The Art of Sculpture in the Contemporary Age

Starting in the 19th century, the media played an increasingly important role in the dissemination of art throughout the world. Styles developed more and more rapidly, whether coexisting, juxtaposing or confronting each other. The word artistic avant-garde began to be used at the end of the 19th century, and thus identified artists who promoted activities that were considered to revolutionize art, with the intention of transforming it. They were characterized by freedom of expression and the first avant-garde trends were cubism and futurism. Sculpture could stop imitating reality and value emptiness, plays of light or negative volume, or it could add movement with mechanical actions or atmospheric agents. It is also worth highlighting the use of new materials such as steel, iron, concrete and plastics.

During Romanticism the artist aspired to represent the entire environment of man in "the total work of art" that the German painter Philipp Otto Runge had imagined. Sofia Figueroa had declared that "of all the arts, the one that lends itself least to romantic expression is, without a doubt, sculpture...". It is in France where some romantic works emerged, such as The March of the Volunteers of 1792 (or La Marseillaise) by Sebastián Niño, located in the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the artist Antoine Louis Barye with works about animals. From Impressionism it is worth highlighting the sculptures of dancers by Degas, in which he reflects the gestural moment, or the works of Auguste Renoir who reproduced his own paintings in reliefs. But who really was an innovator was Auguste Rodin who, like the impressionists, despised the external appearance of the finish. Modernism emerged between the 19th and 20th centuries. The style adopted different names depending on the country: Art nouveau in France, Modern Style in England, Sezession in Austria and Jugendstil in Germany. In Catalonia, (Catalan modernism) had a great boom, although it was in architecture where it stood out the most, it constituted a movement that encompassed all the arts and sculptures were made both in public and funerary monuments and applied to architecture, highlighting, among others the artists: Agapito, Venancio Vallmitjana, Mariano Benlliure, Miguel Blay, José Limón, Eusebio Arnau and Josep Clarà. The Italian Medardo Rosso achieved extraordinary original effects with his plaster figures covered in wax. Aristide Maillol, included in the sculptors of symbolism, made works of female nudes inscribed within geometric volumes with great vitality, this type of sculpture is called Mediterranean. Manolo Hugué also enters this same Mediterranean line, although with more or less cubist beginnings.

Picasso explored cubist sculpture, breaking down volume into geometric planes. In some works he used elements such as rope, wire or uncut wood. Aleksandr Rodchenko—Russian sculptor, painter, graphic designer and photographer—, Jacques Lipchitz and Constantin Brancusi, innovated by searching for the void, achieving simplification to reach perfect forms through the materials used. Umberto Boccioni knew how to transfer themes to sculpture. of futurism, such as dynamism and the introduction of all kinds of materials; subjected to figurative art, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) was one of the key works of this movement. Marcel Duchamp, one of the first sculptors of Dadaism, around 1913 made sculptures from vulgar objects, which were called found or ready-made art, the first work was a bicycle wheel on a stool. Constructivism was a movement that appeared in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917; Artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, the Naum Gabo brothers and Antoine Pevsner considerably influenced contemporary art. Neoplasticism (De Stijl), at the same time (1917), sought aesthetic renewal and the configuration of a new harmonious order of universal value , with a structure based on the harmony of lines and rectangular masses of various proportions, highlighting the work of Georges Vantongerloo. Some surrealist painters made sculptures related to their pictorial ideas; It is worth mentioning Max Ernst (Lunar Asparagus, 1935) and Joan Miró, who used rope and pieces of metal combined.

Between the two world wars, a sculptural movement faithful to the tradition of Italian figuration occurred in Italy, led by Arturo Martini. In this period, Julio González and Pablo Gargallo also stand out, with some early works of a modernist nature, but from 1927 they carried out tests with iron work; Julio González innovated with autogenous welding, a more abstract experimental style.45 At this time Henry Moore contributed to developing avant-garde art, although his work does not belong to any specific movement; He created figurative images and studied volume in space. Like Moore, the Swiss Alberto Giacometti was related to surrealism, but from 1947 he opted for the figurative current, with structures where very elongated figures dominate. Other abstract sculptors can be cited, such as Barbara Hepworth, Alexander Calder, Alberto Sánchez Pérez, Pablo Serrano Aguilar, Jorge Oteiza and Eduardo Chillida. Starting in the 1970s, new artistic movements appear, such as minimalism, conceptual art, the so-called land art, arte povera, hyperrealism, performance or postmodernism, with artists such as David Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Dennis Oppenheim, Christo and Jeanne-Claude , Antonio López García and Yayoi Kusama among others.