Relations of Painting and Sculpture
George
L.
K. Morris
I.
BEFORE EXPLORlNG
the
curiously fluctuating connections he–
tween painting and sculpture, the decisive properties of each must
he
made clearly distinguishable. Many qualities are certainly
common to both art-forms. Essential divergences are also ap–
parent, and it is upon the latter that I shall dwell at some length;
certain opposing characteristics may seem too obvious to mention,
whereas others have proved sufficiently elusive for the leading
artists throughout whole period$ (often unknowingly) to evoke
from one art-form the properties inherent
in
the other. I know
of no other expressive field
in
which a comparable transposition
could have been possible; when music or painting is spoken of
as "literary," for instance, we mean the character and inclination
of the work. But when a painting is conceived as sculpture we
mean that a realization has taken place opposed to the very nature
of the medium. Moreover, far from detracting from the quality,
such paradoxical metamorphoses may he said to have produced
some of the finest achievements in the past.
I might illustrate the extent of the confusion by a reminiscence
of my early (academic) painting-instructors. I can recall
how it was drilled into pupils that painting
was
sculpture,-a sort
of color-sculpture, conceived through such readily-apprehended
symbols as shading, contour, and chiamscuro,-for this indeed
had been the academic approach ever since the Italian Renaissance.
My
confusion may be imagined when somewhere I came across
cezanne's observation that it had taken him forty years to discover
that "painting was
not
sculpture." Without an understanding of
the former tradition it is impossible to feel the revolutionary
import of the latter.
