File:Art and criticism - monographs and studies (1892) (14804520263).jpg

Identifier: criticismmo00chil (find matches)
Title: Art and criticism : monographs and studies
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Child, Theodore
Subjects: Art criticism
Publisher: Harper
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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s to brinsrthe divinity nearer to man, to assure the family that there wasever present, and even visible among them, a divine guardianof the hearth. It was the privilege of sculpture to perpetuatethe memory of heroes and of noble deeds; to embody in beau-tiful forms the vague and eternally human syntheses of thepoets; to transport vulgar facts into the radiant sphere of art.So it became the office of sculpture to contribute to the solem-nity of temples and to the decoration of palaces, and to lend itscharm to gardens and to dwellings. We should see sculpturerevealing its majestic forms in the soft light of cathedrals, orenthroned in gay saloons decked with rich stuffs and flowers,amid the movement and animation of fetes; we should see itin the parks and public places scintillating in the changeful-ness of light and shade, with the flitting reflections of foliageand clouds playing upon its surface, and seeming to give it thethrill and pulsation of life. We should have lovely statuettes
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• AT THE SCHOOL DOOR.—By M. Alexandre Falguifcre. MODERN FRENCH SCULPTURE. 219 in the rooms where we live; and in the adornment of ourhouses, of our furniture, and of the dainty objects of daily use,the sculptor should have his role. But if we form our ideasfrom the occasional sight of the Farnese Hercules, of a muti-lated Venus, or of a colossal statue of some modern statesmanhiding himself in the voluminous folds of a bronze frock-coat,it is only natural that sculpture should seem to us generallyto be profoundly tiresome and uninteresting, not to say hid-eous. Now this is precisely a conception of the art which Iwill ask the reader to abandon, if he has it, before we beoin toconsider together our theme of modern French sculpture. The Greek marbles which constitute the basis, and gener-ally the only contents of museums of sculpture, are not thebeginning, the end, and the last word of the modellers art.The theory that sculpture is essentially a classical and abstractart is an arbi

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