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PARTISAN REVIEW
the vacuum left by the extinction of the Graeco-Roman-Renaissance
tradition.
Meanwhile Cubism had appeared in painting. Brancusi, under its
indirect influence and the more direct one of Negro sculpture, was
able to begin the transition from the monolith to a new kind of sculp–
ture derived from modern painting and the wood-carvings of Africa
and Oceania: a kind of sculpture entirely new to European civilization,
sculpture as drawing in space, as the enclosure of space, and as an
art no longer restricted to the solid mass and to human and animal
forms. Brancusi himself does not complete the transition. What he does,
at least in his work in stone and metal, is push the monolith to such
an extreme, reduce it to such archetypal simplicity, that it is exhausted
more or less as a principle of form. The new sculpture really begins
with Braque's and Picasso's Cubist collages, springing up out of a mode
of painting that thrusts forms outward from the picture plane instead of
drawing them back into the recessions of illusionary space.* Thence the
new sculpture grew through the bas-relief constructions that Picasso and
then Arp and Schwitters created by raising the collage above the picture
plane; and from there Picasso, a magnificent sculptor as well as painter,
along with the Russian Constructivists Tatlin, Pevsner, and Gabo, and
also Archipenko, Duchamp-Villon, Lipschitz, Laurens and then Giaco–
metti, at last delivered it into the positive truth of free space, altogether
away from the picture plane.
This new, pictorial, draughtsman's sculpture has more or less aban–
doned the traditional materials of stone and bronze
in
favor of ones
more flexible under such modern tools as the oxyacetylene torch: steel,
iron, alloys, glass, plastics. It has no regard for the unity of its physical
medium and will use any number of different materials in the same work
and any variety of applied colors-as befits an art that sees in its pro–
ducts almost as much that is pictorial as is sculptural. The sculptor–
constructor is,
if
anything, more drawn to ideas conceived by analogy
with landscape than to those derived from single objects.
The new sculpture is also freed, as should be self-evident from
what I have said, from the requirements of imitative representation. And
it is here precisely that its advantage over modern painting, as far as
range of expression is concerned, lies. The same evolution in sensibility
that denied to painting the illusion of depth and of representation made
*
There is a curious historical symmetry here. Our Western, naturalistic paint–
ing had its own origins in the sculpture of the 12th a nd 13th Centuries, which
was 200 years ahead of painting in point of capacity for imitating nature, and
which continued to dominate the other arts until the late 15th Century.
