Definition: Sculpture

sculp·ture (sk¾lp“ch…r) n. Abbr. sculp. 1. The art or practice of shaping figures or designs in the round or in relief, as by chiseling marble, modeling clay, or casting in metal. 2.a. A work of art created by sculpture. b. Such works of art considered as a group. 3. Ridges, indentations, or other markings, as on a shell, formed by natural processes. --sculp·ture v. sculp·tured, sculp·tur·ing, sculp·tures. --tr. 1. To fashion (stone, bronze, or wood, for example) into a three-dimensional figure. 2. To represent in sculpture. 3. To ornament with sculpture. 4. To change the shape or contour of, as by erosion. --intr. To make sculptures or a sculpture. --sculp“tur·al adj. --sculp“tur·al·ly adv.

Sculpture is a form of aesthetic expression in which hard or plastic materials are worked (as by carving, molding, or welding) into three-dimensional art objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. An enormous variety of media may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, wood, plaster, rubber, and random "found" objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined. Sculpture has been a means of human expression since prehistoric times.

The ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia produced an enormous number of sculptural masterworks, frequently monolithic, that had ritual significance beyond aesthetic considerations.

From the 6th cent. on, with the resurgence of Hindu dynasties throughout India, a characteristic temple plan was developed. An entrance portico led to a pillared hall (mandapa) into the cella. The shrine was often crowned by a large tower known as the shikhara.

Baroque sculptors felt free to combine different materials within a single work and often used one material to simulate another.

Among early 20th-century American sculptors Paul Bartlett, Karl Bitter, Frederick MacMonnies, George Barnard, and Lorado Taft exhibited a continuing conflict between naturalistic and idealized modes of representation. In sculpture the explorations of Julio González led to abstract configurations of welded metal that can be seen in the works of Americans such as David Smith, Theodore Roszack, Seymour Lipton, and Herbert Ferber.

Sculpture is not a fixed term that applies to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The scope of the term is much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it was only two or three decades ago, and in the present fluid state of the visual arts nobody can predict what its future extensions are likely to be.

Certain features, which in previous centuries were considered essential to the art of sculpture, are not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of its definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; but its scope has now been extended to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational; but it is only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional works of art have been produced.

Again, before the 20th century, sculpture was considered primarily an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture--the voids and hollows within and between its solid forms--have always been to some extent an integral part of its design, but their role has been a secondary one. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has shifted, and the spatial aspects have become dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a generally accepted branch of the art of sculpture.
It was also taken for granted in the sculpture of the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and did not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can any longer be considered essential to the art of sculpture.

Finally, 20th-century sculpture is not confined to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modelling or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because present-day sculptors use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve their purposes, the art of sculpture can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.

Through all of these changes there is probably only one thing that has remained constant in the art of sculpture, and it is this that emerges as the central and abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of expressive form in three dimensions.

Sculpture may be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached object in its own right, leading the same kind of independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this kind of independence. It projects from and is attached to or is an integral part of something else that serves either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round limits its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot conjure up the illusion of space by purely optical means or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as painting can. It does have a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual sensibilities. Blind people, even those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate certain kinds of sculpture. It has, in fact, been argued by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural sensibility can be traced to the pleasure one experiences in fondling things.

All three-dimensional forms are perceived as having an expressive character as well as purely geometric properties. They strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Such images go beyond the mere presentation of fact and communicate a wide range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material of sculpture is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive three-dimensional form. A sculpture may draw upon what already exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been used to express a vast range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the most violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and develop emotional responses to them. This combination of understanding and sensitive response, often called a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that the art of sculpture primarily appeals.

Like Western painting, Western sculpture has tended to be humanistic and naturalistic, concentrating upon the human figure and human action studied from nature. Early in the history of the art there developed two general types: statuary, in which figures are shown in the round, and relief, in which figures project from a ground. (see also Index: statuary sculpture, relief sculpture)

Western sculpture in the ancient world of Greece and Rome and from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century twice underwent a progressive development, from archaic stylization to realism; the term progressive here means that the stylistic sequence was determined by what was previously known about the representation of the human figure, each step depending upon a prior one, and not that there was an aesthetic progression or improvement. Modern criticism has sometimes claimed that much was lost in the change. In any event, the sculptors of the West closely observed the human body in action, at first attempting to find its ideal aspect and proportions and later aiming for dramatic effects, the heroic and the tragic; still later they favoured less significant sentiments, or at least more familiar and mundane subjects.

The pre-Hellenic, early Christian, Byzantine, and early medieval periods contradicted the humanist-naturalist bias of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance; in the 20th century that contradiction has been even more emphatic. The 20th century has seen the move away from humanistic naturalism to experimentation with new materials and techniques and new and complex imagery. With the advent of abstract art, the concept of the figure has come to encompass a wide range of nonliteral representation; the notion of statuary has been superseded by the more inclusive category of freestanding sculpture; and, further, two new types have appeared: kinetic sculpture, in which actual movement of parts or of the whole sculpture is considered an element of design; and environmental sculpture, in which the artist either alters a given environment as if it were a kind of medium or provides in the sculpture itself an environment for the viewer to enter.