Sentinel I

David Smith once said starkly about his sculptures, “Well, they’re all girls, Frank….I don’t make boy sculptures.” The “Frank” in...

The systematic characterisation of a distinctively modern tradition in sculpture first properly established itself in the art world in the 1930s. I say systematic with certain qualifications, because what counted as modern often involved what we might now see as contradictory tendencies. On one hand, the modern was thought to involve a focus on simplified compact plastic mass, for which the work of Maillol (fig. 64) was the most prominent model. On the other, it was conceived as a negation of …