Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
A Scribble in the Air
By Hilton Kramer
A Concise History of Modern Sculpture
by Herbert Read
Praeger, 310 pp., $7.50
The sculpture of this century boasts an amazingly wide repertory of forms and styles—wider, perhaps, than that of any other period in the history of art. Behind much of this profusion, which to the untutored eye looks so arbitrary and bewildering, stands the revolutionary change in sculptural syntax effected by the aesthetics of Cubism. This change was decisive in two respects: it displaced the traditional sculptural methods of carving and modeling with the technique of joinery, or assemblage, borrowed from the Cubist collage; and it applied this new technique to the construction of sculptures in which space—so-called 'empty' space—functioned for the first time as the cultural equivalent of solid volumes formerly created by the use of materials such as stone or wood. So fundamental was this renovation that its effects made themselves felt even in the work of those rival traditions—the tradition of modeling which derives from Rodin, and that of carving which stems from Brancusi—which, with Cubism, form the principal conventions governing the production of sculpture in our time.
Review, 1821 words
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