Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Modern American Art - Sculptors Oronzio Maldarelli, in New York, has been quietly coming to prominence for direct-cut figures and groups where a tender emotional quality is felt in unusual combination with the largeness and simplicity of the figure conceptions. Other New Yorkers also producing sculptures of more than ordinary vigor and originality are Aaron J. Goodelman, Maurice Glickman, Franc Epping, Albino Cavallito, and John Hovannes. Reuben Nakian is an able and thorough craftsman in the modern spirit and is almost alone in attempting to carry naturalistic portrait sculpture into a new phase of expressiveness. Carl Walters, working in Woodstock, New York, is quite alone in possessing the power to create ceramic sculptures with the authentic form and color distinction of some of the older Persian products. His animal figures are particularly effective. Hunt Diederich also occupies a place apart. He brought to America in the early days of modernism a conception of simple, formalized, and often studiedly decorative sculptural design, worked out chiefly in iron silhouettes. He has exerted a revolutionary influence upon standards of design in a large field. His Running Dogs, in the Whitney Museum, and Jockey, in the Newark Museum, show two stages in his progress toward more complete emphasis upon expressive form. Working in Mexico now, he is carrying his sculptural design into a new phase. Concetta Scaravaglione has been for several years one of the outstanding women among modern sculptors in this country. She has made noticeable gains in recent years in the direction of boldness and vitality; and there is in her present work a quality more often found in men's work. Anna Glenny, of Buffalo, also well known among younger women, produces studies with intense psychological suggestiveness, without compromising the sculptural character of her work; and in this there is a reminder of Lehmbruck. Minna Harkavy is interested in character studies, to which she brings an ironic touch. Marion Walton and Berta Margoulies, Sonia Gordon Brown, Anita Weschler, and Hélène Sardeau are all significant moderns working in the New York region. The Museum of Modern Art has exhibited in the past a small bronze horse, designed by an unknown nineteenth-century New Englander as a weather vane. This has been called the most complete sculptural expression yet realized in America, by persons who believe that the American creative genius expresses itself most completely in what they call "primitive forthrightness "--a quality asserted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folk art in this country. It is a quality found often in American modern sculpture. Simplification is the basis of the modern sculptural style in this country, in the estimate of William Zorach, who has contributed an article on this subject to the National Encyclopaedia. He also says that "American business with its enthusiasm for novelty and change, has completely adopted the abstract for commercial purposes, until the genuine among the young sculptors have felt that perhaps, after all, it really belongs to the realm of pure decoration." The term "abstraction" as commonly used in connection with the work of a generation of revolutionary European sculptors, who were twentieth-century followers of Cézanne, and as used in Wilenski Meaning of Modern Sculpture, Herbert Read Art Now, and other works of wide acceptance, is not compatible, however, with the meaning of commercial decoration. It implies, as does abstraction in painting, an analytical return to the fundamentals of organic construction and the reordering of those fundamentals in an abstract and architectonic unity. Its intention is to present a vital experience in art as an equivalent for a vital experience in nature. Alexander Archipenko, the Russian internationalist, who came to this country to live in the early twenties, has produced one of the most fertile and imaginative expressions in the field of modern abstract sculpture. He has probably tested out more thoroughly than anyone else in America possibilities inherent in sculptural abstraction, over a period when little progress has been made in any country except by isolated individuals. As Picassoists sought in one period to demonstrate an art of pure form and pure color in abstract paintings, Archipenko, working in equal freedom from the familiar appeals of visual association, has aspired to show, in sculptural forms, "in the substantial body, nothing but its constructive law and its function." He has also experimented widely in the expressiveness of machine-age materials for sculptural uses and has carried on other experiments that are comprehensible only in the light of theories derived from Gaudier, Brancusi, and others. Recently, he has exhibited figures of great simplicity and suggestiveness, figures with continuous and flowing rhythms that give them the character of Wei statues. Isamu Noguchi, the California-born, Scotch and Japanese sculptor, works with the traditional and unerring form sensitiveness of his Oriental ancestors. In the past, some of his most distinguished work has been in portrait studies. At present, he is experimenting in machine-age materials and in making formal constructions that combine symbolic and functional expression. José Ruis de Rivera uses highly polished brass tubing and other industrial materials for sculptures. Warren Wheelock is a competent sculptor whose experiments in semi-abstraction were begun before the Armory Show. Beyond these workers in the direction of abstract expression, there are the Constructivists and Concretionists, working at their different stages of analysis and research; they are, for the most part, outside the ordinarily accepted definition of sculpture. Some critics, and most of the outstanding modern sculptors in this country, believe that our further progress in this field lies along the road of greater simplification. Other critics believe that there must be a general return to the bare fundamentals of abstract and expressive form, and a rebuilding from those fundamentals, through experiment and a period of archaism, before we gradually produce a kind of sculpture that expresses the genius of twentieth-century life, and lends itself to expressive integration with twentieth-century architecture.