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Sculptors in all countries have felt the need of restoring to this art its antique and monumental character and, at the same time, of making it the medium for expressing their own direct visual and associative experience. Doing that has involved a general turning away from the apparently permanent ideal of classical Greece. No such conception would have appeared tenable in recognized American art up to a quarter of a century ago. But the modern sculptors in America, responding to the general impulse of the century's creative energy towards new sources of influence, have been studying the work of the earlier Greeks, the Egyptians, the Orientals; and they have been particularly attracted to the precedent of early native American folk art where it arose through utilitarian craftsmanship to the distinction of a creative expression in its own right. They have also been drawn to the still not completely studied expressions of the pre-Columbian cultures of this hemisphere, north and south. Gaston Lachaise, a Frenchman who was already working in this country before 1913 and who died in 1935, was one of the pioneers in America of this modern movement. William Zorach is the most prominent contemporary. J. B. Flannagan, Robert Laurent, José de Creeft, Heinz Warneke, Alfeo Faggi, and Polygnotos Vagis are all contributors, each in his own way. The international movement includes the names of Eric Gill and the American Jew, Jacob Epstein, in London, Constantin Brancusi in Paris, Ivan Meštrovic in Jugoslavia. The Frenchman Joseph Bernard, a pioneer cutter in stone, was a strong early influence in this country. The French Gaudier-Brzeska, killed in the World War, was a powerfully felt influence in the direction of a revolutionary, geometrical expression. Due to the personal appeal in his story, his actual status as a creative experimenter was somewhat overlooked, and his theories and demonstrations have been very little explored in this country. The contribution of Brancusi is felt throughout the work of young sculptors, though usually as a very superficial and unassimilated asset. The post-Rodinist Maillol in France and the Germans Metzner, Lehmbruck, and Kolbe are figures in a development distinct from that of the seekers for a new geometrical and abstract principle of organization. The American way of experiencing and expressing, as observed in the maturest modern American work, is more in line with the German development and with Maillol's followers in France. The twentieth-century conception of sculptural form arose partly from Cubism, partly from the greatly increased general knowledge of ancient and medieval art and of the true character of abstract archaic art whenever and wherever found, and partly out of a new conception of functionalism as a principle widely active throughout the new age and especially felt in design activities. Sculptural form appears characteristically when the artist selects a block of wood or stone suitable for the realization of his idea and, without losing the conception of pure form, cuts away the material to develop broad volumes, working out the elements of his design in the terms of these volumes. He rounds off or flattens out or hollows the material and establishes planes that he plays against each other in a rhythmic and formal order within the unity of the compact mass. He correlates form and volume so that the expressive sculptural character that belongs to the material and the characteristic process for working the material reinforce the particular emotional or symbolic value that is a purely creative product of the artist's imagination. The general impulse of moderns to eliminate superficial effects and to arrive at a fundamental, structural expression has been fortified by the precedent of such ancient art expressions as the portraits of seated rulers of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, for instance, where the basic cube form of the stone is preserved and is often taken as the motive that is carried out in the development of the design. Sculptural character, as accepted by many modern artists, depends upon the simple surface, the austere form, and a total quality of monumentality. Since these are qualities resulting most characteristically when the artist works in direct contact with his material from start to finish (instead of modeling his design in clay and turning it over to artisan workers to be cut into stone or marble or sending it to a foundry to be cast in bronze), there has been a tendency from time to time to overemphasize the importance of direct cutting by the artist. Michelangelo said, "When I speak of sculpture I mean works which are cut away; the procedure of building up resembles painting." Recalling this and reviewing the products of the great periods of sculpture of past times that have now become available generally in the museum and that ordinarily represent a cutting-away process, many artists have wished to separate the two processes of cutting and modeling, attributing to the former alone the power to create the true experience of sculpture. Style after style of surface-effect modeling has been developed successively through recent centuries, it is recalled; and these styles have been systematized and have passed into stereotypes. They not only resemble painting, but a kind of painting that has been undergoing its own successive stages of decadence. Most Americans, however, use the two processes interchangeably according to the demands of work they may have in hand. Their product is remote from Greco-Roman idealism, remote from the selective naturalism of Canova, whose splendidly frozen nudes were re-created by Powers for admiring generations of Americans in the last century, and remote from the romantically conceived and warmly fleshlike surfacings of the Rodin feminine figures. Gaston Lachaise studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he came to this country at the outset of his career because he felt the need of working in freedom from established tradition. To some extent he demonstrated the meaning of the revolutionary modern movement. His work is strongly sculptural in character. Much of it has a symbolic significance, especially the studies of women. His subject characteristically was Woman. In the ample forms of his mature feminine figures, he has made clear, he wished to express something of the spirit of America, as the foster mother and the producer of generations of creative young men. His early figures display a baroque feeling with some attention to decorative effects. Later works, notably the strongly cut women's heads, are archaic in character and display an unconscious return on the part of their creator to effects not seen in work of the Western World for a thousand years. One of his last works was a massive, elemental figure of a recumbent female cut from a limestone block weighing several tons and intended to be displayed upon an elevation on a wooded hilltop. The subject, which he called La Montagne, is an interpretation of the universal significance of woman. The theme is completely embodied in the terms of monumental form and heroic proportioning, and in the opinion of some critics the work is unexcelled in this country. William Zorach has been mentioned as a pioneer in the field of Cubist painting. About 1922, he turned experimentally to sculpture, and he has been perhaps the outstanding figure of the modern movement in this country, as an independent creative worker and also as an educator, leader, and popularizer at the most advanced position of general public acceptance. There is less abstraction and less symbolism in his sculpture than in the work of Lachaise, though there are similar characteristics in the two expressions. Zorach had much to do with the establishment of direct cutting as a practice among younger men, and his own work is oftenest done in this way. He has a fine, direct, workmanlike attitude and an almost primitive simplicity of presentation. In The Embrace (Museum of Modern Art), the Woman's Head (Downtown Gallery), the torso at the Whitney Museum, and in the early studies of his children, the emphasis is upon sculptural form, the correlation of form and volume, and the organization of planes in a continuous rhythmic pattern. Holger Cahill says of this work: "It has style, but is never stylized. Like all contemporary art that is truly alive, it establishes a living continuity between tradition and today." Zorach was born in 1887, and received his education at the National Academy of Design and in Paris.