Works

It used to be assumed that sculpture was the original art of prehistoric man and that drawing and painting were much later acquisitions. This view was based on the erroneous idea that sculpture involved a much simpler process of reproduction than drawing — the idea that modelling or carving in the round was a process of direct imitiation, whereas drawing or painting required the translation of three-dimensional experience into two-dimensional abstraction. Nothing could be farther from the psychological facts. Volume, the notion of three-dimensional mass, is not given by direct visual perception. We see objects from several points of view and retain one particular and signicant aspect of a memory image. . . . It therefore requires an imaginative or at least a mental effort to pass beyond the memory image and construct a three-dimensional inage. We are aided in this task by other sensations or by the memory of such sensations — sensations of weight or touch — but this fact only serves to emphasize the complicated mental procedure involved in the conception and the representation of the solidity of a solid object. — Sir Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture, p. 26-27

General

Theme and Subject

Genres

Individual Sculptors born before 1850

Individual Sculptors born after 1850

Sculpture from other countries
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Last modified 6 January 2009