by Jeff Hilson

SCULPTURE, AS AN ART form, is not native to Northwest Europe. Northern Europeans excel in painting, graphics, drawing, music, and dance: aesthetic forms more individualistic than the grandiose formalism of monumental sculpture. Sculptural development needed large metropolitan areas, rich patrons, and masses of artisans. Thus, sculpture came to us through the Classical corridor of Egypt, Crete, Greece, and finally the Roman copies that diffused into Northern Europe.

There is an intangible, awe-inspiring something in a sculptured life-size or hyper-life-size figure. It is as if the very immobility of the piece, its timeless permanence, its very mass, simultaneously . . . → Read More: Auguste Rodin: Premier Sculptor