sculpture

sculpture, an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked 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, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

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 was much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of the visual arts in the 21st century 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, one that imitated forms in life, most often human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. Since the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included 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 was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional works of art began to be produced.

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 was 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, with the exception of items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), 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.

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Finally, sculpture since the 20th century has not been confined to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling 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 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 form in three dimensions.

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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 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. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate certain kinds of sculpture. It was, in fact, 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.

This article deals with the elements and principles of design; the materials, methods, techniques, and forms of sculpture; and its subject matter, imagery, symbolism, and uses. For the history of sculpture in antiquity, see art and architecture, Anatolian; art and architecture, Egyptian; art and architecture, Iranian; and art and architecture, Mesopotamian. For the development of sculpture in various regions, see such articles as sculpture, Western; and African art. For related art forms, see mask and pottery.

Elements and principles of sculptural design

The two most important elements of sculpture—mass and space—are, of course, separable only in thought. All sculpture is made of a material substance that has mass and exists in three-dimensional space. The mass of sculpture is thus the solid, material, space-occupying bulk that is contained within its surfaces. Space enters into the design of sculpture in three main ways: the material components of the sculpture extend into or move through space; they may enclose or enfold space, thus creating hollows and voids within the sculpture; and they may relate one to another across space. Volume, surface, light and shade, and colour are supporting elements of sculpture.