sculpture - Materials of sculpture

Traditionally, modelling in a soft material such as clay or wax, the result sometimes being cast in metal, or carving from some hard material such as stone or wood. In the 20th-c there was much work done by joining together prefabricated pieces, a technique known as assemblage. Early Greek bronzes were cast from wooden models, using the lost wax process, but most Renaissance and modern bronzes are cast from clay originals. An alternative process involves firing the clay model in a kiln, to produce a terracotta. Stone carving has been characterized by its greatest practitioners, notably Michelangelo, as a process of releasing from the block a formal idea conceived by the artist as already existing in the stone. Tools include saws, a variety of chisels, drills, and - for finishing - rasps and abrasives. Throughout history and in all cultures, sculpture has been coloured, but since the Renaissance the preference has been for displaying the natural surface of the material used. Marble, the most prestigious stone, has normally been given a high polish.

Portions of the summary below have been contributed by Wikipedia.

Materials of sculpture

Materials of sculpture through history

Throughout most of history, the purpose of creating sculpture has been to produce works of art that are as permanent as is possible, so to that end works were usually produced in durable and frequently expensive materials, primarily bronze and stone such as marble, limestone, porphyry, and granite. Andy Goldsworthy is notable as a sculptor for his use of almost entirely natural materials in natural settings and for creating sculptures much more ephemeral than is typical. Joan Miró proposed that sculptures might be made of gases, see gas sculpture.

Asian

India

The first sculptures in India date back to the Indus Valley civilization, where stone and bronze carvings have been discovered.

During the 2nd to 1st century BCE in far northern India, in what is now southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, sculptures became more explicit, representing episodes of the Buddha’s life and teachings.

The pink sandstone sculptures of Mathura evolved during the Gupta period (4th to 6th century) to reach a very high fineness of execution and delicacy in the modeling. Newer sculptures in Afghanistan, in stucco, schist or clay, display very strong blending of Indian post-Gupta mannerism and Classical influence, Hellenistic or possibly even Greco-Roman. Meanwhile, elsewhere in India, less anatomically accurate styles of human representation evolved, leading to the classical art that the world is now familiar with, and contributing to Buddhist and Hindu sculpture throughout Asia.

China

Chinese artifacts date back as early as 10,000 BC -- and skilled, Chinese artisans have been active up to the present time -- but the bulk of what is displayed as sculpture in Euro-culture museums come from a few, select, historical periods.

The first Buddhist sculpture is found dating from the Three Kingdoms period (third century) , while the sculpture of the Longmen Grottoes (Wei dynasty, 5th and 6th century, located near Luoyang, Henan Province) has been widely recognized for its special elegant qualities. Considered especially desirable, and even profound, was the Buddhist sculpture, often monumental, begun in the Sui Dynasty, inspired by the Indian art of the Gupta period, and many are considered treasures of world art. Chinese sculpture has no nudes --other perhaps than figures made for medical training or practice -- and very little portraiture compared with the European tradition.

Almost nothing, other than jewelry, jade, or pottery is collected by art museums after the Ming Dynasty ended in the late 17th century -- and absolutely nothing has yet been recognized as sculpture from the tumultuous 20th century, although there was a school of Soviet-influenced social realist sculpture in the early decades of the Communist regime, and as the century turned, Chinese craftsmen began to dominate commercial sculpture genres (the collector plates, figurines, toys, etc) and avant garde Chinese artists began to participate in the Euro-American enterprise of contemporary art.

Wine jar, Zhou Dynasty	Calvalryman, Chin Dynasty	Chimera (from a tomb) , Han Dynasty	tomb figure, Han Dynasty
Northern Wei Dynasty	Tang Dynasty	Tang Dynasty	Boddisatva, Tang Dynasty
Jade chalice, Ming Dynasty	Jar from Lushan, Tang Dynasty	Portrait of monk, 11th Century	doctors lady, mid-19th Century

Japan

Countless paints and sculpture were made, often under governmental sponsorship. During the Kofun period of the third century, clay sculptures called haniwa were erected outside tombs. Inside the Kondo at Horyu-ji is a Shaka Trinity (623), the historical Buddha flanked by two bodhisattvas and also the Guardian Kings of the Four Directions The wooden image ( 9th c.) of Shakyamuni, the "historic" Buddha, enshrined in a secondary building at the Muro-ji, is typical of the early Heian sculpture, with its ponderous body, covered by thick drapery folds carved in the hompa-shiki (rolling-wave) style, and its austere, withdrawn facial expression. The Kei school of sculptors, particularly Unkei, created a new, more realistic style of sculpture.

Africa

African art has an emphasis on Sculpture - African artists tend to favor three-dimensional artworks over two-dimensional works.

Egypt

United States

See also: Sculpture of the United States

The history of sculpture in the United States reflects the country's 18th century foundation in Roman republican civic values as well as Protestant Christianity. American sculpture of the mid to late 19th century was often classical, often romantic, but showed a special bent for a dramatic, narrative, almost journalistic realism. Public buildings of the first half of the 20th century often provided an architectural setting for sculpture, especially in relief. Beginning in the 1980s there was a swing back towards figurative public sculpture and by the year 2000 many of the new public pieces in the United States were figurative in design.

Europe

An overview of forms

Some common forms of sculpture are:

The bust, a representation of a person from the chest up. Free-standing sculpture, sculpture that is surrounded on all sides, except the base, by space. Jewellery Mobile (See also Calder's Stabiles.) Relief: sculpture still attached to a background, standing out from that ground in "High Relief" or "Low Relief" (bas relief) Site-Specific Art Statue

Perhaps the majority of public art is sculpture.

Greek-Roman-classical

See also Sculpture of Ancient Greece

Features unique to the European Classical tradition:

full figures: using the young, athletic male or full-bodied female nude portraits: showing signs of age and strong character use of classical costume and attributes of classical deities Concern for naturalism based on observation, often from live models.

Features that the European Classical tradition shares with many others:

characters present an attitude of distance and inner contentment details do not disrupt a sense of rhythm between solid volumes and the spaces that surround them pieces feel solid and larger than they really are ambient space feels sacred or timeless

The topic of Nudity

A Nude or 'unadorned' figure in Greek classical sculpture was a reference to the status or role of the depicted person, deity or other being. Subsequently, nudity in sculpture and painting has represented a form of ideal, be it innocence, openness or purity. Classic examples of this are the removal of penises from the Vatican collection of Greek sculpture and the addition of a fig leaf to a plaster cast of Michelangelo's sculpture of David for Queen Victoria's visit to the British Museum.

The topic of social status

Worldwide, sculptors are usually tradesmen whose work is unsigned. Sculpture was still a trade, but exceptional sculptors were recognized on a level with exceptional poets and painters. In the 19th century, sculpture also became a bourgeois/upper class avocation, as poetry and painting had been, and the classical work of women sculptors began to appear.

Gothic

Gothic sculpture evolved from the early stiff and elongated style, still partly Romanesque, into a spatial and naturalistic feel in the late 12th and early 13th century. 1145) are the earliest Gothic sculptures and were a revolution in style and the model for a generation of sculptors. Prior to this there had been no sculpture tradition in Ile-de-France—so sculptors were brought in from Burgundy. The Bamberg Cathedral had the largest assemblage of 13th century sculpture. In Italy there was still a Classical influence, but Gothic made inroads in the sculptures of pulpits such as the Pisa Baptistery pulpit (1269) and the Siena pulpit. Dutch-Burgundian sculptor Claus Sluter and the taste for naturalism signaled the beginning of the end of Gothic sculpture, evolving into the classicistic Renaissance style by the end of the 15th century.

Renaissance

Sculpture was also revived, in many cases before the other arts. Conceived fully in the round and independent of any architectural surroundings, it was the first major work of Renaissance sculpture.

Among the many sculptures of Michelangelo are those of David and the Pietà, as well as the Doni Virgin, Bacchus, Moses, Rachel, Orgetorix, and members of the Medici family.

Baroque

In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms— they spiralled around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the surrounding space. His first works were inspired by Hellenistic sculpture of ancient Greece and imperial Rome he could study in the new seat. One of his most famous works is Ecstasy of St Theresa

Neo-Classical

The sculpture examples they actually embraced were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures.

Modernism

Modern Classicism contrasted in many ways with the classical sculpture of the 19th Century which was characterized by commitments to naturalism (Antoine-Louis Barye) -- the melodramatic (François Rude) sentimentality (Jean Baptiste Carpeaux)-- or a kind of stately grandiosity (Lord Leighton) Several different directions in the classical tradition were taken as the century turned, but the study of the live model and the post-Renaissance tradition was still fundamental to them.

Classical training was rooted out of art education in Western Europe (and the Americas) by 1970 and the classical variants of the 20th Century were marginalized in the history of modernism.

By the year 2000, the European classical tradition maintains a wide appeal to viewers -especially tourists - and especially for the ancient, Renaissance, Baroque, and 19th century periods -- but awaits an educational tradition to revive its contemporary development.

Post-modernism

Post-modern sculpture occupies a broader field of activities than Modernist sculpture, as Rosalind Krauss has observed. Her idea of sculpture in the expanded field identified a series of oppositions that describe the various sculpture-like activities that are post-modern sculpture:

Site-Construction is the intersection of landscape and architecture Axiomatic Structures is the combination of architecture and not-architecture Marked sites is the combination of landscape and not-landscape Sculpture is the intersection of not-landscape and not-architecture

Krauss' concern was creating a theoretical explanation that could adequately fit the developments of Land art, Minimalist sculpture, and Site-specific art into the category of sculpture. To do this, her explanation created a series of oppositions around the work's relationship to its environment.

Contemporary genres

Some modern sculpture forms are now practiced outdoors, and often in full view of spectators, thus giving them kinship to performance art in the eyes of some. Ice sculpture is a form of sculpture that uses ice as the raw material. Kinetic sculptures are sculptures that are designed to move, which include Mobiles. Weightless Sculpture (in outer space) as a concept is created in 1985 by the Dutch artist Martin Sjardijn.

Other arts which can be regarded as sculptures include:

Costume Doll Floral design (Ikebana) Glass blowing Hologram Mask Pottery

Greenfield Products Pty Ltd v. Rover-Scott Bonnar Ltd (1990) 17 IPR 417 is authority for the proposition that for copyright or intellectual property rights purposes, a thing not intended to be a sculpture is not a sculpture. It is true, as was pointed out in the course of argument, that some modern sculptures consist of or include parts of machines, but that does not warrant the conclusion that all machines and parts thereof are properly called sculptures, and similar reasoning applies to moulds.

Though this seems contrary to some famous examples of sculpture, including Marcel Duchamp's 1917 sculpture consisting of a porcelain urinal lying on its back, titled Fountain, and Carl Andre's sculpture Equivalent III exhibited in the Tate Gallery in 1978, consisting of bricks stacked in a rectangle, this is not really the case since Duchamp and others were intending to produce works of art as opposed to the litigants in the lawsuit who were intending to produce riding lawn mowers.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/unrep4166.html