Entang Wiharso, “Double Protection” (2015), graphite, resin, color pigment, thread with steel structure, 167 x 108 x 107 cm (image courtesy of the artist and Marc Strauss Gallery New York)
For over three decades, Martha Graham danced her most compelling choreography on and around the abstract sculpture of Isamu Noguchi. In their first collaboration, the 1935 “Frontier,” she was consumed in a massive western landscape, a location suggested by just a simple fence and two stretched lengths of rope designed by Noguchi. The artists had a mutual attraction for the mythic and visuals abstracted just enough to bring out bare emotions, which progressed through pieces like 1944’s “Appalachian Spring.” There, Noguchi’s sharp interpretation of a Shaker chair balanced against Graham’s dramatic gestures and Aaron Copland’s moving score.
A Tactile Tour of Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham’s 1940s Dance Sets
New York City is seriously lacking in sculptures of historic women, with just five among the hundreds of bronzes and granite monuments in the five boroughs. Yet look into the faces of some of its allegorical figures — its angels, goddesses, and symbols of victory — and there are other real women embodied in these statues, even if their names are often lost. Here are five women who had their likeness immortalized in public sculpture as artist’s models and muses.
The skull is a universal symbol of mortality, appearing in artworks by everyone from Hans Holbein the Younger and Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But inLee Downey’s “Yorick,” it also represents the human aspiration to comprehend the mysteries of the universe.
It’s hard to get excited for another Pablo Picasso exhibition. He is, after all, the Steven Spielberg of European modernism — flashy, prolific, proficient at a vast range of genres, and overrepresented in the mainstream cultural canon. But Picasso Sculpture, the Museum of Modern Art‘s (MoMA) first exhibition since the late 1960s devoted to the master painter and collageist’s three-dimensional works, is an opportunity to discover a relatively obscure part of his practice. Save a handful of exceptions, Picasso kept his sculptures to himself until the penultimate decade of his life, and even now only certain types of works are widely circulated: the Cubist still lifes, the plaster busts of women, the bronze and wood assemblages derived from his encounters with African art. These works figure prominently in Picasso Sculpture, but so do his incredibly fine and playful ceramic vases of the late 1940s and early ’50s, the somber bronzes he made living through World War II in Paris, and the funny, whimsical plaster and wood sculptures of the mid ’30s. While so much of Picasso’s two-dimensional work has been rendered static by its status as seminal art history, many of the sculptures in this show are refreshingly surprising and inventive.
On June 15, Jesús Moroles was driving from his home in Rockport, Texas, to Chickasha, Oklahoma, to continue work on the largest granite project of his career when he was killed in a car crash. The sculptor’s goliath works hewn in stone are installed throughout the United States, such as the step-pyramid “Houston Police Officers Memorial” (1991) that recedes into the earth, or the 64-ton “Lapstrake” (1987) sculpture with tiered granite towering 22 feet over Manhattan’s CBS Plaza on West 53rd Street across from the Museum of Modern Art. At 65, he’d spent decades finessing delicate details in colossal sculptures, celebrating the formidable rock’s granular texture and luminous embedded crystals. They’re the kind of pieces that could survive centuries, with their abstract shapes and compositions.
A Granite Sculptor’s Last and Largest Work Completed in His Memory
CHICAGO — In the entire history of art, how many works depict a tree as their main subject? The answer is probably incalculable, but even attempting to imagine it makes the mind dizzy, like trying to grasp the mathematical concept of infinity. Yet in two group shows in Chicago, one sees a range of artists wringing new meaning from our leafy friends.
The first nude sculpture of a woman widely seen by the American public depicted a slave, just decades before the Civil War. Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC explores the artistic processes behind one of the most popular, and controversial, 19th-century sculptures.
The 19th-Century Slave Sculpture that Exposed Americans to Nudity in Art
To create translucent sculptures in the colossal proportions he desired, De Wain Valentine needed a new type of plastic. Valentine MasKast Resin, developed with Hastings Plastics in the 1960s, allowed Valentine to create huge resin works like the “Gray Columns” (1975–76), which at 3,500 pounds far exceeded the material’s previous breakage limit of 50 pounds.
The Luminous Plastic of an Underappreciated Light and Space Artist