Analysing Sculpture page 5



Page 5 of 17
Analysing Sculpture > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6
Read the text and study the images below then move on to page 6.

5. Form I

Sculpture is fundamentally concerned with three-dimensional form, so that it can never be underplayed as it might be in a painting. But the physical bulk of the form can be exaggerated or understated, as we see in a comparison of works by French Maillol and Italian Giacometti, both sculptors working in bronze in the twentieth century.



above Maillol, Summer, bronze, 1910-1911. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.	above Giacometti, Standing Woman, bronze, c. 1958-9. Tate Gallery, London.

Maillol stressed the volume of his forms by rendering them with simple, broad surfaces which emphasise their roundness, while Giacometti manipulated his surfaces so intensely that they seem to erode the forms which makes his figures flattened and attenuated. In these cases, the fact that these sculptures by Maillol and Giacometti represent women helps us to read forms this way, because we associate them with either sturdy or thin body types. But a sculptor like the Frenchman Arp, who carved non-representational forms, also suggests bulk and volume through the smooth continuity of his swelling, organic shapes.


above Jean Arp, Human Concretion, stone, 1933. Kunsthaus, Zürich.

Back to top © Elizabeth Rankin and Amanda Skeet, Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, 2004.