Page 60 - Studio International - September 1973

Pioneers of modern sculpture imagery marries, not compromises the
Hayward Gallery, London, 20 July- material.
23 September
'All art from the Greeks onwards is Throughout the exhibition, there is a
an art of decadence ... the more or sense of protest against false
less great artists have only been those limitations and a revival of properties
who have in one way or another lost to sculpture (go straight from the
reacted against this error'. This was 'Salon' section to the British Museum
Gauguin — one of many like polemical or the V Et A if you need refreshing on
asides. In the 40 years covered by the this point). The declamatory scale and
Hayward show, sculpture seemed to mass (not size) of Rodin's great
back his hunch. Head is echoed by Maillol : in that
corner of the show, the physicalness
The biggest shape that emerges is of presence is suddenly very strong.
the shift away from the classical When the process of liberation from
tradition and the post-Renaissance naturalism passes close to caricature
academics towards values that had in Bourdelle, Matisse, Brancusi, it is
more in common with the not in satire ; more a show of strength
pre-Classical, pre-Christian and of emancipated eyes and minds. The
non-European. This meant such a restless experiment in materials—
thorough rethinking of the European particularly with the relief form — was
tradition that we're unmistakably in a ventured by Gauguin and by 1918
new age. has reached adolescent forms of
assemblage and constructivism, via
The exhibition starts, scrupulously, collage. Again, not iconoclastic
with the cluttered mind of the gesture, but freedom of spirit. In
nineteenth-century European, seen general the imagination and invention
through his Salon exhibits in his that one glimpses grappling only with
pleasures and vanities, his modest subject matter in the Salon, grew up
excesses, moralities and manners. I again and were now free to choose
don't intend here to paint the Salon as their level.
too black a villain. Indeed the pieces
on show have much to offer— a Much of this radicalness, sculpture
fairly predictable salutary lesson. owed to painting. With the exceptions
Rather it should be emphasized how of Rodin and Brancusi, the major
obviously later nineteenth-century figures here are the great painter-
Salon sculpture was the butt-end of a sculptors; Gauguin and Degas,
tradition. Domestic in scale and Matisse and Picasso, Boccioni and
preoccupation, it tended not to aspire Tatlin.
beyond its own social boundary. The
sculptor was more conscious of It had been painting since the mid-
Greece and Rome than the painter in century that had shifted art's subject
the sense that the facts of antiquity matter away from allegory and
were marble not paint—facts rubbed mythology towards la vie moderne
home by his Ecole des Beaux Arts and in general proposed an anti-
training. Yet his conception of the literary, anti-narrative attitude to
classical was utterly reduced to his subject. By the 1890s symbolism had
measure, divested of any shred of become thoroughly pictorial,
Brancusi The Kiss 1908. Coll. Philadelphia Art Museum. Photo. John Webb
universal dialogue. If their art wasn't
born from thinking big, then one
should look to its charm not condemn integrated into the painted fabric. stroke of one finger is wiped like a
its triviality. Hand in hand with this went sweeping brushstroke through an
successive revolutions in technique eyelid and left. In his catalogue
In these respects that 'modern' turn- which together proposed that the Professor Elsen feels it necessary to
of-the-century sculpture is so paint on canvas was itself the qualify the traditional association
explicitly different. If it was language—the plastic means to a of Rosso with Impressionism. But if
concerned with contemporary parallel with nature, rather than a you think it right through to late
appearances, it was usually with the manipulated imitation of nature. Monet, where the veils of transient
non-modish and non-parochial and experience accumulate into a deeper
often with a deadpan level of Gauguin's polychrome relief Soyez and symbolic significance, then
democratic banality. Increasingly Amoureuses et Vous Serez Heureuses you're very close to Rosso's image of
though, it looked beyond appearances transposes all of his freedom as a the world. His handling of the wax
to images whose terms of reference painter into woodcarving. He moves comes, like Monet's inventive
were broader than the eye's. If it was imperiously from idiom to idiom within handling of paint, from the sustained
concerned with finish — and for a it, binding the whole with strong linear concentration of looking. Rosso was
while it very self-consciously design and direct cutting. Degas's obviously a minor master but equally
contested that traditional notion of little clay figures were formed of the clearly, one of the great originals of
finish largely associated with same intimacy, informality and direct the period.
naturalistic exactitude — then it was transcription as his pastels. We see
with a finish proper to the metal, the same natural transposition in Picasso invented an art for the
stone or wood, that could at one and Matisse. cluttered twentieth-century mind.
the same time reflect these wider Matisse and Brancusi offered it an
notions of content. This is Medardo Rosso, so near to painting, escape route from clutter. Picasso is
marvellously clear at the Hayward in is well represented with five waxes not seen at his best here : the cast
the distance travelled from the and four bronzes from his small extant shown of the 1909 Head of a Woman
sometimes spectacular multi-media oeuvre. One work pinpoints the sort has a particularly nasty black, treacly
Salon pieces (Delacour's Andromeda of surreptitious inroad made by surface that glosses over all its
c. 1900 is in ivory, granite, bronze and painterly attitudes into the activity of subtle inflexions of light and surface.
onyx) where the materials are sculpture. In the Madame Noblet (Compare it with the marvellous
trinket-like accessories, to the Matisse Head of Jeannette V 1910-13 bust, the fragile relief of the features quality of Boccioni's silvered-bronze
Brancusis upstairs where the strong Photo. John Webb is symbolically despoiled : a single Bottle. The contrast shouldn't be this
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