The Age of Bronze
‘There is a sense in which all art is of the body’ (1) We are now able to talk about bronze sculpture as more than the art of things or as something bound to appearances. Here is a form which can lay claim to a distinct and sustaining language, with a vocabulary made particular through time. Bronze sculpture of classical antiquity had reached a high level of perfection only to languish in the middle Ages. It was not until the fifteenth century in Renaissance Italy, that we see a rebirth of the ideals and methods of the classical bronze. These antecedents have much to tell us about sculpture in the nineteenth – century but it is perhaps not until Auguste Rodin (1840 -1917) and Edgar Degas (1834 -1917) - almost exact contemporaries - that we begin to see the advent of modern sculpture. Whilst Rodin’s Age of Bronze (1877) achieved great fame for the sculptor, Degas, already a noted painter, was to begin on a path of sculpture that although curious in its private nature, now seems the template for much modern figure sculpture. The poet Rilke, feeling the momentum of this new sculpture wrote: ‘This distinguishing characteristic of things, complete self – absorption, was what gave to plastic art its calm; it must have no desire nor expectation beyond itself, nor bear any reference to what lies beyond, nor be aware of anything outside itself. Its surroundings must be found within it.’ (2) At once sculptors seemed liberated to pursue ideas beyond representation and to take as sculpture’s subject what we now know as modernist ideals: the internal life of an object, the culture of materials, space; the formal attributes of sculpture such as structure, mass and gravity. These rather set but durable qualities are central to the exhibition, Sculpture and the Figure. They are the legacy from which sculptors of the twentieth century were able to draw and are also those that still inform sculptors working today. Most all of the sculpture in the exhibition is cast in bronze with some exception – the ceramic figure - urns of Garry Shead, a glass breast by Kiki Smith, an Ana Maria Pacheco carved and painted wooden head – and is complemented by works on paper by Giacometti, Picasso, Frink and Moore. Thematically, the exhibition is tied by a preoccupation with the figure, either in full expression or thereof in part – the head or torso. The Degas sculpture, Arabesque over right leg, left arm in front, is the centrepiece of our exhibition. Cast in 1917, the dancing figure epitomises many of the issues that concern this catalogue and sums up, in concise form, the aspirations of any sculptor working with the figure. Here the issues are of volume and how that may be structured in the figure, and no less gravity, because gravity is perhaps central to all modern sculpture. Much has been written about the sculpture of Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick and Elizabeth Frink. They are the great names of twentieth century British sculpture and what they share with others of their generation – Armitage, Butler, Meadows - is a primacy of form and a restless anxiety; to model and to carve the serious expression of the whole body. This quality of ‘humanness’, common to all these sculptors, is what gives their sculpture its particular heft, and it is the note which still sounds today, appropriately dissonant in a world of figures, hurly – burly at war, or hard at making money. The strong sense of containment in the sculpture of Moore and Chadwick is what Barry Martin referred to, in 1977, as ‘sense of touch’ sculpture, that which links hand and eye to living form. ‘Sculpture was thought as being physically contained and the definition of containment was closely linked to the physical properties of the human figure.’ (3) The process of working in plaster and casting in bronze, informed the sculpture of Australian artist Lyndon Dadswell (1908 – 1986). Dadswell, the first sculptor to be appointed an official war artist, also made singular non – allegorical figures. We are fortunate to include two in our exhibition: The Reclining Lady c.1949 which bares a strong trace of the Benvenuto Cellini (1500 -71) figure, A Reclining Woman, held in the Ashmolean Museum and the effulgent, The Fat Lady c.1939. They both make clear Dadswell’s concern with adding weight and gravitas to a figure, but it is The Fat Lady whose form sings the greater. Already voluminous, she seems to grow as we go about her, each plane of her body expanding to suggest monumental form. An emphasis on the partial figure and abstraction is the subject of William Tucker’s head, Little Jeanne, 1997. The sculpture makes reference to Matisse’s 1910 – 11, ‘Jeannette’ series of five heads, but succeeds not by its outward appearance, because in look, it is neither head nor portrait. What Tucker wants to do is to forego recognition for a more internal quality, where the connection is made within the body. Michael Zavros is already an established painter / drawer who has turned to sculpture with startling effect. His bronze horse, The Waiting One 2006 - prone and in foal - is a clever subversion of the equine bronze. She, in her vulnerability, carries none of the aspiration of equestrian sculpture, or the frisson and lightness of Degas, when modelling the horse. Zavros has said himself: ‘…she is not a famous or mythical horse, she is nameless and humble. I am quite interested in the humility of her pose, using bronze, this grand material to render an almost spiritual moment.’ (4) Realism in sculpture is also the starting point for the painted bronze figures of Sean Henry. It is Henry’s fine sense of drawing which propels his modelling of figures, from small, to over life - size. They are compelling in their likeness to ordinary people and although modelled on someone, they have a universal quality; achieved by a familiarity with types of people, those whom we know through habitation of place and through common sentiment. It is their streets and thoughts we share. Brett Ballard, 2006 Footnotes
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