direct carving

direct carving. The practice of producing carved sculpture (particularly stone sculpture) by cutting directly into the material, as opposed to having it reproduced from a plaster model using mechanical aids and assistants. Although this might seem a purely technical matter, in the early 20th century it became associated with aesthetic and ethical issues, particularly in Britain and in France. During the 19th century it was customary for sculpture to be exhibited in plaster; it was much more expensive and time-consuming to produce marble carvings (or bronze casts), so these were usually made only when firmly commissioned. A successful sculptor could become the administrator of a large studio producing numerous, almost identical versions of popular works (Rodin employed many assistants, including artists of the calibre of Bourdelle, Despiau, and Pompon, and he rarely touched hammer and chisel himself, only occasionally adding final touches to his works in marble). This kind of procedure was attacked by John Ruskin, who in 1872 denounced the ‘modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into form by machinery [by this he means the pointing machine], and by the hands of subordinates’. Ruskin argued that the sculptor of such works thinks in clay and not in marble and that ‘neither he nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as expressive of personal feeling and that nothing is looked for except mechanical polish’. However, it was not until the early years of the 20th century that his ideas on direct carving were put into practice by sculptors in Britain. Among the most important pioneers were Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who collectively illustrate some of the range of issues involved. For Epstein, the activity of carving was linked to his interest in sculpture from outside the Graeco-Roman tradition, such as that of Assyria and Africa, and it reflected his contact in Paris with Brancusi and Modigliani, who had similar interests. For Gill, a return to carving was a return to a medieval practice, through which he hoped to overcome the iniquitous effect of industrialism in dividing the work of the thinker and the maker. For Gaudier-Brzeska, carving was equated with a struggle that was both manual and creative, an aspect of a ‘virile’ art that contrasted with the ‘feminine’ modelling that had dominated the previous generation of New Sculptors.

After the First World War a number of British sculptors, including Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, practised direct carving as a dogma (see truth to material), while others, such as Frank Dobson and Leon Underwood, worked as both carvers and modellers. In France, direct carving moved from being chiefly an avant-garde concern before 1914 to wider acceptance in the 1920s, and at the same time it was taken up in other countries; Fritz Wotruba was an influential exponent in Austria, for example, as was William Zorach in the USA. After the Second World War the carving versus modelling debate was rendered largely obsolete by the prevalence of newer techniques, although for many older sculptors the sense of personal engagement with the material through carving still remained of central importance.