by Giancarlo Biagi
Endurance over Broken Glass
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, “resembling fields of broken glass,” as one critic of the time expressed it, marks the climax of a movement that was germinated by Rodin and Manet forty years earlier. They, in turn, had followed the naturalism of Velázquez and his Spanish contemporaries two hundred years prior—as is beautifully revealed in the current exhibit “Manet/Velázquez, the French Taste for Spanish Painting,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By linking key passages, art history shows how everything is related in the transformation of expression: the Spanish naturalism of Velázquez influencing the French fragmentation of Rodin and Cézanne, and setting the course for abstract expressionism, which has dominated the art world for the past seventy years.
Since Sculpture Review is the only magazine totally dedicated as a forum for the review of the figurative tradition in sculpture, in this issue we examine a selection of sculpture collections that convey the endurance and revitalization of representational work in our era. The inclusion of this type of work in these collections attests that the figure is strongly reemerging as a means of expression, and being appreciated once more by critics and collectors alike, in my point of view.
Giancarlo Biagi
Back Issues of POV's
• Back to list
Sculpture Review Magazine
56 Ludlow Street, 5th Floor • New York, NY 10002 • Tel (212)-529-1763 • Fax (212)-260-1732
E-mail GP@SculptureReview.com
Squatting Woman (1882)
by Auguste Rodin
Click for enlargement
Current issue: Spring 2003