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noodling about sculpture, and solidity
Aug. 31st, 2007 12:00 pmBack in early July, I spent some time in the National Gallery looking at sculpture. There is a medium-sized room, near the door I first went in, full of statues by Rodin and Degas. The contrast was really remarkable. Just looking at the sculpture, I'm tempted to say, "Rodin knows what he is doing. He can make the sculpture look and feel the way he wants." But there's more to it than that.
Rodin sculptures show muscles. I don't know how much of it is liking to look at evident muscles, or using muscles to represent strength or tension or what have you, or using anatomical structure to constrain the form of art like writing a sonnet instead of free verse. Degas isn't trying to show muscles. His figures hardly even look like they have bones. They're all smooth curves. I had never seen the sculptures before, but Degas's paintings of dancers are quoted all over the place, and they show the same kind of softness.
At first glance, an ideal of beauty like Degas is showing looks like something very different from the emaciated ideal of women's beauty that's been shown in pop culture for as long as I've been paying attention. But Degas wasn't painting dancers. (He might have been sitting in a dance studio while he sketched. That's different.) He wasn't even painting women with enough musculature to stand up. When he tried to sculpt his figures, he had to prop them up with metal fixtures coming in from the sides, because they were too soft, too unstructured. Being fat or soft is different from not having muscles. My body has muscles with padding over them, and I am not particularly strong or athletic. Degas was a clumsy sculptor, but his statues still managed to show the same romantic ideal as his paintings, very soft beauty with no strength to it at all.
This conversation was a couple of weeks ago, but it's still good. These things don't change in a few weeks, or even a few years.
http://callunav.livejournal.com/746463.html
It's about the problem of holding up an ideal of women's beauty that is so thin the figures have no room for muscle. That's the current shape of the problem. A more general frame might be that a beautiful woman is not supposed to look strong.
Rodin sculptures show muscles. I don't know how much of it is liking to look at evident muscles, or using muscles to represent strength or tension or what have you, or using anatomical structure to constrain the form of art like writing a sonnet instead of free verse. Degas isn't trying to show muscles. His figures hardly even look like they have bones. They're all smooth curves. I had never seen the sculptures before, but Degas's paintings of dancers are quoted all over the place, and they show the same kind of softness.
At first glance, an ideal of beauty like Degas is showing looks like something very different from the emaciated ideal of women's beauty that's been shown in pop culture for as long as I've been paying attention. But Degas wasn't painting dancers. (He might have been sitting in a dance studio while he sketched. That's different.) He wasn't even painting women with enough musculature to stand up. When he tried to sculpt his figures, he had to prop them up with metal fixtures coming in from the sides, because they were too soft, too unstructured. Being fat or soft is different from not having muscles. My body has muscles with padding over them, and I am not particularly strong or athletic. Degas was a clumsy sculptor, but his statues still managed to show the same romantic ideal as his paintings, very soft beauty with no strength to it at all.
This conversation was a couple of weeks ago, but it's still good. These things don't change in a few weeks, or even a few years.
http://callunav.livejournal.com/746463.html
It's about the problem of holding up an ideal of women's beauty that is so thin the figures have no room for muscle. That's the current shape of the problem. A more general frame might be that a beautiful woman is not supposed to look strong.
