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Title :: Rendering the Figure Volume :: Vol. LVIII, No. 4 Cover Photo :: |
"Caryatid" In the history of art and architecture, the word "caryatid" generally describes a draped female figure carved in place of a column or pilaster; thus, bearing the weight of a building's entablature. The most famous caryatids are those of the Erechtheion (421-406 B.C.) on the Athenian Acropolis. All six caryatids, now replaced on-site with replicas, stand frontally, facing out on the south porch of the Erechtheion. One of the original figures, removed by Lord Elgin in the early part of the nineteenth century, is in the British Museum in London. The other five figures are currently on display in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. "The Female Form in Twentieth-Century Sculpture" Many twentieth-century artists began their careers by working in a representational style and later adopted a semiabstract or entirely abstract manner, or even shifted back and forth from one style to another. Their motivations varied: Some were stimulated by artistic principles or themes, others by the exploration of techniques and materials. When sculpting the female figure, they typically adapted traditional ways of treating the time-honored subject to their individual concerns or rejected them altogether. "'What is this Face?': Isamu Noguchi's Portrait Busts" On February 15, 1927, twenty-five members of the National Sculpture Society convened to discuss, among other orders of business, the election of new associate members. Of the three accepted, twenty-three-year-old Isamu Noguchi would emerge as one of the twentieth-century's great abstract sculptors and designers. While his beginnings as a figurative sculptor are often overshadowed by his later achievements, they nonetheless served as the foundation for a career that spanned more than half a century. "Michael Rees: Model Behavior" We have inherited "figurative" and "abstract" from mid-twentieth-century formalist discourse, especially as Clement Greenberg, among other critics, posited that artistic progress was a move toward abstraction and self-reference in any single (and isolated) medium. This argument works especially well when abstraction is grounded in the materiality of pigments and canvas, or bronze and patination. But photographic media have complicated the abstraction/realism dichotomy. We might recall the paradox of Aaron Siskind's "abstract" photographs that show peeling paint or torn posters. Photography has to be an image of something; even at its most conceptual level, it captures conditions of light. As such, this medium renders everything an "image" - not exactly "abstract" or "figurative" but more a range of "unrecognizable" to "identifiable." | |