| This study addresses the problematic position of sculpture in the theory and practice of modernist art in Germany in the 1920s. Steeped in academic conventions, largely restricted to the human figure and haunted by the physical presence of its material, sculpture seemed particularly ill suited to analyze or represent modernity. And yet, for all of its outmoded qualities, sculpture proved remarkably vital. Conventionally understood as the static display of mass in space, sculpture now became inflected by the materials and technology of modern industry, the emerging visual practices of photography and film, and the processes of mass production and consumption.; Through a series of chronologically organized case studies, the problem of modernist sculpture is examined from different vantage points: the turn-of-the-century sculptor and theorist, Adolf von Hildebrand, whose formalist aesthetics respond to new visual media of modernity; Rudolf Belling, who rose to prominence after the First World War and aggressively pursued opportunities for sculpture in the newly commercialized spaces of the metropolis; the unstable position of sculpture at the modernist academy, the Bauhaus—e.g. Gropius's attempt at a modernist monument, controversies between architecture, ornament and statuary, and the centrality of photography to the practice of sculpture at the late Bauhaus; concluding with a design by Naum Gabo for a searchlight installation in Berlin in conjunction with a festival of light and commerce.; The artists I address do not form a coherent group, but in their reactions to the cultural conditions they faced, and in the successes and failures of their work, they reveal important aspects of the crisis of modernist sculpture and underscore a profound uncertainty about the nature of sculpture's relationship to monuments, architecture, photography and mass-produced commodities. Their works, and the explanations and defenses offered for them, represent an effort to develop an engaged and historically authentic sculptural practice in the changing visual and material culture of modernity. Together they suggest the partial collapse of sculpture as category of art in the Weimar Republic and the instability that has characterized the theory and practice of modernist sculpture ever since. |
