direct carving

direct carving. The practice of producing 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 20th century it became associated with aesthetic, ethical, and even political issues, particularly in Britain (where it was related to the idea of truth to materials) 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 bronze casts or marble carvings, so these were usually made only when firmly commissioned. A device called a pointing machine enabled the sculptor to make an exact replica or enlargement of the plaster model by taking a series of measured points on it and transferring them to the copy. It was common for both bronzes and marbles to be produced from the same model and for smaller versions to be made for the domestic market (for an example see JOHN, SIR WILLIAM GOSCOMBE). This situation reflected economic realities (a sculptor would want to maximize earnings from a work in which much time and effort had been invested), but it also indicated a priority of idea and subject over material—the sculptor's artistry being located in the concept and form, rather than in the handicraft. A successful sculptor could thus 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 had been attacked by John Ruskin (1819–1900), the most influential British art critic of the 19th century, in his Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture (1872), where he denounced the ‘modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting it into form by machinery, 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'. In embryonic form he was stating two fundamental tenets of the philosophy of direct carving as it later developed: that stone, as opposed to plaster, has particular qualities of its own; and that there is a special relationship between the hand of the artist and the material he uses.

In spite of Ruskin's influence and the force of his arguments, it was not until the early years of the 20th century—when his authority as a critic and prophet was waning—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 in the practice. 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 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 which had dominated the previous generation of New Sculptors; he wrote that in the sculpture he admired ‘every inch of the surface is won at the point of a chisel'. The difficult economic conditions in which Gaudier-Brzeska lived also had an influence on his working methods, for he was dependent on found or even stolen fragments of stone in odd shapes that would suggest forms and subjects.

After the First World War a number of British sculptors, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and John Skeaping, practised direct carving as a dogma, while others, such as Frank Dobson and Leon Underwood, worked as both carvers and modellers. Whereas academic sculptors favoured white marble because of the smooth and detailed finish it made possible, these direct carvers used a wider variety of stone, which they exploited for its range of texture and colour (see HOPTON WOOD STONE and HORNTON STONE). However, direct carving was not associated exclusively with avant-garde artists; it was advocated, for example, by the conservative critic Kineton Parkes (1865–1938) in articles in Architectural Review and in his book The Art of Carved Sculpture (2 vols, 1931).

In France there was a similar development, whereby direct carving (taille directe in French) moved from being chiefly an avant-garde concern before 1914 to wider acceptance in the 1920s. Brancusi and Derain made direct carvings as early as 1907, and they were almost certainly preceded by the more traditional Joseph Bernard (1866–1931). The issue of precedence is complicated by the existence of an artisanal tradition of stone carving in provincial France; one of the major exponents of taille directe, André Abbal (1876–1953), came from a family of stonecarvers working near Moissac in the south of the country.

The death of Rodin in 1917 had important consequences for public awareness of the issues involved in direct carving, for until then it had not been widely appreciated how much the most famous sculptor of the day had relied on assistants (praticiens) in the physical production of his work. In 1919 there was a scandal when a number of fakes of his work were revealed, leading to legal action, and the press coverage included accounts by some of Rodin's praticiens of the extent of their involvement. The critic Louis Vauxcelles took advantage of the situation to attack the ‘lie of modelling'—the mechanical transcription of one material into another. The scandal encouraged the acceptance of direct carving, which became such a vogue that by 1922 even the praticien Charles Jonchery (1873–1937), who had been implicated in the Rodin scandal, was exhibiting work described as taille directe.

Another factor in the growth of direct carving in France was the way in which it was stimulated by nationalist rhetoric in the wake of the First World War. For example, in his book Modelleurs et tailleurs de pierre, nos traditions (1921), the sculptor Joachim Costa (1888–1971) linked direct carving with medieval French cathedrals; these had suffered so much damage in the war that some patriots accused the Germans of a deliberate campaign against them. Another consequence of the war was the demand for memorials, and several of the leading exponents of this type of sculpture were direct carvers, among them Abbal, Paul Dardé (1890–1963), and Raoul Lamourdedieu (1877–1953).

Patriotic support for direct carving also came from the journal La Douce France (originally called La Belle France), published from 1919 to 1924. Its ideology went beyond conventional nationalism to propose a pure Celtic French identity associated with the north of France, in opposition to the south, in which the heritage had been corrupted by compromise with Latin invasion. (This is especially bizarre in view of the actual geographical origins of some of the carvers.) ‘La Douce France’ was also the name of a group of sculptors, founded in 1913, which held six exhibitions between 1922 and 1931. These featured carving alongside the equally medieval arts of fresco and tapestry, but the group's most permanent monument is a pergola made for the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs (see ART DECO) in 1925. It was originally intended that the pergola should be placed in a prime site in the garden behind Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, but it has ended up in a park in Étampes, about 50 kilometres south of the capital. In this work the idea of Celtic identity is expressed in the choice of subjects from Arthurian legend, and patriotism is underlined by the use of stone from the battlefield at Verdun. However, the fact that the Russian-born Zadkine was among the ten sculptors who worked on the pergola (others were Costa, Lamourdedieu, and Pompon) suggests that La Douce France may have been more dogmatically nationalist in theory than in practice.

In the period between the two world wars, direct carving was taken up in other countries; Fritz Wotruba was an influential exponent in Austria, for example, and leading American adherents included John B. Flannagan and William Zorach. Since the Second World War the carving versus modelling debate has been rendered largely obsolete by the prevalence of newer techniques that make both procedures seem conservative. However, for many older sculptors in the postwar period the sense of personal engagement with the material through carving still remained of central importance (in her later years Barbara Hepworth was concerned to conceal the extent to which assistants participated in her work). Isamu Noguchi vividly expressed the sheer love of stone—the sense of communion with the material—that means so much to certain carvers: ‘Sometimes out of despair, when we have given up, the stone itself sends a message—should one say bit by bit—so that we may receive it. Finally everything falls into place and emerges with a precision so remarkable that it cannot be chance.’