The Lost Renaissance
In many ways, the fine arts behave over time very much like technologies. They have cultural content that we don’t usually associate with a CPU microchip or a CNC robotic factory machine but they use highly specialized tools and practices to achieve complex goals and as with other technologies, humans are unsentimental about walking away from whatever becomes outmoded.
Some technologies, like home building change incrementally every year but overall stay fairly stable. A 1970’s carpenter or plumber who time-traveled to today wouldn’t be lost on a building site. There would be some new skills to pick up, but most of it would be pretty familiar.
Others technology we drop like a hot potato. Analog recording tech reached an incredible pitch of perfection towards the end of the last century, then all but vanished overnight. I remember going to Tower Records one day in the 90’s and being amazed that there weren’t any records— just CD’s. One visit prior I had barely known what a CD was. Then for years, CD’s were everything, until all at once the Internet relegated them to garage sales. Disk drives are about to do the same thing in favor of silicon disks. In just a few years engineers will be telling their kids about the old days when computer wrote data on a spinning disk and there were little arms with sensors that moved back and forth reading the data. No, seriously kids, they were amazing.
A Tale Of Two Art Technologies
Something interesting along those lines happened in the art world about a hundred years ago. Political and social change caused an almost complete revolution in how sculpture was made, who made it, and for whom while painting followed a strikingly different path.
Wikipedia’s cooperative public process makes it the nearest thing we have to a voice of global consensus. Better than any public opinion poll, Wikipedia tells us what views we share. Take for instance, 20th Century Art.
The page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_art on 20th Century Art shows eight representative works. The artists are Pollock, Warhol, Matisse, Picasso, Kupka, Gleizes, Kandinsky, and Malevich. The Pollock (1948) and the Warhol (1968) are mid-century, not early-century but the average date for the rest of he works is 1910, four years before the beginning of The Great War.
The Wikipedia page is uncontroversial now, but an Edwardian (1901–1910) Era time traveler visiting 2021 would be mystified by the choices, having almost certainly never have heard of any of the artists. Although the roots of the bohemian art world went back to the middle of the 19th Century, to say that Modernism was small potatoes in 1910 would considerably overstate its prominence at the time.
In 1912, the year the artists were being selected for the seminal New York Armory Show, Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon” was five years old, and Picasso’s career had only recently begun to progress beyond poverty, when he first attracted the attention of Gertrude and Leo Stein in 1905. Even as the Armory Show was being planned, Picasso’s London dealer was pricing his canvases at as little as two pounds — roughly a week’s pay for a laborer. That same year marked the first time any painting by Matisse ever became part of a museum collection, when his 1910 Still Life With Geraniums was given to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.
In contrast, the Dutch-English academic painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema was regularly selling paintings for between six and eight thousand pounds which works out to about 76 years pay for a laborer (perhaps 150 years pay for a working woman.) If an Edwardian laborer’s pay is the equivalent of making 15$/hour today, that’s 2.28 million dollars per painting. The future may have belonged to Modernism, but the present still belonged to the Academy in those days.
Today, we see art history through the lens of these artists’ later success. At the time, they were known only to a handful of insiders.
The mainstream of sculpture was tightly linked to Beaux Arts architecture and was in an unbroken line of descent from the Italian Renaissance, which resurrected techniques and styles of Hellenistic Greece that had been dormant since the fall of Rome a thousand years earlier. Small pieces that you could display in a private home weren’t unknown but as a whole the art form was deeply non-domestic, largely a branch of the architecture of power and wealth.
Painting’s Running Start
The great revolution against the rule of the academies began early for painting and had developed for seventy years prior to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The painters of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood issued their first manifesto in 1848, seeding Britain and Europe with the idea that serious art could be made outside of the official styles. The second half of the Nineteenth Century would see the emergence of the Barbizon School, Realism, Impressionism, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Nabis, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and the Secession, to name only the best known movements, culminating in Modernism at the dawn of the new century. Culminating might be misleading. Modernism was among the latest of the movements to start, but multiple extra-Academic styles flourished side by side and they all coexisted with the 600 pound gorilla of academic painting.
Rebellion comes naturally to painters because paint and canvas are cheap, execution is relatively quick, and the results are easy to display, transport, and store. For a painter, patrons are a nice-to-have, not an absolute necessity. More than a few of the great works of the late 19th and early 20th Century spent decades in someone’s attic.
It is not so with sculptors of stone and bronze. Sculpture is inherently expensive to make with the heavy and costly materials, industrial space, equipment, and help that must be paid. Painters can do as they please, but the sculptor works for the man, because only the man can pay for it, and only the man has a place to put it. It is the ornament of palaces, and parks, and public buildings and as such, remained primarily in thrall of established power even as painting diversified and evolved to suit the tastes of a rising upper middle class.
That is not to say apartment-size sculpture did not exist. It did. But the mainstream of the form was closely allied to architecture. Tabletop-scale pieces like the exquisite “Maggie” by Francis Derwent Wood were the exception but the real work went on and in public buildings and monuments.
The last years of classical style sculpture were spectacular. The wealth produced by the successive Industrial Revolutions, the rise of modern governments, and the explosive growth of cities had probably resulted in more architecture in the Classical styles being erected in the preceding century than in the rest of history combined, and sculpture was a part of all of it.
It All Came Crashing Down
The French Revolution notwithstanding, in 1910 the immemorial aristocracies still ruled pretty much as they had for centuries but they had become an anachronism in a world that had far outgrown them. The disaster of the First World War toppled the glittering but fragile structure of European aristocratic power forever. Of the five Empires that controlled Europe in 1914, only the British Empire would remain after the war, standing but deeply shaken.
Painting was ready for the revolution with a robust bohemian culture of painting already champing at the bit in 1914 but sculpture was caught flat footed. It’s not that sculptors didn’t know the old world was ending. It had been clear for decades. The British New Sculpture movement, Rodin, and others had consciously sought a way for sculpture to exist in the world that was clearly coming even before The Great War but for the first time in history, the new powers of Europe did not aspire to the old aristocratic trappings; on all sides, they wanted to see the old ways buried.
The Beaux Arts style and all that went with it deflated with amazing suddenness and finality. It didn’t die all at once everywhere, but it was cut off at the root and the centuries-old link between academic styles and power all but vanished within just a decade or two. Painting was, if anything, invigorated by the changes but without a deep alternative tradition, sculpture suffered an almost complete discontinuity. Just like that, it was yesterdays newspaper. The sculptors who emerged in the post-war era mostly did not come out of the ancient sculptural tradition, or if they did, they turned their backs on it in haste. Modern sculpture instead emerged essentially newborn from the bohemian world of world of painters.
The World We Walked Away From
No one in his or her right mind would mourn the old European aristocracy. Marx, wrong about so much, was spot on about the aristocrats being vampires on the necks of the working people but to give the devil his due, nobody builds like an emperor, and in the last days of the old world, the wealth of Empires reached a level never known in history.
The scale at which sculpture was made in those last years is hard to imagine. If Michelangelo had not existed, would High Renaissance Sculpture even have its own separate name? What would Neoclassical sculpture be if Canova and three or four others had never been born? But the list of brilliant sculptors of 1880 to 1920 goes on and on — dozens and dozens, hundreds, in every corner of Europe, in the Americas, in Australia, and elsewhere.
In the Britain of the early 20th C. alone, there were Brock, Wood, Babb, Dick, Montford, Pomeroy, Ford, Bates, Gilbert, Thornycroft, Thomas, Frampton, and Bayes, to name only the most prominent. America had French, Gaudens, Remington, MacMonnies and a host of others. It seems as if every third citizen of France was a sculptor: Rodin, Claudel, Degas, and Dalou are the best known today, but Wikipedia lists hundreds.
The expatriate French sculptor Dalou greatly influenced British sculpture of the turn of the century; many of the greats were his students.
Alfred Gilbert was among the last of the era in Britain. The work pictured is in the Art Nouveau style, which is probably the last great style that attempted continuity with the ancient forms. The work below wasn’t completed until 1932 but work started just after the end of WW1.
Edward Onslow Ford was known for smaller works, often exquisite nudes. The turn of the Century was the dawn of an era of tremendous change in the status of women and one is struck by the ubiquity of women as the subjects of sculpture in this era, foreshadowing the enormous increase in the number of noteworthy women artists after the collapse of the Academic tradition.
Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were two notable Americans working at the end of the era of traditional sculpture.
The Aftermath
Much of the academic painting of the period slowly migrated to museum basements during the post-War decades but sculpture, even when out of fashion, tends to remain in place. It’s heavy and often a part of a building so it didn’t just go away but it had few descendants; it was irrelevant, on the wrong side of a generational divide.
In the post-War years, the idea that art could be made outside the academy morphed into the idea that art could only be made outside the academy. This is not an unreasonable view where painting is concerned, but it is clearly false for architecture, which, under the Academy, had been brilliant. Late Victorian and Edwardian architecture and sculpture were like a good kid caught running around with a bad crowd, and it paid the price.
The oldest people alive today were children when the Edwardian Era ended and not a single person remains who was alive when Victoria died in 1901. Today, even the generations that came up in the heyday of Modernism are mostly gone, but the the broad rejection of the old symbols, which peaked decades ago, still hangs on as the conventional wisdom, informing the oversimplified view of history that is implicit in the Wikipedia article.
Ironically, Modernism itself, the essence of which was revolution, has now become just another old museum thing, like the Mona Lisa, and even the movements that succeeded it, and succeeded its successors, seem quaintly old-time now: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Post Modernism —it all seems like stuff from Grandma’s and Grandpa’s day.
The Future
There is still some sculpture made in the old styles but there’s no real place for it now; there is good work being done, but without Beaux Arts architecture in the background it’s something of a curiosity. Yet figurative sculpture is quietly once again flourishing in an unexpected haven that was undreamed of when the academies fell: supporting cinema and CGI. There don’t seem to be any good numbers available, but it seems that much of the top-flight 3-D work today is for cinema. If 3D is even the right term, because cinematic sculpture is of course 4-dimensional in that it works in time.
These young sculptures have mostly never heard of the old politics and could not care less. Like architecture a century ago, the gaming and movie industries are building a cultural mass of artists who are at home in three or more dimensions. Art styles have a way of returning. When the humane naturalism of the late Victorian and Edwardian sculptors eventually gets a fresh look, something very new is likely to emerge from the fusion.
