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 the same questions about the meaning of these mysterious representations. In prehistoric sculpture, there are two main types of figuration: human figures and animal representations, with the latter predominating. Most often seen are species in the environment of the artists, such as bison, aurochs, deer or horses. While the 19th-century researchers saw in these illustrations of the animal kingdom a magico-religious cult of hunting, we now know that the species represented are not necessarily those that were hunted. The anthropomorphic figurines, meanwhile, are far less numerous and are almost exclusively women. These are the famous Venus, so called by analogy with the Roman goddess of beauty and because the prehistory of the early 20th century saw in these statues a kind of feminine ideal. Almost 250 Venuses have been found, dating from 27,000 to 17,000 BCE, and from all over Europe. The most famous is The Venus of Willendorf (fig. 1), found at Krems in Austria, and the Lady with the Hood of Brassempouy (fig. 12), discovered in the Landes, which is one of the earliest realistic representations of a human face. Many interpretations have been advanced to define the exact role of the Venuses, whose rounded shapes evoke those of pregnant women. Were these goddesses part of a religious cult or just symbols of motherhood, reflections of a matriarchal society? The contrast between the female statuettes and animal figurines is striking. Fauna are made with great attention to detail and a deep attention to detail, revealing a close observation of the animal world. In contrast, the curves suggest a caricature of women exaggerated to suggest fertility, which is exacerbated by the extreme stylisation of their faces, usually non-existent.
A particular case in prehistoric sculpture was revealed by the discovery of two figurines, The Lion Man (fig. 3), with similar characteristics to some paintings of ‘witches’, found in the cave of Altamira, Spain, or one of the Trois Frères caves in Ariège. These sculptures, which are formed as a body topped with a lion’s head, are among the oldest known to date (they are estimated at 32,000 BCE), and are an enigma to researchers: are they the remnant of one of the first deities created by man? Is this a ritual costume dedicated to shamanic practices? Finally, there is megalithic art in the same style as in figurative art furniture. Dolmens and menhirs – prehistoric megalithic stones erected by the great ancestors for religious purposes, often sepulchral, between the fifth and sixth millennium BCE – are among the earliest monuments of Europe. They are a preferred medium of artistic expression: there are a large number of dolmens adorned with intricate carvings, including at Newgrange in Ireland. Some are carved to suggest a human form: breasts and rows of necklaces are shown in the block of stone, related to a real statue. The late Neolithic period also saw the emergence of ‘statue menhirs’: megaliths carved in the round with engravings, often very advanced, evidence of the association in men of prehistoric art with the sacred. The subjects represented are almost exclusively zoomorphic and anthropomorphic. However, this restricted theme meets an extraordinary diversity in the techniques and materials used. Etching, bas-relief, round: from 32,000 BCE, man mastered the art of sculpture. Although the statuettes are mainly clay, sandstone, limestone, bone or wood, raw materials that are readily available, the use of rare media, such as ivory, jasper and dyes shows a real aesthetic. Thus, at Swanscombe, England, palaeontologists have discovered a series of bifaces almost 200,000 years old, which already have a very special artistic interest. These tools are in fact carved from stones containing fossils of bivalves and sea urchins that have been respected and saved by the author of these artefacts. A shift in the artistic vocation of prehistoric art furniture can also be observed. From the Middle Palaeolithic, the artists are no longer content to carve and engrave their tools (spears, axes, propellants, etc.). We can begin to recognise the first purely aesthetic works, which are devoid of any functional role, including