Sculpture

Sculpture. During the Colonial Era, untrained artisans carved gravestones, ship figureheads, and furniture. William Rush (1756–1833) represents the culmination of the woodcarving tradition with his ship figureheads and outdoor public sculpture such as Water Nymph and Bittern (1809), once located in a Philadelphia town square.

Sculpture emerged as a profession during the 1820s as Americans traveled to Florence or Rome to study ancient prototypes, hire stonecutters, and purchase marble. Horatio Greenough (1805–1852), Thomas Crawford (1813–1857), and Hiram Powers (1805–1873) carved idealized stone busts; allegorical, historical, and literary parlor statues; and full‐length portraits of national heroes such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Powers's The Greek Slave (1842–1847), the first female nude to be accepted by the American public, achieved renown at home and abroad. Receiving federal patronage, Greenough and Crawford created works for the U.S. Capitol that promoted the nation's Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of the Native Americans.

Other U.S. artists lived and worked in Italy, rendering idealized, neoclassical marble works with clear contours and smooth, polished surfaces. Of a notable group of women sculptors, Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1843–after 1909), half Chippewa and half African American, drew upon her dual heritage, creating images of Hiawatha and the emancipation of slaves, while Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) rendered heroic captive women. William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), Benjamin Paul Akers (1825–1861), and William Rinehart (1825–1874) also opened studios in Italy, where they sold their neoclassical marble statuary to American and European patrons. Some Americans, such as Erastus Dow Palmer (1817–1904), stayed home to create idealized marble statues of national themes such as Indian Girl: or, The Dawn of Christianity (1853–1856).

After the Civil War, most American sculptors studied at the école des Beaux Arts and in independent ateliers in Paris where they learned to create more realistic bronze statues with individualized facial expressions, rich modeling, and lively surface textures. At the same time, sculpture became an organized and respected profession of fine artists who formed new organizations such as the National Sculpture Society. Augustus Saint‐Gaudens (1848–1907), Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), and Frederick MacMonnies (1863–1937) combined portraiture and allegory as well as realism to create civic monuments as part of the Progressive Era City Beautiful movement. They collaborated with architects to complete elaborate, harmonious buildings (such as the U.S. Customs House in New York City, 1900–1907), expositions such as the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and public portrait monuments such as Saint‐Gaudens's bas‐relief memorial to the Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw on the Boston Common (1884–1896) and French's monumental seated Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (dedicated 1917). Supported by wealthy patrons seeking to promote patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic taste, and to evoke Italian Renaissance culture, Gilded Age sculptors and architects joined forces to create opulent, artistically unified public spaces.

Despite the emergence of modernism in Europe and its introduction to the United States through the 1913 Armory Show and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's “291” gallery, American sculpture remained conservative during the first half of the twentieth century. Paul Manship (1885–1966), William Zorach (1887–1966), Elie Nadelman (1882–1946), and Hugo Robus (1885–1966) rendered figurative and narrative works in a stylized and simplified manner. Only a few artists, such as Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell (1903–1973), experimented with new types of sculptural forms.

After World War II, formalist and conceptual considerations brought major changes to sculpture in the United States. David Smith (1906–1965), Theodore Roszak (1907–1981), Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), and Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) challenged traditional notions of sculpture, sometimes creating abstract and nonfigurative works that often eliminated the base; the patriotic, narrative, and allegorical themes; and the expectation that the work should be viewed from all sides. From the 1960s to the end of the century, artists created even more nontraditional sculpture, experimenting with medium (from earth to the human figure), subject matter and content, form (abstract, realistic, hyper‐realistic), setting, and scale. The range of styles was extensive (pop art, minimal art, light sculpture, assemblage, earthworks, performance, and new realism), as a host of artists created their own unique form of sculpture. These included Christo (1935– ), Robert Smithson (1938–1973), Donald Judd (1928–1994), Claes Oldenburg (1929– ), Sol LeWitt (1928– ), Edward Keinholz (1927–1994), Duane Hanson (1925– ), Robert Morris (1931– ), and Vito Acconci (1940– ). Artists also challenged the distinction between painting and sculpture and between architecture and sculpture, creating controversial works for public spaces such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981) in Washington, D.C., and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York City (1981, removed 1989).
See also Folk Art and Crafts; Modernist Culture; Museums: Art Museums; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Wayne Craven , Sculpture in America, 2d ed., 1984.
Michele H. Bogart , Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930, 1989.
Joy S. Kasson , Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth‐Century American Sculpture, 1990.
Vivien Green Fryd , Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol 1815–1860, 1992.
Harriet F. Senie , Contemporary Public Sculpture, 1992.
Kirk Savage , Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1997.

Vivien Green Fryd