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The summer of 1969 was a memorable summer for me as I lived in Paris and worked at the Chemical Bank Representative Office in the Place Vendome. It was a make work job for potential future bankers engineered for me by my father who seemed to know every major corporate CEO in New York City. I clearly didn't become a banker, but I did have a few fun tasks in my tenure at the bank. One of those was to visit all the museums in Paris to find slides of the art in each museum. I quickly realized that the museums did not have their own slides, the slides were generic--the same slides were at every museum. I chose not to mention this and, as I had a motorcycle, I could learn Paris while visiting museums--it was a wonderful time. And I have to say that it was sculpture that ended up intriguing me more than flat art and I lay the blame for that, at least partly, on the Nike of Samothrace which, before the Louvre changed its entrance, was on the left as you entered the building, centered and up a flight of stairs--it was a very powerful image. But, I can't not mention Brancusi's workshop in the basement. I had always loved his work and finding his actual studio was just so cool. And then there was the Rodin Museum--wonderful! The power of sculpture is not lost on me, maybe because it was the only thing I felt I could do reasonably well in art classes.
Rodin worked in bronze and it's a medium that has always intrigued me. I probably prefer stone and wood, but bronze sits well and can have an almost life like feel. A favorite sculpture for me is of a bronze horse in the Met by the Italian, Giambologna, made for a larger scale model of Cosimo I astride his horse. It is truly a wonderful item to behold. I am not as crazy about all Renaissance classical sculptures, the story behind the piece sometimes seems lost in the display of musculature and beards and breasts and what have you. But when it is right, it is sublime, rather like Rodin's "KIss". Stone sculpture has its own enticement for me. Sculpture that has lived outside has a unique patina that is very hard to fake, at least to the trained eye. Antiquity, the Nike is just one of many sculptures that are sensational, has endless examples of quite extraordinary work. Alexander the Great's tomb, although I am not so certain it actually is his, located in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, is an amazing art work. But I have to say that even a well formed limestone obelisk with great proportions is something wonderful. And, if you are like me, you know the Assyrian sculptures that are at the British Museum, let alone all the tablets that you can find at places like the Dartmouth Musuem, Yale, Williams and the Brooklyn Museum--they are all quite beautiful..
Wood, however, as you can tell by the ho-ho bird on this page, always grabs my attention. However, I will attest to the fact that there is a lot of bad wood sculpture out there. I sense that wood was not a medium for large scale sculpture in the Renaissance and even as late as 1850, as it wasn't considered as durable as stone or bronze. Many of the wood sculptures from the Renaissance are small--the German wood carvers of the 15th and 16th centuries are still considered some of the finest wood carvers ever, but these items were always small. Of course, renditions of putti, angels, the Holy Family, were all done in wood and often quite large and usually painted (not that it doesn't count as sculpture, of course) and more set pieces than artistic statements. Some carvers were better than others, without a doubt. Grinling Gibbons, who carved very few faces, changed the way wood carving was seen as he did what I would call ultra realistic work that was used as surrounds to frames or hung in churches. If you are on Piccadilly in central London, stop to see his work at Wren's St. Jame's Church. It is Brancusi, however, that seems to finally cross the line and bring wood into the realm of full fledged artistic sculpture and not just a material for models. (Tribal artists around the world were way ahead of Brancusi, but that is not western art.) His towering pillars chopped out of trees still resonate with me.
Sculpture does not have scale requirements, nor does it have to be of wood, bronze or stone. Porcelain, glass, gilded metal, concrete, steel, cloth and today a host of synthetic materials all serve as sculptural media. Fine art often takes the monetary prize in today's sales, but sculpture has indelible power. I think of Rodin's Gates of Hell in the Musee Rodin or Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise in Florence which can only be called extraordinary, let alone the late Frank Stella's enormous steel structures, which I am not a huge fan of but which still have great power. The tactile quality coupled with a sense of familiarity--and I would see that even the Nike in the Louvre has this quality--make sculpture memorable. And I do remember the first time I walked into the Rodin Museum--I can see it in my mind's eye to this day from fifty-five years ago. What a summer that was!
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