constantin Brâncuși, 1909, Le
Baiser (The Kiss), 89.5 x 30 x
20 cm, stone, Cimetière de
Montparnasse, Paris
Constantin Brâncuși, Une Muse,
1912, plaster, 45.7 cm (18 in.)
Armory Show postcard.
Exhibited: New York, Armory
of the 69th Infantry (no. 618);
The Art Institute of Chicago
(no. 26) and Boston, Copley
Hall (no. 8), International
Exhibition of Modern Art,
February–May 1913
Alexander Archipenko, 1910,
Le baiser (The Kiss)
See also
Proto-Cubism
Cubism
Modern sculpture
References
1. ^ a b c d e f g h Penelope Curtis (1999). Sculpture 1900-
1945: After Rodin (http://books.google.com/?
id=JjcxddXkJXUC&pg=PA118). Oxford University Press.
p. 118. ISBN 978-0-19-284228-2.