and had a major impact on painting.
A number of political regimes utilised the classical style to garner public support. This was hardly a new practice, as a number of Italian Renaissance rulers had done the same. Such a practice linked the new regimes to a long-standing tradition that was enlightened, virtuous, steeped in democratic values, favourable to education, and stood at the apex of secular culture among world civilisations. The French revolutionaries immediately embraced the developing neoclassical style, and Napoleon continued to do so, linking himself to Roman imperial iconography. The American Revolution and its aftermath led to an adoption of classical reference to the Greek and Roman form of government, but the English themselves provided the background for this and had already incorporated the new classical ideas into their sculptural traditions and other art forms. Every country or regime, in somewhat nuanced versions, shared in this neoclassical style. Its international character of was the product of the exchange of artistic ideas and the mining of the same ancient sources.
Another international style, Romanticism, unfolded during the 19th century against a backdrop of growing industrialism, democracy and disillusionment by some with the results of those economic and political developments. The romantics explored the world of the irrational, the distant and the bizarre, and their art often appealed to those disenfranchised by the societal progress and change being experienced in Western culture. Some of this thinking continued later in the century and beyond, and one can argue that romanticism continued – and continues – to inform modern thinking and artistic solutions.
The late 19th century world of thought put forth a number of attempts to explain the world, and the recognition of the power of irrational or hidden forces, whether by Freud, Nietzsche, Jung or Marx, generated artistic manifestations. Paul Gauguin, who explored (and exploited) the stylistic and iconographic world of the South Pacific islands, is an example of this anti-bourgeois trend. Even before Darwin, the world of animals had great appeal among the romantics. Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species (1859), linked Homo sapiens to the animal world genealogically, and during his time and earlier one could read of the importance of animals and animals’ spirits in the works of Romantic poets and prose writers; animals were recognised as knowing and passionate, and their emotions linked to those of humans, a theme already explored by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Le Brun and other artists. The sculptures of Antoine-Louis Barye express this interest in the passions of the animal world, in a vivid trend also explored by painters such as George Stubbs, Eugène Delacroix, and Henri Rousseau.
The late 19th century was a time of great cultural and societal change, and some artists seemed to respond to this and produce an art as revolutionary as the new ideas in science, philosophy and psychology.
Auguste Rodin, for example, moved in the direction of modernism in the later 19th century, but many sculptors in different countries favoured a more studied, academic and traditional approach. Throughout Europe and America, traditional, academic sculpture found an admiring public, and many of these works still dominate their public sites, from the so-called Eros by Alfred Gilbert in London’s Piccadilly Circus, via Edvard Eriksen’s Little Mermaid in the harbour of Copenhagen, to New York’s Statue of Liberty by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (fig. 745). This last colossal work is a remarkable specimen of academic Classicism, produced at a time when even the less avant-garde American school was ready to explore a variety of manifestations of early modernism.
The 20th century was marked by a new subjectivity of thought, and old paradigms gave way to new. Einstein’s theory of relativity overthrew more static beliefs in physics. The atonalist musical composers overthrew the old common system of four hundred years and shifted aural attention away from the keynote and musical scale. Psychoanalytical thinkers continued to undermine confidence in conscious thought and reason.
Even economists introduced new ideas of subjectivity into economic thinking, and saw prices as the result of shifting sentiment of supply and demand rather than based in firm factors such as the costs of production.
All of this was part of a new mentality that saw a dynamic universe, and artists shared in this new vision. Cubism is the most obvious participant of this novel thinking, and the focus on fragmentation, changing viewpoint, and the re-assessment and re-evaluation of traditional artistic ideals continued to be widespread in the 20th century.
From the abstractions of Umberto Boccioni and Jacques Lipchitz to the work of David Smith and Donald Judd, there was a nearly unbroken line of shared modernist taste. Yet such modernism was not without opposition in the 20th century.
Indeed, even early in the century, in the midst of paradigm shift away from academic art and towards modernist solutions, the tragedy of World War I occurred, with tremendous loss of life bringing little change or advantage for either side. The war left a generation disillusioned, and the artistic movements of Dada and even Surrealism can be traced to this fall in confidence and darker vision. The value of modernism itself was questioned; a challenge that would continue to the end of the century in the work of the post-modernists, who found in Dada a spiritual forerunner.
The abstract features of modernist thinking were also challenged by the Pop Artists in the 1950s and 1960s, who used everyday objects (or facsimiles of them) to comment on, among other things, modern consumer society. Indeed, today’s sculpture often finds expression in the form of ephemera that are raised to the level of high art: the found object of the early 20th century is being renewed in the art of contemporary installations.
What is needed now is for architectural sculpture to return. Long banished by most modern architects, sculptural ornamentation has all but disappeared, to the detriment of society. The sense that form should follow function leaves little room for sculptural ornamentation, which had long been the jewel in the crown of architectural construction. Perhaps a new generation of architects will once again embrace the use of carved or moulded ornament as a means to convey a sense of grace, beauty and nobility.
Prehistory
1. Anonymous, The Venus of Willendorf, around 30,000–25,000 BCE. Palaeolithic. Limestone and red traces of polychrome, height: 11.1 cm. Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Discovered in 1908 in the town of Krems, Lower Austria, the Venus of Willendorf is a limestone statue dating from the Gravettian. It represents a standing nude woman with a steatopygous form. The head and the face, finely engraved, are completely covered and hidden by what appear to be coiled braids. Traces of pigment suggest that the original sculpture was painted in red. In fact, this statuette is the most famous example, and one of the oldest sculptures of the Palaeolithic, described by modern prehistorians as ‘Venus’. Indeed, the corpulence of her forms (breasts, buttocks, abdomen and thighs) can easily be equated to the symbols of fertility, the original feature of femininity, of which Venus has been the pure incarnation since antiquity. However, the interpretation of these works remains enigmatic and cannot really be verified. Some say the Venuses were elements of a religious cult, for others they were the ‘guardians of the home’ or, more simply, the expression of an ‘ideal of Palaeolithic beauty’.
Prehistory is defined as the period between the appearance of man (about three million years BCE) and the invention of writing (about 3000 BCE). A distinction is usually made between three main prehistoric periods: the Stone Age (split between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic), the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. As evidenced by their traces, each period has its specific features, including its own artistic point of view. The first few traces of creative activity found date from the Palaeolithic (about 3,000,000,000–300 BCE). Then it is essentially an artistic craft. Tools, for example, are cut with a regularity and a concern for symmetry more aesthetic than practical. However, it is only in the Upper Palaeolithic (40,000–10,000 BCE) that sculpture actually develops. It operates in conjunction with rock art, with which it has many similarities. Indeed, in painting as in sculpture, a true unity is found in both iconography and style, which raises
