The Liberty of Thought Itself

By ROBERT HUGHES

The very title of this summer's big show at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which fills a floor of the cavernous Centre Georges Pompidou with 263 works by 95 artists (through Oct. 13), gives one pause: "Qu'est-ce que la Sculpture Moderne?" (What is modern sculpture?). A tendentious question, perhaps, but not without its point. Most museumgoers feel they know what modern painting is. About sculpture they care less and are less sure.

If you asked a Parisian or a New Yorker in 1886 what sculpture was, the answer (after a short blank stare) would have been: statues. Statuary, to borrow the mordant phrase of Claes Oldenburg many decades later, was "bulls and greeks and lots of nekkid broads." The sculptor of that day was responsible -- as in the age of film, TV and other ways of mass-circulating the visual icon he is not -- for commemorating the dead, illustrating religious myth or dogma and expressing social ideals. The aim and meaning of the work were rarely in doubt. With statues, good or bad, from garden gnome to Marcus Aurelius, you knew where you were.

In the 20th century, which, in cultural matters, really began around 1880, this changed. After 1910 the momentum of change was plain to all. Why do we always speak of "modern sculpture" but never of "modern statues"? Because one of the criteria of modernity itself was the degree to which sculptors angled their work away from the accepted forms of social communication via the human figure. Not because they lost interest in the figure -- on the contrary, the years 1900-1950 were rich in figure sculpture and body-haunted objects by Matisse, Picasso, Archipenko, Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because they did not want to serve the social consensus in the way that statuary did. Consequently, few public commemorative sculptures made in the past 75 years have any real importance in the modernist canon; and conversely, modern public sculpture is mostly banal in the extreme.

Modern sculpture after 1910 wanted the liberty that painting had already . claimed -- the unobliged liberty of thought itself. It extracted new models from the changing culture around it, from painting and music, anthropology and psychoanalysis, from the idea of the "primitive" (that escape route of a culture stuck in the gridlock of its own sophistication) and the dream of a utopian machine future. One could have a sculpture that was also a little building, like Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 A.M., 1933, or a still life, like Henri Laurens's Dish with Grapes, 1918; an image of landscape, like David Smith's Australia, 1951, or for that matter a real landscape, like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, a quarter-mile coil of rock now sunk in Utah's Great Salt Lake.

Marble, wood and bronze remained fundamental materials, but they were used in unorthodox ways; and in addition, a sculptor could use any kind of junk, from cardboard, tin and pine boards (the stuff of Picasso's and Laurens's cubist constructions) to the wire and celluloid favored by constructivists, the steel plates and boiler ends forged by Smith, and so on down to rocks, twigs, burlap, twine or even the artist's own dung, which, canned and labeled by the Italian Piero Manzoni in 1961, provided a nastily prophetic comment on fetishism in late modern art. On its road away from statuary, sculpture gained a new depth of cultural resonance, a flexibility of invention, an access to the inner self, a power of aggression and a weird, self-reflexive playfulness. All it lost was its audience.

The unpopularity of modernist sculpture, as compared with painting, is a fact of life. Americans, especially, seem to prefer painting to sculpture because of its greater power of illusion and fantasy. (Sculpture is resistant stuff, hard to fantasize about. Renoir used to provoke erotic reveries; Maillol, never. You can imagine a painted body as flesh, but a sculpted one remains stone -- hence the archetypal frustration expressed in the myth of Pygmalion.) Combine the relative unpopularity of modern sculpture with its awesome complexity as a subject and one sees the problem of this show. There has not, in fact, been such a survey in France, or even in the U.S., in living memory.

The task of putting it together fell to an American curator, Margit Rowell, formerly of the Guggenheim Museum. Her speciality is constructivism, and she is nothing if not clear about her agenda. Of late, a great deal of scholarly energy has gone into displaying the continuities between 19th and 20th century art and correcting the myth that the modern art that mattered represented a wrenching break with the past. Without the culture of the salon and the Academy, no Matisse; you cannot imagine a work like Constantin Brancusi's Caryatid, 1940, without its triple root in the peasant woodcarvings of the artist's native Rumania, his study of African sculpture and his passion for the archaic Mediterranean.

And yet such works are very unlike their ancestors. One must look first at the differences, then at the similarities -- so Rowell argues; and the show is based on her belief that "sculpture is in essence a 20th century idea." The result is a big exhibition conceived with elegant if dogmatic precision (in that department, Rowell is more French than the French) and composed largely of masterpieces whose arrangement provokes one to reflect and argue rather than simply gape.

Certainly there is room for argument. Feminists will decry the shortage of women -- a mere seven artists out of 95. This may be more the 20th century's fault than the curator's, but all the same, it is surprising that Rowell could not find room for a sculptor as distinctive as Louise Bourgeois. French patriots will be irked by her certainty that the contribution of native Gauls to modern sculpture, compared with their achievements in painting, was slight. Yet it is probably true that if no Frenchman had either made or commissioned a sculpture since the death of Rodin, the history of modernism would look much the same. Nearly all the people who worked in Paris and changed the fundamental grammar of sculpture between 1900 and 1950 were foreigners: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Julio Gonzalez (Spanish), Giacometti (Swiss), Brancusi (Rumanian), Jacques Lipchitz (Lithuanian), Alexander Calder (American), Alexander Archipenko and Naum Gabo (Russian). All manner of French favorites, from Aristide Maillol to Jean-Robert Ipousteguy, are left out.

By contrast, some artists whose names are hardly known in the U.S., let alone in France, are included: the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), for instance, whose 1914 figure Toga and Worm, with its crisp, eupeptic elegance, is one of the delights of the show. Russian-Polish Constructivist Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951) is represented by six works; but there is only one Henry Moore, and a very early one at that, a 1929 stone figure that records his interest in the crankshaft rhythms of Mayan Chacmool sculptures.

The show argues that there are two main lines in modern sculpture. One addresses itself to nature, the other to culture. The first descends from Gauguin in Tahiti and from Matisse's early bronze nudes and heads. It winds through expressionism and emerges as a "primitive" strain, whose Great White Gods are Picasso, Brancusi and Giacometti. Its consequences include the surrealist fascination with play and dream ("nature" here being the unconscious), the abstract expressionist interest in gesture and archetype, the ritual-mythic sculpture of Joseph Beuys and the recent work of arte povera (literally, "poor art") sculptors like Mario Merz and Giovanni Anselmo.

The other line, the "aesthetic of culture," as the catalog calls it, is taken to begin with cubism -- most vividly, with Picasso's sheet-metal Guitar of 1912 and his Mandolin and Clarinet of 1913, which are everything statues had not been: not monolithic but open, not cast or carved but assembled from flat planes. The sound of these instruments would reverberate from Russia to Spain and supply the leitmotiv of constructivism. This line of sculpture, posited on rational systems, modern materials, urban-technological rather than tribal metaphors, with incessant reference to other arts and disciplines such as music, painting, architecture and mathematics, ends up (for the purpose of this show) in minimal art.

Naturally, there are some artists who fit neither category, like Gonzalez, in whose iron heads blacksmithing meets cubism, and at least one who dominates both, Picasso. It is he who emerges from this show as the archsculptor of the 20th century, the great surveyor who chose the spots where sculpture, as distinct from statuary, would stake its claims.

No matrix is perfect, but this is pretty good; and it draws authority from the presence of many telling works that are not always textbook familiar. Giacometti's The Nose, 1947, is rarely exhibited, but no modern sculpture speaks more of anguish than this Pinocchio head, its nose protruding like a corroded spear from the cage in which it hangs. Nor can many objects exist that say more about the postwar imagery of brute matter, the ashen protein of a half-dismembered culture, than Lucio Fontana's 49 SC 6, 1949. There are better-known David Smiths than Gondola II, 1964, with its assertive pictorial planes of painted steel that answer to the blunt black ovoids in his friend Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, but few that are stronger and more succinct. And to look at Anselmo's Torsion, 1968, consisting of nothing more than 30 meters of flannel screwed into a thick, tense hawser by an iron bar, is to realize afresh how strongly sculpture can affect one's sense of one's own body.

Such choices are not haphazard. Rowell, 45, has what most curators lack, a discriminating eye that can lay surprises, odd twists and half-noticed comparisons instead of the usual linear plod through the potato field of historical categories. This is not the kind of show where the art looks like an array of slides. Even if you know the works in advance, they still seem fresh. Sculpture ought to be made to look as clear as painting, and that, to its credit, is what the Centre Pompidou has done.