Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mainly, as it turned out, it mattered for formal reasons. Iron is quintessentially structure, not mass. Inside every figure produced by the academies had been a leaner, more abstract presence -- the wire armature on which the clay or plaster was built, hidden by the later work of representation. Just as Michelangelo had imagined the figure latent in the raw marble block, hidden by the superfluities of stone, so it fell to Picasso, Gonzalez and others to imagine a second structure within the conventionally sculpted figure: a kind of iron essence, expressed in line and plane rather than continuous surface...
...move to iron forging originated with craft and folk art; it was "primitive," something apart from academic atelier practice, and it fitted perfectly into the general move among artists at the end of the 19th century to refresh art from hitherto unused sources. One of the first artists to imagine a link between iron forging and formal sculpture was a minor Spanish painter, Santiago Rusinyol, an impassioned collector of the ironwork in which the smiths of his native Barcelona had always excelled. "I think of those forges of old Barcelona," he wrote in 1893, "where instinct was set free. There...
...Cubist Guitar of 1912 -- all planes and interstitial spaces. But it wasn't realized until 1928, when Picasso, who had spent much of that year making diagrammatic drawings for sculptures that would be executed in nothing but wire, sought out the help of Gonzalez, who taught him to weld iron. Picasso's energies, in turn, seem to have inspired in Gonzalez the daring to become an inventive sculptor in his own right. The Picasso-Gonzalez link was as important for sculpture, in the end, as the earlier Picasso-Braque partnership had been for painting...
Both men realized how things already made of iron could be brought into sculpture, thus extending the aesthetics of assemblage and the found object. To see Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together...
Giacometti, by contrast, did not work in iron at all; every object by him in this show is cast bronze. He is included, presumably, because of his relations to Picasso through the Surrealist figure, because of his influence on Smith and because of the linearity of his style -- an obsessive thinning out of sculptural mass that is nevertheless modeled in a wholly traditional way on an armature, and never welded. It's true that Giacometti tended increasingly to think of sculpture as a means of connecting points in space, rather than of setting volume imposingly before...