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.. Editor-in-Chief/Art Director's note:
 by Giancarlo Biagi

Humble Plaster

This issue marks our first front cover in color, along with a signature, to provide a full chromatic enhancement to our Review. Ironically, we start with a theme on one of the most humble materials: plaster. Calcium sulphate (gypsum), when roasted at about 300°F, loses three quarters of its water content, becoming a fine, white powder commonly known as plaster of Paris. When mixed with water, it solidifies without shrinkage and stabilizes, making it very versatile for artistic applications. Works in plaster date as far back as 7000 BCE; archaeological digs in the biblical city of Jericho have uncovered human skulls that were treated with and sculpted in plaster to portray people as they looked before death, representing one of the earliest forms of portraiture. The facial features were modeled directly on the bone, seashells were inlaid in the eye sockets, and the impression of hair was painted on the head and face.

Here depicted are Sumerian gypsum statues from Tell Asmar, which were buried beneath a temple floor so that the commissioners’ prayers would be eternally heard by the gods, indicating the high esteem for the material as well as its expected and proven durability.

In challenging ourselves to bring to you examples of the wide versatility and applications that plaster offers, we have narrowed our choice of sculptors down to Canova, for his excellence in using plaster as a vehicle for his marble masterpieces, and to George Segal, because of his persistence in expressing the human form directly in plaster during the era of Abstract Expressionism, when figurative work was not in favor with the critics. In addition, we are featuring examples of plaster collections: one pivoting on the Renaissance in Florence, the center of plaster collection throughout this period; a maquette collection in the town of Pietrasanta, representing a unique display of original plasters created in the last three decades by artists from around the world; and an article on the Horace Smith Collection of Plaster Casts in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is indicative of the growing national interest in the material. Plaster is a friendly, yet enduring material that feeds the creative process with its endless possibilities, in my point of view.

Giancarlo Biagi

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Sumerian gypsum statues from Tell Asmar

Curent issue: Winter 2002