Three Favorite Western Sculptures (More)

THREE FAVORITE WESTERN SCULPTURES (MORE)

“Awakening Slave” (1530-34) by Michelangelo

“Night” (1902-1909) by Aristide Maillol

“Sisyphus” (2007) by Jane McAdam Freud

His complete name is Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, but today he is known simply as Michelangelo, and everything else is forgotten. One of the foremost luminaries, together with Leonardo da Vinci, of the Renaissance, he is considered by some as the greatest sculptor of Western civilization. Michelangelo revived classical sculpture and some would say even perfected it.

If Renaissance culture and art speak to us today, the message is inevitably unsatisfying, because the Renaissance belongs to a period of history considerably removed from our present time. We are not the children of the Renaissance. We do not belong to the generations who had been poised for transformation at the beginning of modern history. We are at least 500 years removed from that time.

I guess that it is for this reason—the alienation that inevitably results from our being separated in time—that I am challenged to find favorite pieces in art that has been conceived so distantly in history.

Michelangelo’s series of unfinished slaves may not have been executed with his legendary polish, but they speak to the modern age for precisely this reason. They are works of art in process, embodying our shifting, unsettled worldview. They lack smoothness and finish, that is, the self-assurance of an earlier time.

“Awakening Slave” (1530-34), so named by curators, is the most salient. Michelangelo, it is related, said that he worked to liberate the forms imprisoned in marble. Sure enough, this piece shows us a strapping male trapped in stone, struggling to free himself. Michelangelo demonstrates his expert understanding of the human figure, the male in particular, and reveals his love of the subject.

Here the emergent form of the slave depicts the universal human condition. We are all trapped, as it were, wrestling to be freed.

Deeply emotive, it is almost Expressionist in style.

Awakening Slave (1530-34) by Michelangelo

At first glance, Aristide Maillol looks like a classical sculptor, but he is not. True, his sculptures are naturalistic and figurative, dwelling on the female form. However, they are not intended to be true to life. Monumental, stylized, idealized, they are suggestively symbolic.

Bordering on abstraction, Maillol is considered a precursor of Henry Moore. Maillol, like Auguste Rodin, is transitional and modern.

“Night” (1902-1909) impresses upon us the expressive power of the human form. Seated, geometrically almost a cube, the heavy, reposeful, quiescent figure indicates a state of monumental rest.

Maillol’s seated figure communicates a message that resonates in its individual parts, some of which are shown here in detail. The folded arms, the broad back, even the dutiful toes convey withdrawal with rejuvenation.

Night (1902-1909) by Aristide Maillol

Night, detail

Night, detail (feet)

“Sisyphus” (2007) by Jane McAdam Freud is a remarkable piece of contemporary sculpture. Freud portrays the tragic protagonist from Greek myth, Sisyphus, imprisoned by the gods, endlessly laboring in a task eternally unfinished.

Kneeling, hands pushing against the rock, his desperate condition is shown as irreversible and permanent. Almost one with the jagged stone, he emerges from the surface in relief, incapable, ironically, of even the least movement. Our vantage from the rear offers us, unusually, a look at the soles of his feet and his raised shoulder blades. The work is assembled from several large blocks.

Combining original expressive elements, Freud offers us a figurative work of tremendous power, monumental in conception.

Sisyphus (2007) by Jane McAdam Freud