Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, beginning in Paris around 1909 with its proto-Cubist phase, and evolving through the early 1920s. Just as Cubist painting, Cubist sculpture is rooted in Paul Cézanne's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids; cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Presenting fragments and facets of objects that could be visually interpreted in different ways had the effect of 'revealing the structure' of the object. Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.
History
In the historical analysis of most modern movements such as Cubism there has been a tendency to suggest that sculpture trailed behind painting. Writings about individual sculptors within the Cubist movement are commonly found, while writings about Cubist sculpture are premised on painting, offering sculpture nothing more than a supporting role.
We are better advised, writes Penelope Curtis, "to look at what is sculptural within Cubism. Cubist painting is an almost sculptural translation of the external world; its associated sculpture translates Cubist painting back into a semi-reality". Attempts to separate painting and sculpture, even by 1910, are very difficult. "If painters used sculpture for their own ends, so sculptors exploited the new freedom too", writes Curtis, "and we should look at what sculptors took from the discourse of painting and why. In the longer term we could read such developments as the beginning of a process in which sculpture expands, poaching painting's territory and then others, to become steadily more prominent in this century".
Increasingly, painters claim sculptural means of problem solving for their paintings. Braque's paper sculptures of 1911, for example, were intended to clarify and enrich his pictorial idiom. "This has meant" according to Curtis, "that we have tended to see sculpture through painting, and even to see painters as poaching sculpture. This is largely because we read Gauguin, Degas, Matisse, and Picasso as painters even when looking at their sculpture, but also because their sculptures often deserve to be spoken of as much as paintings as sculptures".
A painting is meant both to capture the palpable three-dimensionality of the world revealed to the retina, and to draw attention to itself as a two-dimensional object, so that it is both a depiction and an object in itself.Christopher Green, 2009, Cubism, Origins and application of the term, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press Such is the case for Picasso's 1909-10 Head of a Woman (Head of Fernande), often considered the first Cubist sculpture.Grace Glueck, Picasso Revolutionized Sculpture Too, NY Times, exhibition review 1982 Retrieved July 20, 2010 Yet Head of a Woman, writes Curtis, "had mainly revealed how Cubism was more interesting in Painting—where it showed in two dimensions how to represent three dimensions—than in sculpture". Picasso's Head of a Woman was less adventurous than his painting of 1909 and subsequent years.
Though it is difficult to define what can properly be called a 'Cubist sculpture', Picasso's 1909-10 Head bears the hallmarks of early Cubism in that the various surfaces constituting the face and hair are broken down into irregular fragments that meet at sharp angles, rendering practically unreadable the basic volume of the head beneath. These facets are obviously a translation from two to three dimensions of the broken planes of Picasso's 1909-10 paintings.
According to the art historian Douglas Cooper, "The first true Cubist sculpture was Picasso's impressive Woman's Head, modeled in 1909-10, a counterpart in three dimensions to many similar analytical and faceted heads in his paintings at the time."
It has been suggested that in contrast to Cubist painters, Cubist sculptors did not create a new art of 'space-time'. Unlike a flat painting, high-relief sculpture from its volumetric nature could never be limited to a single view-point. Hence, as Peter Collins highlights, it is absurd to state that Cubist sculpture, like painting, was not limited to a single point of view.
The concept of Cubist sculpture may seem "paradoxical", writes George Heard Hamilton, "because the fundamental Cubist situation was the representation on a two-dimensional surface of a multi-dimensional space at least theoretically impossible to see or to represent in the three dimensions of actual space, the temptation to move from a pictorial diagram to its spatial realization proved irresistible".
Now liberated from the one-to-one relationship between a fixed coordinate in space captured at a single moment in time assumed by classical vanishing-point perspective, the Cubist sculptor, just as the painter, became free to explore notions of simultaneity, whereby several positions in space captured at successive time intervals could be depicted within the bounds of a single three-dimensional work of art.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001
Of course, 'simultaneity' and 'multiple perspective' were not the only characteristics of Cubism. In Du "Cubisme" the painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger write:
"Some, and they are not the least intelligent, see the aim of our technique in the exclusive study of volumes. If they were to add that it suffices, surfaces being the limits of volumes and lines those of surfaces, to imitate a contour in order to represent a volume, we might agree with them; but they are thinking only of the sensation of relief, which we hold to be insufficient. We are neither geometers nor sculptors: for us lines, surfaces, and volumes are only modifications of the notion of fullness. To imitate volumes only would be to deny these modifications for the benefit of a monotonous intensity. As well renounce at once our desire for variety. Between reliefs indicated sculpturally we must contrive to hint at those lesser features which are suggested but not defined."Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du "Cubisme", Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912 (First English edition: Cubism, Unwin, London, 1913. In Robert L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
More astonishing still, writes John Adkins Richardson, "is the fact that the artists participating in the [Cubist] movement not only created a revolution, they surpassed it, going on to create other styles of an incredible range and dissimilarity, and even devised new forms and techniques in sculpture and ceramic arts".John Adkins Richardson, Modern Art and Scientific Thought, Chapter Five, Cubism and Logic, University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 104-127
"Cubists sculpture", writes Douglas Cooper, "must be discussed apart from the painting because it followed other paths, which were sometimes similar but never parallel".
"But not infrequently the sculptor and the painter upset the equilibrium of the work of others by doing things which are out of key or out of proportion." (Arthur Jerome Eddy)Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1914, second edition 1919
The use of diverging vantage-points for representing the features of objects or subject matter became a central factor in the practice of all Cubists, leading to the assertion, as noted by the art historian Christopher Green, "that Cubist art was essentially conceptual rather than perceptual". Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes in their 1912 writing, along with the writings by the critic Maurice Raynal, were most responsible for the emphasis given to this claim. Raynal argued, echoing Metzinger and Gleizes, that the rejection of classical perspective in favor of multiplicity represented a break with the 'instantaneity' that characterized Impressionism. The mind now directed the optical exploration of the world. Painting and sculpture no longer merely recorded sensations generated through the eye; but resulted from the intelligence of both artist and observer. This was a mobile and dynamic investigation that explored multiple facets of the world.Alexandre Thibault, La durée picturale chez les cubistes et futuristes comme conception du monde : suggestion d'une parenté avec le problème de la temporalité en philosophie, Faculté des Lettres Université Laval, Québec, 2006
Proto-Cubist sculpture
The origins of Cubist sculpture are as diverse as the origins of Cubist painting, resulting from a wide range of influences, experiments and circumstances, rather than from one source. With its roots stemming as far back as ancient Egypt, Greece and Africa, the proto-Cubist period (englobing both painting and sculpture) is characterized by the geometrization of form. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase, in three-dimensional form, of an art movement known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
The influences that characterize the transition from classical to modern sculpture range from diverse artistic movements (Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Les Nabis and Neo-Impressionism), to the works of individual artists such as Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Despiau, Constantin Meunier, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin (among others), to African art, Egyptian art, Ancient Greek art, Oceanic art, Native American art, and Iberian schematic art.
Before the advent of Cubism artists had questioned the treatment of form inherent in art since the Renaissance. Eugène Delacroix the romanticist, Gustave Courbet the realist, and virtually all the Impressionists had jettisoned Classicism in favor of immediate sensation. The dynamic expression favored by these artists presented a challenge to the static traditional means of expression.Alex Mittelmann, State of the Modern Art World, The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time, 2011
In his 1914 Cubists and Post-Impressionism Arthur Jerome Eddy makes reference to Auguste Rodin and his relation to both Post-Impressionism and Cubism:
The truth is there is more of Cubism in great painting than we dream, and the extravagances of the Cubists may serve to open our eyes to beauties we have always felt without quite understanding.
Take, for instance, the strongest things by Winslow Homer; the strength lies in the big, elemental manner in which the artist rendered his impressions in lines and masses which departed widely from photographic reproductions of scenes and people.
Rodin's bronzes exhibit these same elemental qualities, qualities which are pushed to violent extremes in Cubist sculpture. But may it not be profoundly true that these very extremes, these very extravagances, by causing us to blink and rub our eyes, end in a finer understanding and appreciation of such work as Rodin's?
His Balzac is, in a profound sense, his most colossal work, and at the same time his most elemental. In its simplicity, in its use of planes and masses, it is—one might say, solely for purposes of illustration—Cubist, with none of the extravagances of Cubism. It is purely Post-Impressionistic.