The Sculpture Show, part 2

You can't have a show about 20th century sculpture without having work by Barbara Hepworth - which is fortunate, because she's one of my favourite artists.  I've been to see her work at the new Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,  and several times to her inspiring studio in St Ives.

Her work is very feminine, very nurturing - not surprising, because she had four children, including triplets with fellow artist Ben Nicholson - and very rooted in the landscape, referring not only to her native Yorkshire but also to her adopted Cornwall.  

Don't mistake feminine for namby pamby - this is work of sensuous strength and vitality, and forms a complete contrast to the rooms later in the exhibition of hard-edged male militaristic or machine aesthetic art.

This is Curved Form (Oracle) 1960.

Made of carved guarea wood, the tactile fluid form is smooth and natural on the outside and more textured and painted on the inside.  It is sensuous and mysterious, suggesting perhaps a seed-pod, nurture, reproduction and ripeness.  

This is Wave of 1943.

Again carved in wood and painted, is contains strings, and so suggests a musical instrument or aeolian harp.  This gives a sound dimension to it, almost as if you listen very closely, you can hear it, like putting your ear to a seashell.  The sculpture is meant to be a view of the sea, encapsulating many viewpoints of a landscape in one (rather like a Peter Lanyon painting).  'The horizon of the sea is enfolded by the arms of the land to the left and right' (wrote Hepworth), with a great sweeping gesture held by the tension of the strings.

(Not all of her sculptures are of wood, nor are they small - there are many epicly-sized public sculptures and Wakefiled has the most amazing plasters.)

The next room contained Epstein and Gill, not their best examples.  It included a great clunky ugly alabaster by Epstein. 

However, the 'Geometry of Fear - 1950s Britain' was a very interesting room.  Elizabeth Frink's small bronze birds from 1959 aren't pretty, delicate things.

 

These are disjointed, fractured forms, menacing and militaristic, like something out of Star Wars.  They are the bronze version of Ted Hughes' poem Hawk Roosting (published around the same time these sculptures were made).  Both creative forms, poem and sculpture, are born out of a post-war Britain that has itself been taken apart and brutalised, and is trying to find itself again.

Similarly, Kenneth Armitage's 1957 figure on its side, with its stick-like legs, has literally been knocked sideways and can't stand on its own two feet.

In the room also are Eduardo Paolozzi's assemblages - large forms created out of make-do-and-mend recycled scraps and objects.  

 Eduardo Paolozzi St Sebastian 1957 bronze

It's as if they are self-made figures, trying to piece themselves back together and find themselves again, and to create a new world order out of the chaos in which they find themselves.  They are rather touching in their rag-bag appearance, and almost heroic, as these are figures that are, indeed, putting themselves back on their feet.

Overall the exhibition is a very deft piece of curating, the Geometry of Fear room especially (although it would be wrong to think that all post-WW2 sculpture consisted of the fractured forms suggested displayed in that room - just look at what Hepworth was doing in the same era).  

However, it is a difficult thing to make sense of such a big subject, but by making good use of the layout of the gallery, it manages to tell a cohesively thought-provoking, if not exhaustive, story.

The Sculpture Show, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

During half term, I managed to get through to Edinburgh and take in a few shows, including a trip to the Gallery of Modern Art.  I was especially keen to take in the sculpture show, and to see how it compared with the very disappointing British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago - having a theme of 'sculpture' for a show is, after all,  ludicrously wide ranging.  How to curate and make sense of such a large subject?

The answer here was to narrow the range between 1900 and 2012, and to arrange the rooms each with a theme.  The first room that I entered was all about the human form, and contained Ron Mueck's super-sized A Girl (2006).

Born in 1958 in Melbourne (Paula Rego is his mother-in-law, which I didn't know), Mueck's hyper-real sculptures are meant to give a disconcerting sense as you are able to look at something normally quite small in super-close-up, including individually applied hairs on the baby's head.  However, I found that the skin was just too shiny and unreal to carry off the illusion and trigger that disconcerting feeling.  Or maybe I've watched too many episodes of One Born Every Minute to feel any sense of shock.  Or maybe it's having had a baby - of course they feel that big!

In the next room were less literal represenations of figures, with works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Lucas (with her stuffed tights) and Henry Moore.

Henry Moore, The Helmet 1939

Moore's piece is at once something militaristic, and also a mysterious abstract object relating to the human form, being one thing inside another.  It can also be read as a mother and child, with the 'helmet' as the protective mother.

Further rooms contained works by Nick Evans - 'Oceania' is a giant checker board with huge coral-like figures, and a dull Damien Hirst retake on Degas' 14 year old ballet dancer.   Then I discovered Room 1 where I perhaps should have started...

Now we're talking!  This contains a piece by Medardo Rosso - 'Ecce Puer' (Behold the Boy) of 1906.

 

This plaster sculpture was inspired by seeing a small boy push his face against a net curtain, revealing the form in a ghostly, partially hidden, mysterious shape.  The result is a textural, organic form.  

Then there are Degas' bronzes, where you can feel the fingers of the artist in the work.  Hurrah, there is Rodin, and his study of Balzac, with the figure and the dressing gown all merging into one expressive gesture, like a wave, with an organic synthesis of foam and hair forming the head at the top.

Rodin leaves the marks of the manufacture clear to see.  You get a sense of precisely what it was like over a century ago to take a piece of wax and work it into a shape with your fingers.  Nothing says that more clearly than the back of his Flying Figure 1900, which originally had a second figure as part of the sculpture.  Rodin then decided to remove it by slicing it off with a large knife.  You can see the sawing action through the wax as he carved it off, like a Sunday joint.  Instead of smoothing off the site of the butchery, he decided that this was all part of the genesis of the piece, and so it is preserved as the final bronze.

This Impressionist sculpture, where you can see the process behind the finished object, of course reflects what was happening in painting in the last part of the 19th century.  Painting was changing from highly-finished, studio-created  Salon paintings, where brush marks couldn't be detected, to en plein air Impressionism, where expressive gestural brushwork was the order of the day.

Then it was on to a room of Cubist sculpture, of which there's nothing much good to say except I was heartened by again meeting Henri Gaudier Brzeska's Bird Swallowing a Fish.

It's a beautiful thing, a beautiful shape and a lovely patina.  It was made in 1914 a few months before the start of WW1 (in which Gaudier Brzeska was killed in 1915 at the age of 23).  This was created by someone who was just 21!  How many students coming out of art school could make something like this?  It's a fusion between machine aesthetic and the organic, with a torpedo like fish being rammed into the beak of a tank-like bird.  

It's a resonant precursor of Isaac Rosenberg's WW1 poetry, where he also combines striking imagery of the fusion between the destroying machine and the lyrically organic; as in the poem Dead Man's Dump where 'the swift iron burning bee/ Drained the wild honey of their youth', or in August 1914, 'Iron are our lives / Molten right through our youth. / A burnt space through ripe fields / A fair mouth's broken tooth.' 

More tomorrow!