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PAINTED SCULPTURE*A Letter From
MORRIS COX November, 1952
Recent Editorials in the WORLD REVIEW urge us to consider a fresh
assessment of painted sculpture in general, and tempt us for a start
with an exciting account of what Spain has to offer.
Old arguments for and against the
painting of sculpture are bound to crop up again as they have before,
and artists and critics may think they know them all by heart. Actually,
however, as far as we can tell, the crux of the matter seems hardly
to have been adequately dealt with. The July Editorial comes near
to it when speaking of ‘the power of creating magic images’
... ‘releasing the spirit from the tree and the conjuring up
of figures from the living wood’, without, however, suggesting
how a successful marriage of painting and sculpture begins or develops.
If this could be done, we might better understand how the two came
to fall apart and may even yet be reconciled.
The material of sculpture (not to
be confused with modelling) is commonly wood and stone, but before
sculpture even begins, certain wood and stone is reverenced for
its own sake. For there were sacred stones and trees, supposedly
inhabited by spirits, which were given ‘life’, ‘fed’,
or maintained by man, in close proximity to their physical manifestations,
with the help of suitable offerings.
Highly important among these was the
ceremony of LUSTRATION, which consists of pouring water over the
sacred object, water, milk or oil, the intention perhaps being to
give ‘light’, or a magically-convincing appearance of
life, to the body of the in-dwelling spirit.
But even holy trees die at last. The
timber, however, could be preserved. Thus portions of dead trees
(still regarded as sacred), as well as holy stones, could be set
up and perhaps protected from the weather or profane gaze by a simple
shelter or shrine. It is not a very great step for this material
to become ‘touched up’ by primitive tools into the beginnings
of sculpture.
Modifications in lustration, too,
become evident. At some period, ochreous colouring-matter becomes
added to the water, milk, etc., before pouring over: red ochre being
popular, with its blood-like, life-suggesting vibrations. The lustrating
substance now acts as a vehicle for colouring-matter.
But when a material, however sacred
in itself, begins to be shaped by man, the question of fallibility
arises. What shape, after all, is the ‘right’ one? What
is most like, or best suited to, the ‘spirit’? At first,
unconscious collective reactions may find their own level in agreed
patterns, but as thinking develops, criticism can enter in, with
the artist less relied upon to furnish what HE may think is the
desirable exterior form of the image. An authoritative body, therefore,
grows into power, which will thereafter not be altered. This body
will similarly exercise control over the vicissitudes of lustration.
In spite of all, however, a growing ‘realism’ will be
seen in the sculptural forms, while the lustrating material will
be spread with some deliberation over clearly-defined areas, and
not simply poured over. With various colouring materials coming
into use, applied to the statue with a brush, the process can now
properly be described as ‘painting’.
Thus, in time, from the first tentative
beginnings, the manifest ‘likenesses’ of the spirit forms
become more realistically defined. As sculptural skill increases,
so lustration, or painting, becomes more ‘life-like’.
Spanish painted sculpture of today might well be illustrative of
this process in its final stage, for Catholic communities still
preserve something of an essential ‘magic’ with which
to surround and impregnate their revered objects. Perhaps the Editorial
is right in saying that for such people the painted statue is ‘more
approachable and more dear’. It might be argued, however, that,
for some other people, spiritual qualities in a statue might seem
superficial and far less truly divine in so ar as they are painted
into humanised likenesses. It is very easy to see, though, that
for the believer so many of his images still become ‘miraculous’.
With science in the ascendent, magic,
with its particular dependence on sub-conscious emotive states,
is becoming rather suspect. Apart from religion, what magic there
is emerges rather weakly out of neo-primitive and personal awareness,
supported by very little authority from either the church or the
popular mind. But it is here that painting and sculpture are kept
most widely apart.
With most of Henry Moore’s work,
any application of colour would hinder appreciation of the intrinsic
beauty of his materials. Some of it might take a simple, ‘poured’
effect, but somehow the process, being reminiscent of ceremonial,
brings in an element which would be bound to worry him. Marino Marini,
on the other hand (almost exclusively a modeller, it should be remembered),
uses traces of colour to some advantage. He does, however, cheat
a little, since the patina and simplification of his surface treatment
suggests that of sculpture dug up from a past civilisation. Some
of it, in truth, almost seems to groan, as though partially-reanimated
creatures are struggling vainly with their flesh encrusted with
old lava. Marini’s colouring effects, too, convey the impression
of old lustrations in the act of flaking off rather than of recent
ones freshly put on. This cheating is, however, most appealing in
an age like our own where antiques and antique effects are of growing
interest and importance.
Without pursuing our inquiry any further
into modelling (or pottery, in which the use of colour is generally
accepted), it is well to keep the working differences between painting
and sculpture clearly in mind. Sculpture, it is suggested, originates
in the heightening of innate qualities sensed in the original material,
at which time lustration appears necessary to it. A drawing, however,
is a gesture, usually recorded on a flat surface with the aid of
a suitable instrument, which becomes a painting on being lustrated
with colour.1 Strictly speaking, one cannot ‘draw’ with
colour, although, particularly in oils, this is often attempted.
colour has, in fact, tended to become exclusively a painter’s
medium, heightening and giving magic to a drawing (ilLUMINAtion,
ilLUSTRAtion). The embellishment of architecture with colour is
another story.
In Roman Catholic countries where
very ancient traditions are still largely followed, the sanctification
of objects, sculptured or otherwise, is still recognised, and the
lavish use of colour encouraged. It is the ‘reformed’
religions that tend to throw doubt on all this and use the term
‘idolatrous’. The emancipated sculptor, too, in following
his own inclinations and developing formal values, has tended to
discard colour, which he regards, in its final stages, as often
a mere ‘skin’ to conceal inferior materials: pieced-up,
gesso-coated wood, etc., which cry out for such extra-sculptural
aids to save them. The battle, then, appears to be between the display
of natural magic emanating from the material itself through simple
cutting and polishing, and the tendency to cancel out such qualities
whilst enhancing the form with the more immediately appealing, but
less enduring, application of paint.
Summing up, here are the suggested
stages:
1. Certain natural materials, where
believed to be inhabited by spirit forces, are ‘fed’ by
pouring over them some bright ceremonial liquid (lustration).
2. The materials become shaped tentatively
by man into the supposed likeness of the in-dwelling spirits. Lustration
continues.
3. With the supposed likeness now
fixed by ‘authority’, and reproduced in any numbers in
any material, lustration becomes confined to a deliberate colour-printing
of specific areas.
4. Sculptors, working apart from traditional
authority, reject colour, and return by degrees to stage one, in
that the materials as found and selected are enhanced significantly
by carving.
A fifth stage, as proposed by the
Editor, would be the possibility of bringing sculpture and painting
together again in a new and profitable relationship.
If the above evolution be accepted,
it remains to be seen whether the marriage outside of authority
and a ‘form of words’, without their work appearing, on
the one hand, merely sham-religious, or on the other, waxwork-real.
____________________________
1 [Original footnote]: Michelangelo’s famous letter defines
sculpture as ‘taking away’ and painting as ‘adding
on’ to the material. -Ed.
* First published in WORLD REVIEW, November, 1952.
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