Like Life. Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now). (original) (raw)
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Convenors: Claire Jones, University of Birmingham and Imogen Hart, University of California, Berkeley. The history of sculpture has largely been written with an emphasis on free-standing, monumental, figurative, single-authored works created by named sculptors, primarily in bronze, marble and plaster. Decorative arts scholarship has been predominantly concerned with works created by named manufacturers, and with the impact of industrialisation on craft and related issues around mass production, taste, labour and commerce. Yet cross-fertilisations between sculpture and the decorative have played a vital role in the formal practices and aesthetics of art production, bringing sculptors into contact with diverse makers, materials, techniques, forms, colours, ornament, scales, styles, patrons, audiences and subject matter, to produce composite, multi-material, quasi-functional and multi-authored objects. This session will explore the decorative as a historically fertile, parallel and contested field of sculptural production. We invite proposals that address affinities between sculpture and the decorative in any culture or period from the Middle Ages to the present day, and which explore the cross-disciplinary connections between the institutional, biographical, conceptual, visual, material and professional histories of the two fields. Topics might include artistic autonomy and creativity; the fragment and the composite work; figuration and relief; the hierarchy of the arts; copyright and authorship; originality and reproduction; and the languages and histories of making and materials. We also welcome papers that examine sculpture and the decorative in relation to the racialization, nationalisation and gendering of the practices of art, craft and manufacturing. Click here to download a .pdf of this session's paper abstracts Martina Droth (Yale Center for British Art) Common Grounds of Making: Modelling for sculpture and decorative art in 19th-century Britain Amy F Ogata (University of Southern California) Aluminium Orfèvrerie and Second Empire France Margit Thøfner (University of East Anglia) Resonant Tendrils and Furtive Grimaces: The role of ornament in Abel Schrøder’s altarpiece for the church of Skt Morten, Næstved Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Beethoven’s Farewell: Klinger’s Beethoven-Denkmal ’in the claws of the Secession’ Conor Lucey (Trinity College Dublin) 18th-Century Property Speculation and the Sculptural Interior Anna Ferrari (Victoria and Albert Museum) Beyond the Studio in Interwar Paris: Henri Laurens with Robert Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier and Jean-Michel Frank Nina Lübbren (Anglia Ruskin University) Renée Sintenis, Milly Steger and German Sculpture, 1910–33 Angela Hesson (University of Melbourne/National Gallery of Victoria) Sirens on the Sideboard: Fantasy and function in Art Nouveau
Looking at Colour on post-Antique Sculpture
2011
As Alex Potts points out in his essay, ‘Colors of Sculpture’, ‘all sculpture is colored, in a literal sense’.1 Yet, despite the fact that the addition of colour to objects as well as its presence as an inescapable fact of sculptural media makes imperative its inclusion in any consideration of sculptors’ intentions and the meaning of their work, Amanda Claridge is right to note in her review,2 that polychromed sculpture has been given short shrift in the post-enlightenment settlement. The ideal of monochrome sculpture, often associated primarily with Winckelmann, was first articulated with real philosophical force by Johann Gottfried Herder and held such sway throughout the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, more importantly, throughout the formative years of art history as a discipline, that polychromy was largely removed from the discussion and the predominance in sculptural taste and scholarship of form over colour was seldom deemed worthy of comment. Although the colo...
Material, Medium, and Sculptural Imagining
Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches, 2020
In what follows I discuss a limit that is commonly attributed to certain forms of gurative sculpture. It is one that, for example, Kant characterizes in his Critique of Judgement. There, he wisely observes that in pictures or descriptions, one can offer a beautiful representation of things-the Furies, diseases, devastations of war-that themselves are assuredly not beautiful. But perhaps not so wisely, Kant denies that sculptural depictions enjoy such an aesthetic independence from the things in the world they portray. In a sculpture, he writes, "art is almost confused with nature," and thus, it must con ne its direct representation to only beautiful things. It is a limit that Baudelaire complains of in his review of the 1846 Salon, under a section with the snarky title, "Why Sculpture is Boring." There the poet suggests that, whereas painting and literature can elicit thoughts of abstract ideas, absent objects, and fantastical states of affairs, sculpture cannot provide an experience whose content excludes an awareness of the work as an ordinary object in our environment, "as brutal and positive as nature herself." 2 Later, Walter Pater takes up the charge, asserting that sculpture suffers from a "tendency to a hard re-alism…[a]gainst this tendency to hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles." 3 Rephrased in the deprecatory ontology proposed by the painter Ad Reinhardt, "sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting." 4 These invidious comparisons among the arts echo the standard charge against sculpture made in Renaissance notions of the paragone: that its powers of representation are much weaker than those of painting because it cannot depart from the actual shape of what it depicts. Hence, in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Pliny's story of the adolescent boy's libidinous reaction to Praxilites' statue of Aphrodite while locked in her shrine overnight, explanations of how viewers of a sculpture could respond to it-a mere object-with real emotions or desires, proposed that they confuse the artwork with the actual thing in the world it only represents. 5
The Deceptive Surface: Perception and Sculpture’s “Skin”
In the eighteenth century, sculptors such as Antonio Canova often experimented with polychromy, using wax or grind water to subtly tint their figures’ flesh. In this article, I examine viewers’ discomfort with these surface treatments. I argue that viewers reacted negatively to the colored surface of works such as Hebe and Penitent Magdalene because they found it to be deceptive. First, encaustic treatments mellowed the marble surface, giving modern works the appearance of antiquities. Second, the “reality effect” created by color threatened sculpture’s status as high art. Finally, hyper-realism also suggested that the sculpture’s surface was exactly that—that is to say, only a surface, a shell that contained the messy reality of the body. The polychrome surface therefore oscillated between ancient and modern, flesh and stone, penetrable and impenetrable and raised larger aesthetic, philosophical and scientific issues.
'The importance of colour on ancient marble sculpture'
This article explores the significance of paint and pigment traces for understanding the aesthetics and artistic composition of ancient marble architectural and statuary sculpture. It complements the pioneering technical and reconstructive work that has recently been carried out into classical polychrome sculpture by approaching the subject from the perspective of the cultural history of colour and perception in the ancient world. The study concentrates in particular on the art of imperial Rome, which at the present time is under-represented in the field. By integrating visual material with literary evidence, it first reviews some of the most important pieces of sculpture on which paint traces have survived and then assesses the significance of sculptural polychromy under four headings: visibility, finish, realism and trompe-l'oeil. Finally, it considers some of the ways in which polychromy can enrich our understanding and interpretation of the Prima Porta statue of Augustus.
Journal of Art Historiography, 2011
The polychromy of medieval sculpture in Northern Europe is addressed in five of the articles in Circumlitio, which together form an important part of the editors’ project to bring the study of the coloured surfaces of sculpture out of the realm of technical reports and into the mainstream of sculptural scholarship. The five articles comprise surveys of techniques and materials (Harald Theiss) and of the field in general (Stefan Roller), and case studies of a major monument, Sluter’s Well of Moses at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Susie Nash), the raw material of the dyestuff madder (Dieter Köcher) and the reconstruction of the polychromed surface of a fourteenth century St George at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum,in Nuremberg (Arnulf von Ulmann). In his review, the author discusses some of the historiography of polychromy, examining in particular the treatment of Italian sculpture, whose study is not the focus of Circumlitio, giving context to the essays at hand within the wider field.