Early Modern Sculpture by William TuckerReview by: Dore AshtonThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 599-600Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049452 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 599

York and London, I963.) Picasso also compared himself with Rembrandt in paintings entitled Bathsheba and Rembrandt and Saskia

(both 1963). During 1968, Picasso produced 347 etchings in 203 days; as

Boggs writes, "the intensity of his narrative imagination is apparent in that extraordinary tour de force." One might think that Picasso was reviewing the vast accumulation of images that he had painted or dreamed or fantasized throughout his lifetime; nearly a full

page is needed just to list them. For Gert Schiff, "Suite 347 rep- resents . . . the most comprehensive statement ever made by an artist about his philosophy of painting and life" ("Picasso's Suite

347 or Painting as an Act of Love," in Woman as Sex Object [Art News Annual, xxxvII], 1972). In commenting upon the frank rep- resentation of genitalia and copulation, Boggs quotes Leo Stein-

berg's statement: "Performing the act of painting as a making of

love, as if love and creation were twin phases of a single cycle per- petually generating each other and most accurately defined when

telescoped into one." Although some of Picasso's critics might disagree (cf. John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso, London, 1965), the reader will be reminded of Leiris's observation that

throughout his life Picasso was obsessed with the theme of artist and model and with the act of painting.

It seems clear that these examples of his last creative drive are to be understood as Picasso's final struggle against death after an extraordinary career of creativity and inventiveness, of de-

picting the beautiful and the monstrous, enlivened, as Kahnweiler

said, by fanatic autobiography and a fierce sense of freedom. HENRY R. HOPE

Indiana University, Emeritus

WILLIAM TUCKER, Early Modern Sculpture, New York, Oxford University Press, 1974- Pp. 174; 155 ills. $15

There is a paucity of literature on modern sculpture. Not only is there a shortage of intelligent discourse, but in the very few at-

tempts to deal with modern sculpture in more than a survey manner - they take up scarcely a library shelf - I have found curious accesses of prejudice. Commentators who are otherwise

sound, and who would normally balk at easy definitions when

discussing the diversity in modern painting, often slip into glaring cliches in the case of sculpture. Nebulous accounts have persisted unchallenged until very recently. I have often wondered why.

William Tucker has answered my vague questions most satis-

factorily and with a precision I find unmatched in any other text.

Although Tucker is a major British sculptor, who has written his

book, he says, "from the perspective of a sculptor working now rather than that of the historian, critic or connoisseur," he has

successfully assumed the mantle of all three. The strength of the book lies in his having experienced - and experienced deeply - a

great many sculptures that he then sets out in coherent contexts. He shuttles back and forth in 19th- and 2oth-century history with

complete authority, and he winds up with a true weaving of the diverse strands in modern sculpture.

Tucker answers the basic question concerning the laggard development of modern sculpture succinctly: i 9th-century paint- ing, with its strong experimental bias, had had three centuries of

preparation, whereas sculpture was trapped in the complexity and inertia of its medium. "The inability of Renaissance sculpture to

capture space and atmosphere - to say nothing of the obvious

physical problems of making, handling and disposing masses of bronze and stone- precluded sculpture, from Michelangelo on-

wards, as an art in which a substantial dialogue between the per- sonal vision of the artist and the common components of the medium could function." He highlights the contrasts between

painting and sculpture as a prelude to his discussion of Rodin: "The academic sculpture of the nineteenth century, with its

appalling virtuosity, the vulgarity of its subject-matter, its total lack of real feeling, intelligence or sensitivity, was as much the

prisoner of conditions established centuries earlier as Impression- ism was the final and convulsive gesture of liberation in a con-

tinuous and parallel tradition, which had expanded and enriched itself as its companion had degenerated."

Such speculations are essential to Tucker's argument. Like

others, he recognizes Rodin as the source of modern sculpture. But unlike the others, he is able to weigh the problems thrust upon Rodin by his epoch and to discern the distinct ways in which Rodin could replenish an exhausted tradition and become the avatar of a new one. Tucker discerns the new approach in Rodin's

handling of clay (parallel to the Impressionists' handing of surface) and in the beginning of "the release of structure from subject." It is one thing to determine that all of modern sculpture is based on the release of form from subject. Most writers have glibly done so. But it is another to examine intimately the means of release and the many nuanced approaches among Rodin, Degas, Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, and Gonzalez, the artists to whom Tucker renders homage.

Most appropriately, Tucker summons Rilke to announce his own leitmotifs. Rilke, Tucker says, anticipated later develop- ments when he wrote of Rodin. Rilke's concept of sculpture "as

essentially object" would characterize early modern sculpture. His own esthetic was moving toward the conception of the work of art as Kunstding rather than Kunstwerk, and he was able to see beyond Rodin to a condition that would bring forth Brancusi and Matisse. There is also an implication in Rilke's texts of one ofTucker's most

important points: that it is as "maker" that the modern sculptor emerges. "Rodin was primarily concerned with constructing with and within the figure: choosing poses and models from nature; in

physically modelling; in the continuous process of casting that went on in his studio as in the process of addition or reduction of

figures or part-figures until they separately became 'sculpture."' Evaluation of this additive process leads Tucker easily into the discussion of Picasso's assemblages, which, for the first time in

history, permitted the sculptor the freedom to ignore historic sanctions on material and subject matter. "It was due solely to Picasso ... that it became possible to 'make' a piece of sculpture, for the first time in history."

Not that Picasso was alone. Tucker shows, in one of the most sensitive discussions of Matisse I have encountered, that Matisse was fully capable of making the long-prepared break with sculp- tural convention. But not with tradition. Tucker's fine discernment between these two carelessly-used terms I find impressive. "Ma- tisse's acceptance of a traditional framework for his sculpture, partly through deliberate aesthetic inclination, partly through a sense of his own technical limitations, gives his work a peculiar freedom that is not to be found in any of his contemporaries . .. Matisse has no monumental prejudice; none of the anxiety about the status of the work as an object, its relation to reality and the

spectator, that has been one of the characteristic obsessions of

sculpture since Rodin." From the beginning Matisse's ends differed from those of Rodin.

Matisse sought, as he put it, "a work of general architecture, re-

placing explicit details by a living and suggestive synthesis." By replacing Rodin's assumption concerning the human figure with a

radically different approach, Matisse was able to utilize the figure as motif without depending on its imprisoned associations. In describing the great achievement of Matisse, Tucker is at his finest. About La Serpentine, for instance, he says:

Space itself is sucked into the sculpture, like air into a vacuum: space modelled, carved, stretched, compressed, with an energy corresponding to the stillness of the visual armature, seen directly from front or back. Every inflection of the surface gives a key not only to a residual anatomic function, but affirms an outward, directional role, modulating the flow and pace of the surrounding void in favour of anti-anatomic, perceptual, rhythms and connections through the figure; contained and returned by the five 'windows' of space, the crucial apertures between left arm and head, right arm and back, between the upper legs and between the feet, and finally, the great central core of space framed by the continuous but varied structure of the left side of the figure, the base and the vertical support. Through this exhilarated description we find the openings into

the subsequent history of modern sculpture, but, more important,

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600 THE ART BULLETIN

we find a recognition of singularity. Tucker, who is ready to con- sider with affection many modern innovations, can still suggest that the artist who cared little for his avant-garde recognition is the most original. Who can deny that certain extravagant experi- ments in our century are of utmost historical and factual interest; yet, when they are confronted, they seem slightly dated or, worse, boring.

The essential change, after Matisse, came in radically altered attitudes toward the task of sculpture-making. It is in tracing the transformation of subject into object that Tucker is able to qualify his sculptor's vision with the historian's objectivity. Having dis- cussed Brancusi and the dramatic history of his "hard-won libera- tion from Rodin," Tucker tracks back to the phenomena that attended Picasso's departure from tradition. The act of construc- tion performed by Picasso when he took to wood, cardboard, paper, and string was to have consequences of enormous import. Not only was sculpture finally released from its perennial subject - the human figure - but the artist was released from material con- ventions. By using the still-life as base, Picasso neutralized the

importance of the subject. His wooden constructions, "constructed of the same material and in the same way as made objects in the world," contained within themselves an object quality that opened sculpture to the plethora of possibilities we can observe actively functioning in today's sculpture. Tucker devotes a sep- arate and most cogent chapter to the object-like nature of modern sculpture, in the course of which he discusses Duchamp's ready- mades ("virtually unrecognizable except as sculpture"), Tatlin's "culture of materials," and Rietveld's chairs, concluding that they demonstrate how the object had itself become subject. It is in this chapter that Tucker's only lapse occurs - a testy attack on Gia- cometti that suggests that Tucker's own strong taste for structure has made it impossible for him to deal with what he calls Gia- cometti's exploitation of Gestalts and his dependence on imported figurative and intellectual referents.

The nature of Tucker's hostility becomes clear in the final chapter, in which he addresses himself to the role of gravity in all sculpture. Here he comes closest to critical articulation of what he believes sculpture should be, and he does so by artfully turning back to the I9th century and the "private" sculpture of Degas. Gravity, Tucker says, unites sculpture and spectator in a common depend- ence on and resistance to the pull of the earth. The elements of sculpture - materials, structure, volume, and space - do not speak their language independently but rather "articulate a com- plex and profound sense of our own being in the world." Thus there is an essential duality in sculpture, which modern sculpture has consciously registered, between its internal, physical and its external, perceived nature. The tension that our sense of gravity automatically institutes is best described by Tucker when he deals with Degas's small figures of dancers in which "the figure is articulated, not as with Rodin from the ground upward, but from the pelvis outward, in every direction, thrusting and probing with volumes and axes until a balance is achieved." We sense that for Tucker, the sculptor who successfully invigorates the movements among multiple axes, all relating to gravity, is the best sculptor. Tucker is able to move from Degas's private experiments to David Smith's because of this basic attitude: "The effect of suspension in time and space, suspended action and suspended mass, challenging and teasing gravity, structure appearing to generate itself in mid- air, inevitably recalls the frequent use of this articulation by David Smith . . . Smith stretches steel, stresses its junctions, takes balance to its limits, just as Degas stretched and stressed the human body in attitudes that were in themselves structures before work on the sculpture was started." The implicit condemnation of Giacometti, then, is based on his psychological and painterly bias, which allows him to sidestep internal problems of structures based on gravity and the general duality between known and felt that keeps sculpture taut and challenging. Throughout Tucker's book the evidence adduced, weighed, and clarified testifies to his ability to work from an overall assumption (that, as we all know, modern art is self-contained; object-like, etc., and, still, not) and yet not lose the nuances that keep some of its objects alive in our imagina- tions. His epigraph from Wallace Stevens, easily transposed to

modern art, is borne out in the evidence he puts forward:

Poetry is the subject of the poem From this the poem issues and To this returns.

DORE ASHTON

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Science

BURTON B. FREDERICKSEN and FEDERICO ZERI, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1972. Pp. 678. $25

After looking through this volume - it is not the type meant to be read cover to cover - one feels a mixture of awe and admiration. Awe because of the huge amount of material the authors have scrutinized, either in person or via photographs, and organized; admiration because such a Herculean task has been so well done that the results will prove useful to all students interested in Italian painting before I8oo00. The book's aim is stated concisely by its title, Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. The division of the pictures in those collections into three major sections clearly demonstrates its sensible and useful organization.

In the first section, "Index of Artists," the hundreds of painters are listed alphabetically by name, with their dates when known. There then follows an inventory, alphabetically by location of collection, of the painters' individual works. So, if one wants to check the register of an artist, Bernardo Daddi for example, one turns to Daddi, on page 6 , where the list begins with a Madonna and Child in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. But one finds much more than a simple listing of attributed works, for the indi- vidual entries are qualified by a series of abbreviations that detail the authors' opinions for each picture. The Virgin and Child with Eight Saints in Kansas City is prefaced with an "s," which stands for "school, shop, or studio work; close to the artist but not up to his autograph production." The Nativity in the Portland Museum receives an "f," meaning "follower: by someone highly influenced or trained by the artist under which it is listed." By these and other qualifiers (including the dreaded "i," "imitation, in the style of the artist, implying a forgery"), each of the entries is carefully divided according to most of the nuances that are attached to any attribution. When no abbreviation appears before a picture, the authors consider the work autograph. In the "Index to Artists" there is a listing of acquisition numbers (when they exist) and often a reference to published reproductions of the pictures. The lists of Schools of Anonymous Painting, which close the first section, will be of great help in tracking down many of these elusive pic- tures.

One realizes that the public collections of our continent are amazingly rich in Italian painting: leafing through the scores of lists of the most varied painters underscores this reality. Although the great holdings of Italian paintings are in the northeast, many marvelous pictures are scattered throughout the country: the Census forcefully reminds us of this fact.

The Census's second major section is an "Index of Subjects." This is subdivided into five parts - Religious Subjects, Secular Subjects, Portraits and Donors, Unidentified Subjects, and Frag- ments. Here the prodigious amount of material gathered by Fredericksen and Zeri can be used for a number of purposes, for instance, to study the recurrence of subjects during the period covered by the Census. If we look at the listing for Annunciation, we discover that the authors have not simply listed the pictures of that subject but have grouped them into variants within the type. Numerous versions show the Virgin standing on the right, other examples show her seated or kneeling on the same side, and only a small number depict her on the left. This kind of specific break- down into the variants of a given subject, a practice throughout this section, furnishes an idea of the subject's range and history, given the fact, of course, that the lists represent only the results of private and public collecting. For those interested in the chrono- logical development of a particular story or the representations of

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