The Yale Review

2 1 R M A K I N G A S M E T A P H O R T H E S C U L P T U R E O F N A T A L I E C H A R K O W A N D M A N U E L N E R I L I N C O L N P E R R Y At this time of year, packages arrive daily, in piles, the UPS man staggering to our door like a circus performer, combination strongman and juggler. When opened, these boxes seem to fall into two general categories. In some we find products tightly, perfectly ensconced in their boxes, and in others, friends have let their wrapped gifts float free in a sea of Styrofoam peanuts. Perhaps oddly, this has made me think about two sculptors, Adolf von Hildebrand and Auguste Rodin, roughly contemporaries, whose approaches to sculpture read almost as caricatures of their respective nationalities. We have the German, his product clearly reminding us of the stone box in which it came and from which it was carved, and his nemesis, the Frenchman, whose sensuously juxtaposed forms, modeled from clay, are blissfully indi√erent to Adolf’s box. Their sculpture points in two radically opposed directions , with ramifications for the larger world, and perhaps for how we lead our individual lives. Which man’s conception of the world comes closer to our perhaps unarticulated assumptions about life? We might start with an allegorical figure from Hildebrand’s fountain in Munich, completed 1895. (If you have access to a search engine, try finding an image for ‘‘Adolf von Hildebrand, 2 2 P E R R Y Y Europa’’ to see his large, semi-nude woman sitting on a bull.) All the major planes remind us of the large block from which it emerged, almost as if a relief were carved more and more deeply until the back plane was dispensed with. He preferred doing reliefs , a format that necessitates a frontal view, like a painting whose forms recede from a foreground plane. In his Europa’s case the front view is primary, the back secondary, and the end views almost incidental. That’s the way Hildebrand conceived of sculpture; it should reassure us with memories of the block, orienting and ordering our experience, controlling our view in an almost Platonic way. In The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1897), he stresses that we all move in air the way fish exist in water, subliminally aware of our surrounding space, even with our eyes closed. To extend the UPS analogy, even somewhat complex gifts (an espresso maker!!) usually arrive in 3-D Styrofoam jigsaw pieces that keep the parts from rattling around, and this is how Hildebrand conceives of the unity between positive and negative space, which it is the artist’s job to make tangible. He derides the Farnese Bull, the massive Hellenistic sculpture now in Naples, saying, ‘‘The artist has failed to transform his fully formed figures together with the volumes of air lying between them into factors of a unitary, ideal space. Instead we find real air spaces holding the various figures apart until these appear like so many stone men and animals grouped, it would seem, quite accidentally.’’ (Find images of the Farnese Bull on the web and you’ll immediately see what he means.) While the huge Farnese figure group is carved in marble, Hildebrand has great reservations about modeling in clay as well, finding it inherently liable to the same kind of problems. Without guidance from an initial block, adding clay to an armature tends toward mere imitation, at worst a glorified wax dummy. We’re disoriented, forced to move around the form to make sense of it as best we can; it might as well be the thing itself, for no art has been involved. True, Hildebrand says, modeling is good for studying isolated forms or parts in nature, but it lacks the inherently pictorial , and immediately comprehensible, nature of stone carving. Those familiar with the work of Rodin will see what’s coming; the critique of the Farnese Bull...