Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works.[2][3] He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void".[4] Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".[5]
Cubist sculpture, in the early 20th century, was a style that developed in parallel with cubist painting, and the formal experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Beginning around 1909 and evolving through the early 1920s cubist artists developed new means of constructing works of art using collage, sculptural assemblage using disparate materials and traditional sculpture making from plaster and clay molds. Some sources name Picasso's 1909 bronze Head of a Woman as the first cubist sculpture.[8]
In the early 20th century, during his period of cubist innovation, Pablo Picasso revolutionized the art of sculpture when he began creating his constructions fashioned by combining disparate objects and materials into one constructed piece of sculpture; Picasso reinvented the art of sculpture with his innovative use of constructing a work in three dimensions with disparate material, the sculptural equivalent of the collage in two-dimensional art. Just as collage was a radical development in two-dimensional art; so was construction a radical development in three-dimensional sculpture. The advent of Surrealism led to things occasionally being described as "sculpture" that would not have been so previously, such as "involuntary sculpture" in several senses, including coulage. In later years Picasso became a prolific potter, leading, with interest in historic pottery from around the world, to a revival of ceramic art, with figures such as George E. Ohr and subsequently Peter Voulkos, Kenneth Price, and Robert Arneson. Marcel Duchamp originated the use of the "found object" (French: objet trouvé) or readymade with pieces such as Fountain (1917).[citation needed]
Similarly, the work of Constantin Brâncuși at the beginning of the century paved the way for later abstract sculpture. In revolt against the naturalism of Rodin and his late 19th-century contemporaries, Brâncuși distilled subjects down to their essences as illustrated by the elegantly refined forms of his Bird in Space series (1924). These elegantly refined forms became synonymous with 20th-century sculpture.[12] In 1927, Brâncuși won a lawsuit against the U.S. customs authorities who attempted to value his sculpture as raw metal. The suit led to legal changes permitting the importation of abstract art free of duty.[13]
Since the 1950s Modernist trends in sculpture both abstract and figurative have dominated the public imagination and the popularity of Modernist sculpture had sidelined the traditional approach. Picasso was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge, 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is not known; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman, or a totally abstract shape. The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.[citation needed]
In the late 1950s and the 1960s, abstract sculptors began experimenting with a wide array of new materials and different approaches to creating their work. Surrealist imagery, anthropomorphic abstraction, new materials and combinations of new energy sources and varied surfaces and objects became characteristic of much new modernist sculpture. Collaborative projects with landscape designers, architects, and landscape architects expanded the outdoor site and contextual integration. Artists such as Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Richard Lippold, George Rickey, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson came to characterize the look of modern sculpture.[citation needed]
Auguste Rodin, The Three Shades, before 1886, plaster, 97 x 91.3 x 54.3 cm. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the shades, i.e. the souls of the damned, stand at the entrance to The Gates of Hell, pointing to an unequivocal inscription, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Rodin assembled three identical figures that seem to be turning around the same point.[19]
Paul Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 x 19 x 27 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Postmodern sculpture occupies a broader field of activities than Modernist sculpture. Rosalind Krauss identified sculpture in the expanded field, a series of oppositions around the work's relationship to its environment that describe the various sculpture-like activities that are postmodern sculpture, creating a theoretical explanation that could adequately fit the developments of Land art, Minimalist sculpture, and site-specific art into the category of "sculpture":
Site-Construction: the intersection of landscape and architecture
Axiomatic Structures: the combination of architecture and not-architecture
Marked sites: the combination of landscape and not-landscape
Sculpture: intersection of not-landscape and not-architecture
The Spire of Dublin officially titled the Monument of Light, stainless steel, 121.2 metres (398 ft), the world's tallest sculpture
Contemporary genres
Modern sculpture is often created outdoors, as in environmental art and environmental sculpture, often in full view of spectators. Light sculpture and site-specific art also often make use of the environment. Site-specific artwork is intentionally created for a specific place. The term was first used in the mid-1970s by sculptors Patricia Johanson, Dennis Oppenheim, Athena Tacha, and others.[27] Site specific environmental art was described as a movement by architectural critic Catherine Howett[28] and art criticLucy Lippard.[29]Land art, Earthworks, (Earth art) is an art movement that makes specific use of the real landscape to form works of sculpture that are located in and make use of nature generally in altered form. It is a form of sculpture created in nature, from nature, using materials found in nature like dirt, soil, rocks, logs, branches, leaves, and water, as well as man made materials like Chain-link fencing, barbed wire, rope, rubber, glass, concrete, metal, asphalt, and mineral pigments. Ice sculpture is a form of ephemeral sculpture that uses ice as the raw material. It is popular in China, Japan, Canada, Sweden, and Russia. Ice sculptures feature decoratively in some cuisines, especially in Asia. Kinetic sculptures are sculptures that are designed to move, which include mobiles. Snow sculptures are usually carved out of a single block of snow about 6 to 15 feet (4.6 m) on each side and weighing about 20–30 tons. The snow is densely packed into a form after having been produced by artificial means or collected from the ground after a snowfall.
Sound sculptures take the form of indoor sound installations, outdoor installations such as aeolian harps, automatons, or be more or less near conventional musical instruments. Sound sculpture is often site-specific. Art toys have become another format for contemporary artists since the late 1990s, such as those produced by Takashi Murakami and Kid Robot, designed by Michael Lau, or hand-made by Michael Leavitt.[30]
^Elsen, Albert E. (2003). Rodin's Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & Gerald B. Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-513381-1.
^Giedion-Welcker, Carola, ‘’Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space, A revised and Enlarged Edition’’, Faber and Faber, London, 1961, p. X
^Atkins, Robert, ‘’ARTSPOKE: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords, 1848-1944’’ Abbeville Publishers, New York, 1993, p.140
^Curtis, Penelope, ‘’Sculpture: 1900-1945’’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 1
^Elsen, Albert L., ‘’Rodin’s Gates of Hell’’, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1960 p. 77
^Edward Lucie-Smith, Visual arts in the 20th century, Edition illustrated, Publisher Harry N. Abrams, 1997, Original from the University of Michigan, ISBN0-8109-3934-7, ISBN978-0-8109-3934-9
^The Oxford dictionary of American art and artists, Author Ann Lee Morgan, Publisher Oxford University Press, 2007,Original from the University of Michigan,ISBN0-19-512878-8, ISBN978-0-19-512878-9
^National Air and Space Museum Receives "Ascent" Sculpture for display at Udvar-Hazy Center [1][permanent dead link]