Contemporary Sculpture

Frank Dobson, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Eric Gill are the most notable exponents of modern sculpture in England. Dobson's work, like Maillol's, is usually severely architectural and most satisfying in the formal values it achieves. Gaudier, who was killed in the World War, was a sensitive and original artist of the highest endowments. Gill is less brilliant, but a splendid tech nician. In Germany, George Kolbe's work exhibits a most inter esting and promising synthesis of movement and formal harmonies; and in Spain, Mateo Hernandez (1897– ) creates from the carefully-observed forms of animals, translated into diorite, living designs that attain a simple and elegant formalism.

The Balkan sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic (1883– ) is perhaps the most virile and original sculptor outside of France and is one of the few contemporary artists wholly free from French influence; his sculptures, full of racial rather than personal significance, have a feeling for materials and for architecture like that revealed in archaic Greek sculpture.

In recent years the reaction from Rodin's representational art has gone so far as to create a sculpture in which descriptive mod elling is almost entirely eliminated. In order to attain an intense aesthetic expressiveness, the simplification of mass and the elimination of detail are carried so far that sculpture tends to become almost wholly an art of abstractions. Conceived forms and arrangements, which have always been the chief pre-occupa tion of sculptors, are held to be independent of observed forms and arrangements. That emotional energy that is inherent in sculptured masses is, it is thought, obscured and often defeated by symbolic or descriptive attributes or by an emphasis upon reproduced organic forms. Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Ernst Barlach, Morse Kegan, Ossip Zadkine, Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919 ), Henri Laurens, Modigliani (1887 5920), Joseph Czaki, and John Mowbray-Clarke are among the many sculptors whose experiments in this new field have resulted in works of great interest and charm. Jacob Epstein (188o– ),

one of the most talented and vigorous sculptors of our day, has, apparently, abandoned his experiments in abstract design for a romantic and realistic art more akin to that of Rodin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Wilhelm

Liibke, Geschichte der Plastik (188o) ; A. Marguand and H. W. Singer, History of Sculpture (1899) ; H. U. Fowler, A History of Sculpture (1916) ; C. K. Post, A History of European and American Sculpture (1921) ; G. Maspero, Egyptian Archaeology (1902) ; F. W. von Bissing, Denkmaler Aegyptischer Sculp tur (1913) ; J. Capart, Egyptian Art (1906) ; P. S. P. Hancock, Meso potamian Archaeology (1912) ; A. Paterson, Assyrian Sculptures (1912) ; A. Dieulafoy, L'art antique de Perse (1889) ; Perrot and Chipiez, Histoire de Part dans l'antiquite (1881-1914) ; E. A. Gardner, Greek Sculpture (1911) ; P. Gardner, The Principles of Greek Art (1914) ; E. Loewy, Die Griechische Plastik (1907) ; Mrs. Arthur Strong, Roman Sculpture (1907) ; F. Wickhoff, Roman Art (Iwo) ; W. R. Lethaby, Mediaeval Art (1912) ; 0. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (19II) ; W. Bode, ltalienische Plastik (19II) L. Gouse, La sculpture francaise (1895) ; M. Sauerlandt, Deutsche Plastik des M'ittelalters ; A. F. Calvert, Sculpture in Spain (1912) ; L. F. Freeman, Italian Sculptors of the Renaissance (1902) ; Corradi Ricci, Baroque Sculpture in Italy (1912) ; Wilhelm Radenberg, Moderne Plastik (1912) ; Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art (1908) ; Andre Fontanis and Louis Vauxcelles, La sculpture, vol. ii. of "L'art francaise de la Revolution a nos jours" (1923) ; Adolphe Bauler, La Sculpture Moderne (1924) ; Lorado Taft, American Sculpture (1924) ; Sidney Casson, Some Modern Sculptors (1929) ; and Jan et Joel Martel, Sculpture (1929).

(For cross-references to other related subjects, see introduction to this article.) (J. HUD.)