Rendering the Figure
Features
Throughout the history of art and architecture, a number of artists have incorporated the caryatid in their work: Auguste Rodin, Amedeo Modigliani, and Constantin Brancusi.
Many twentieth-century artists began their careers by working in a representational style and later adopted a semiabstract or entirely abstract manner, or even shifted back and forth from one style to another… When sculpting the female figure, they typically adapted traditional ways of treating the time-honored subject to their individual concerns or rejected them altogether. The article develops this theme with Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Gaston Lachaise, Pablo Picasso and Bernard Reder.
On February 15, 1927, twenty-five members of the National Sculpture Society convened to discuss, among other orders of business, the election of new associate members. Of the three accepted, twenty-three-year-old Isamu Noguchi would emerge as one of the twentieth-century’s great abstract sculptors and designers.
“Model Behavior” – Michael Rees’s October 2009 exhibition titled, “Model Behavior,” at the Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston, Texas, allows us to ponder, especially given the theme of this Sculpture Review issue, whether or not the opposing poles of “figurative” and “abstract” are still valid for sculptural criticism.