CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was the first sculptor to challenge successfully the classic authority. Taking nature, not tradition for his guide he created a purely naturalistic sculpture, almost wholly free from architectonic form. Not structure, nor abstract harmonies of mass, are emphasized in his work, but rather the natural loveliness of flesh, in the rendering of which he recalls Praxiteles and the Hellenistic masters. This realism he used as a medium for narrative and for the expression of sentiment. His sculptures are a series of pictures in which characterization and action, ideas and romance, not form, are the things insisted upon. To attain these, he eventually sacrificed even his realism, develop ing an impressionistic style which permits a distortion of nature and an elimination for the sake of emphasis far in excess of that permitted by the classic canon.
The Kiss, in the Musee Rodin, Paris, is a characteristic work, illustrating not only the natural proportions and treatment of the body which Rodin substituted for the classic canon, but also the sensuality and formlessness, the romantic and subjective quality, of Rodin's art. The Victor Hugo in the garden of the Palais Royal, the Thinker, in the front of the Pantheon, Paris, are also among his best works.
The influence of Rodin was paramount in the art of sculpture until after the period of the World War and remains perhaps the most important element in contemporary work. Everywhere it has sanctioned a popular realism, encouraged a subjective and indi vidualistic development, and tended to destroy not only the authority of tradition but to prevent the growth of any new continuity in sculptural development.
Max Klinger (1857-1890) is an example of the extreme indi vidualist in sculpture. A literary and even mystic interpretation is required by his pictorial and formless works, among which the Beethoven of the Leipzig Museum is perhaps the best known. Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), a Belgian sculptor, is more directly influenced by the pictorial romanticism of Millet; his realism, his admirable technique, his impressionism, are informed with democratic sentiment. Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) an Italian, and Paul Troubetskoi, a Russian (1866-1938), were among other members of the pictorial and emotional school of Rodin. George Grey Barnard (1863-1938) belonged also to this school. An artist of great originality and force, he was like Rodin in his realism, in his love of symbolic and moral values in form, and in his impressionistic technique. He was, like Rodin, not untouched by
Baroque tendencies. His Great God Pan, on the campus of Colum bia University and his Hewer in the Brooklyn Art Institute, are among the fine achievements of American sculpture. Other Ameri can artists distinguished in their field are: Paul Bartlett (1865 1925), Gutzon Borglum (1867– ), Charles Grafly (1862 1929), Paul vIanship (1885– ), James E. Fraser (1876– ), Edward McCartan (1878– ), Mahonri Young (1877– ), Leo Lentelli (1879– ), and Malvina Hoffman (1887– ). Before the death of Rodin a reaction against his art had com menced. The realistic and interpretive art of the great romanticist had ignored those architectonic qualities that had ennobled sculp ture in its greatest periods. To recapture these qualities without again subjecting sculpture to the deadening influence of formulae —to free sculpture from symbol and picture and restore it as a form-giving art—has become, in our time, the aim of an in creasing number of artists.
Among these, Aristide Maillol (1861– ), Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), Joseph Bernard (1866-1931), and Charles Despiau (1874– ), are most prominent. All pupils of Rodin, they retain in their work much of Rodin's worship of nature and vigour of technique; but, unlike Rodin, they do not use natural forms as a medium for emotion or thought. Nature, rather, is the basis from which they build up a design of plastic and harmonious forms. Bourdelle had the greatest range of imagination and achieved in his best work a superb vitality combined with an impressive solidity and breadth of treatment : his Herakles, in the Luxembourg, is as charged with arrested energy as the bow he bends and yet is designed with the most studied care for balance of masses and for plastic rhythm. Maillol, who has had the greatest influence of any sculptor since Rodin, arranges figures of great natural loveliness into compositions that attain the serenity of Hellenic art: in his Monument to Cezanne, for example, which contrasts strangely with Bourdelle's Herakles, being wholly with out strain or effort, nature and design reach an almost perfect equilibrium. Despiau excels in portraiture, producing busts that have an arranged and exquisite naturalism. Bernard, whose work embodies most directly the essential characteristics of modern art, is at his best in such decorative works as the Femme et En fant Dansant, in the Luxembourg, in which forms derived from life are simplified and woven into a rhythmic pattern.