Explore the Basics of Sculpture

Throughout history the techniques artists use to create sculptures have been largely determined by available materials and tools as well as by the purpose of the finished work.

Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert, Painting and Sculpture, 1774/1778, marble, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.110
This carved ivory statue shows a mostly nude man standing on a square base with his hands bound to one side as he looks over the other shoulder. In this photograph, his wrists are tied together to our right, and he looks off to our left with his face tucked close to that shoulder. He has a curly beard and long wavy hair, which is pushed back over his shoulders. His lips are parted and his brows gathered. Both feet are planted on the base but most of his weight rests on his straight right leg, on our left, and the other knee is bent. This makes his right hip, on our left, jut out as his torso angles to our right. A loincloth drapes around his hips and ties at his right hip, on our left. His torso, arms, and legs are muscled, and veins stand out on his hands and arms. Some cracks are visible along the surface.
François Duquesnoy, Christ Bound, 1620s, ivory, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2007.67.1
Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert, Painting and Sculpture, 1774/1778, marble, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.110
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Head of a Woman, 1913, carved and painted oak, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2002.143.1

Carving: Sculptors use metal tools and abrasives to create figures, reliefs, or abstract forms. They often work with hard materials, such as stone and wood. Carving is considered a subtractive process, which means artists remove material with chisels or other tools to form the sculpture.

This freestanding, beige, terracotta bust shows the head and shoulders of a cleanshaven man, Giuliano de' Medici, wearing a suit of armor. The bust is straight across the bottom so it rests directly on the white surface on which it is photographed. In this view, the man’s shoulders are square to us, and he looks off to our right, chin lifted. His eyes are blank, and he has a bumped, aquiline nose and rounded cheeks. His lips are closed, the corners slightly pulled back. His thick, curly hair is cut to create an angle down from his eyebrows, on either side of his forehead, to the back of his neck. His breastplate has a high collar, and, at the front center, a man’s head is sculpted in relief with his mouth wide open, head flanked by upswept wings. The yelling man’s teeth and tongue are visible, and he has wavy hair and prominent ears. The pauldrons, the armor covering Giuliano's shoulders, and the rest of the breastplate are decorated geometric shapes and curved lines that end in sharp points.
Andrea del Verrocchio, Giuliano de' Medici, c. 1475/1478, terracotta, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.127
Edgar Degas, The Tub, c. 1889, pigmented beeswax, plastiline, plaster, lead, wood, cloth, cork, wire, on wooden base, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1985.64.48

Modeling: When working with soft materials, such as clay and wax, sculptors use their hands, assisted by tools made of metal, wood, bone, or plastic, to build up forms. Sometimes they use a wood or metal framework (armature) to support the weight of the materials. Artists fire clay in a hot kiln to turn it into durable terracotta.

Molding and casting: Sculptors can create copies of their work through molding and casting. They use plaster, clay, gelatin, or silicone to make a mold of the sculpture, and then they fill the mold with moist clay, plaster, or another material to reproduce it. Some sculptures cast from a mold are considered finished works, while others are used as models for future molds.

Hammering: Sculptors occasionally use a hammer or awl to add details or decorative patterns to a surface. They form a relief sculpture by working a thin section of metal, freehand or around a mold, from the front (embossing) or by pushing forms out from the back (repoussé). Striking, a related method utilized with coins, uses a mold (die) to press a design into metal.

Noah Purifoy, Untitled (Assemblage), 1967, mixed media, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund and Gift of Dr. Samella Lewis), 2015.19.3928
The outline of a fish is made with bent, colored wire and then hung with fragments of colored glass to loosely resemble scales in this free-floating sculpture. In this photograph, the open mouth faces our left. The body is made with a thick gauge, mustard-yellow wire. Finer, gold-colored wire creates a honeycomb-like pattern within the body. Pieces of colored glass hang within most of the cells. The irregularly shaped pieces are clear or in tones of brick red, indigo or sky blue, amber brown, pearl white, or emerald green. A few cells have little bits of metal, including a washer, a disk pierced with holes, and a spiraling piece of wire. The thicker yellow wire makes a circle near the mouth, creating an eye, which is hung with two pieces of glass in plum purple and pale lilac. To our right, the tail is as tall as the body and half its length. It is outlined with thick, red wire. Another piece of wire runs along the middle of the tail, and thinner red wire is strung from the central wire to the upper and lower edges, mimicking the rays of the fish’s fin. A fin along the bottom center of the fish’s body is made with thick, royal-blue wire that balances across the bottom rim of the fish. On the side closer to us, the blue wire is bent into a boomerang shape. It is suspended within a cell close to the bottom of the fish’s body, and is balanced on the far side with a piece of cobalt-blue glass. A hand-shaped pendant hangs from the point of the fin closest to us. The wall behind the hanging sculpture is fog gray.
Alexander Calder, Finny Fish, 1948, steel rod, wire, glass, objects, and paint, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1996.120.15

Assemblage: Artists use the assemblage process to arrange carefully shaped or found objects into a sculpture. The parts of the sculpture might be all of one kind or a variety of elements. Modern sculptors who practice this process bring together found or diverse elements to create a sculpture, that is, a three-dimensional version of a collage. The combination of elements can result in a work of beauty, visual interest, or significant meaning.

Four women, six men, and seven babies and children are gathered in three rows in this freestanding, painted wooden sculpture. The people all have pale, peachy skin with rosy cheeks, round faces with double chins, and thin, curving brows under high foreheads. They mostly wear gold robes over garments in gray, dark blue, plum purple, spruce green, or red. The four women sit hip-to-hip across the middle of the grouping. The two center women angle slightly in toward each other. To our left in that pair, Mary holds a nude baby Jesus on her lap. Mary’s long, loose, light brown hair is held back with a twisted band. The chubby Jesus on her lap reaches for the woman to our right, Saint Anne, who wears a voluminous wimple that covers her face, chin, neck, and shoulders. The women to either side of the central pair hold books, one open and one closed, and wear turban-like headdresses over long, wavy hair. Six children play together in two groups at the women’s feet. Some are nude and others wear dark or gold robes. A pair eat grapes to our left. The right-most child rides a hobby horse and holds onto the hand of the woman behind him with his tiny hand. In the top row, a man stands behind each of the four women except for Saint Anne, who has three men standing over her shoulder. Two of the six men are cleanshaven, and the others have beards. Some are bareheaded and others wear turbans or a cap. Their faces are lined, and they look down or off into the distance, most under furrowed brows. The gold on the robes is tooled to create patterns.
South German 15th Century, Swabian 15th Century, Franconian 15th Century, The Holy Kinship, c. 1480/1490, polychromed wood, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2002.13.1
Luca della Robbia, Madonna and Child, c. 1475, glazed terracotta, Widener Collection, 1942.9.141
Jean (Hans) Arp, The Forest, 1916, painted wood, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1977.20.1

Polychromy: The term polychromy means “many colors.” Applying color to the surface of a sculpture can heighten its sense of energy and bring surfaces to life. Artists use paint, gold leaf, or glaze to direct viewers’ focus and highlight certain features or forms.

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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

Educational Resource:  Exploring Identity through Modern Art

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Two women with pale skin look out at us from the other side of a rectangular window opening with a shadowy interior behind them in this vertical painting. On our right, in the lower third of the composition, one young woman leans toward us over her left arm, which rests along the window ledge. She bends her right arm and props her chin on her fist. She looks at us with dark brown eyes under dark brows. She has shiny chestnut-brown hair with a strawberry-red bow on the right side of her head, to our left. She has a straight nose, and her full pink lips curve up in a smile. She wears a gossamer-white dress with a wide neckline trimmed in dark gray, with another red bow on the front of her chest. Her voluminous sleeves are pushed back to her elbows. To our left, a second woman peeks around a partially opened shutter. She is slightly older, and she stands next to the first woman with her body facing us. She tilts her head and also gazes at us with dark eyes under dark brown brows. She has dark brown hair covered by an oyster-white shawl. She holds the shawl up with her right hand to cover the bottom half of her face. Her mouth is hidden but her eyes crinkle as if in a smile. Her left arm bends at the elbow as she grasps the open shutter. She also wears a white shirt pushed back to her elbows, and a rose-pink skirt. The frame of the window runs parallel to the sides and bottom of the canvas. The room behind them is black in shadow.

Educational Resource:  Spanish Art

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Four people with black skin are squeezed into a narrow boat on bright, turquoise-colored water that nearly fills this stylized, square painting. All four sides of the unstretched canvas are lined with six gromets spaced along each edge. The boat approaches a carnival-like tunnel near the upper right corner. Cartoon ghosts loom at the tunnel entrance and a translucent, veil-like ghost hovers over the left half of the painting. The horizon comes almost to the top of the canvas, where white clouds float against an azure-blue sky. A long, lemon-yellow line curls back and forth in a tight, curving zigzag pattern that widens out from a tiny sun setting on the horizon. A red cross on a white field floats near the upper left. At the top center, the word “WOW” appears in white letters within a crimson-red, bursting speech bubble with long trailing tendrils, like an exploded firework. Below the boat and against the water to our right, the word “FUN” has been overlaid with a white square so the tall, white letters are barely visible. The words “GREAT AMERICA” appear in a curling banner across the bottom half of the painting.

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