Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [127]
To discover evocative forms, Moore studied artifacts like Anglo-Saxon, Sumerian, and pre-Columbian objects as well as nature. He aimed not for beauty but power of expression. “Truth to the material” was another principle. Whether he worked in wood, stone, or bronze, Moore respected his medium. His figures seem to emerge out of their materials, his designs harmonized with natural textures and streaks.
Moore, “Reclining Mother and Child,” 1960-61, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Moore did stylized single and grouped figures with characteristic hollows.
CALDER: DEFYING GRAVITY. “The least one can expect of sculpture,” Dalí said, “is that it stand still.” American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) disagreed and invented a new art form: sculpture in motion. Dubuffet named Calder’s floating sculpture “mobiles.”
Calder got the idea when he visited Mondrian’s studio and admired the colored rectangles covering the walls. He wanted to make, he said, “moving Mondrians.” In 1932 Calder succeeded by suspending discs of sheet metal painted black, white, and primary colors from wires and rods. Since the barest wind set them dancing, the result was a constantly shifting set of shapes that Calder called “four-dimensional drawings.” In “Lobster Trap and Fish Tale,” the forms swim in space, realigning themselves with the slightest breath of air. In 1953 Calder invented what Jean Arp dubbed “stabiles,” or nonmoving steel structures whose intersecting planes spring from the ground on tiny points.
Calder intended his work to delight and surprise. While sculpture was traditionally heavy and massive, his was airy and open. He was as unpredictable as his work. A friend once discovered him working in his studio with a clothespin and piece of cotton clamped on his nose because he had a cold and wouldn’t stop to wipe. When asked by an earnest visitor how he knew that a piece was finished, “When the dinner bell rings,” was Calder’s reply.
Calder, “Lobster Trap and Fish Tale,” 1939, MoMA, NY. Calder knocked sculpture off its feet by inventing the mobile, which combines spontaneity and playfulness.
SMITH: MAN OF STEEL. The most important sculptor associated with the New York School was David Smith (1906-65). “When I begin a sculpture I am not always sure how it is going to end,” he said. Smith invited chance and surprise to enter the process of creation, believing that sculpture should pose a question, not offer a solution.
“Now steel, that’s a natural thing for me,” Smith, the descendant of a blacksmith, admitted. He called his work site Terminal Iron Works because it was more a machine shop than an artist’s studio. Smith learned his craft on a Studebaker auto assembly line where he picked up welding and riveting skills. Untrained in sculpture, he fused machined metal parts into open, linear designs. Smith is best known for his Cubi series of balanced stainless steel cubes and cylinders. Cantilevered into space, the squares and rectangles seem momentarily poised but on the brink of collapse. Although semiabstract, they often suggest the human form. After Smith’s death in a car crash, his friend Robert Motherwell eulogized him, “Oh David, you were as delicate as Vivaldi and as strong as a Mack truck.”
Smith, “Cubi X,” 1963, MoMA, NY.
Smith was among the first to use welding in sculpting his geometric compositions.
BOURGEOIS: THE LONELY CROWD. While Calder and Smith pioneered new forms in metal, French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois (b. 1912) did ground-breaking work in carved wood. Her first exhibition in 1949 included constructions of six-foot-tall wooden posts that were thin like asparagus. She clustered several tapering columns together and often painted them black because, she said, “the world is in mourning.”
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