Frishmuth, Contrapposto and the Beauty of Bronze
Featuring a few non-yoga poses and plenty of talking about things that could fall over at any moment.
The utility poles I can see out the window of the coffee shop lean precariously to the left. Imagine the way a sidewalk cracks and lifts up when a root swells under it, but replace the root with a small building and you’ll get the basic idea. On my way out, I’ll try to remember to check the small tags on the pole to see when it was inspected.
If you didn’t know the bottom six feet of poles were cemented into the ground, you might assume they would topple over. It’s akin to the trick Michelangelo plays on the viewers of David. I’ve never had a tour of the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, where David lives, but I’m sure the guide has everyone try to recreate the pose David strikes.
Right leg ever so slightly bent, right hand at his side, left foot out with just the barest toe resting on the ground and left arm thrown over his shoulder. Give it a shot and then ask yourself how long you’d willingly stand like that.
It’s a real pain in the ass and it’s called “contrapposto”. One of the beautiful things about sculpture is that it allows artists to pose statues in ways that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t want to pose. Sometimes, those poses make the statue seem even more real than if they were standing in a more “natural” way.
David is a great example of the form. He seems relaxed and ready, one arm up and one at his side. However, that left foot is just barely grazing the ground, with his large toe being the only thing resting. All of his weight is distributed over his right leg and his right shoulder is dipping down.
The poles aren’t in contrapposto, they’re just old and leaning. The similarity is in the hidden presentation.
David’s pose actually put a ton of strain on the right ankle of the statue. While the poles have six feet of earth and cement to support them, David is largely supported by the tree stump hidden behind his leg. Earlier installations of the piece were poorly aligned, though, and the ankle suffered.
Strain and structure aside, the effect the pose creates is a shortening of the torso on the right side and a pull in at the waist to make him seem even more sinuous than he already is. It makes David seem even more powerful and prepared, while actually presenting him in an almost impossible stance. A stance that makes a static thing seem alive.
By the way, Michelangelo was 26 when he started working on the statue. The massive chunk of carrara marble had been worked on 35 years earlier by another sculptor, but was abandoned for unknown reasons – but probably because the first guy who tried to work the block found out the marble kinda sucked.
Contrapposto is used in painting and sculpture to accentuate the natural curves of models and subjects. By crimping the side – see below – the artist can fake a smaller waist and broader shoulders or hips. That gives a cinched, hourglass figure to women and a strong, triangular shape to men. It’s one of many tricks artists use to give life to their work – or to flatter their subjects.
Smashcut to Harriet Whitney Frishmuth in the 1920s – a mere 300-and-change years after Michelangelo.
Frishmuth was an American who spent some time in her youth studying with Rodin while she lived abroad. In the early 1900s, she started getting commissions to create sculptures, which was probably a nice reprieve from her work doing dissections for the College of Physicians and Surgeons. We skip over a decade of biography and find her in 1921 when she created The Vine, one of her most popular pieces.
See the similarity? Frishmuth has also employed a pose for her statue that defies gravity.
The Vine does what contrapposto is meant to do – it draws the eye to the human figure and makes it seem alive. Here, she’s thrown the statue back, arching into certain collapse – except the bronze doesn’t give way.
Frishmuth often worked with ballerinas and dancers to get striking poses for her works, and The Vine is no different. She employed a dancer from modern day Slovenia named Desha Delteil to pose for her. Frishmuth modeled a number of her more famous sculptures on Desha.
The Vine is a striking piece and, at The Met, stands in the middle of The Charles Engelhard Court, which is crammed ass-to-ankles with amazing sculptures. The photo of The Vine I’ve used here is actually from the American Art Museum in DC.
One of the joys of bronzes is their ease in replication. You can find copies of The Thinker, The Vine or Little Dancer in all sorts of museums.
The Vine revels in motion and form. It captures the dancer in the middle of action, on the edge of movement. The viewer knows that she can’t hold that pose forever – I’d say give it a shot yourself, but I don’t want that kind of injury on my conscience – in the same way you know Desha’s left leg has to come down at some point in the photo above.
The tension between the sculpted position and the reality of the pose generates the perception of motion. It’s parallel to the trick your eyes play on you. You take in somewhere between 30 and 60 “frames” per second, but your mind knows things are happening in between to generate motion and it fills in the little gaps so that your vision doesn’t feel choppy.
We interpolate movement and actions. It helps us figure out where a falling jar of peanut butter is going to be in a half second and lets us feel the movement of static images and sculptures. Bugs that turn into features seem to be some of the basic parts of our humanity.
I’m not a neurologist or an optometrist, so that’s a little conjecture on my part.
I’m now back at the National Gallery. It’s February, which is lovely because it means the tourists have all given up and the school trips are minimal. I get the place all to myself for a few months. Totally forgot to look at that power pole, by the way.
Frishmuth also has a piece at the NGA. Same basic idea – dancer in motion. Here, it’s a male dancer in a less precarious, but no less challenging pose. The piece is also substantially smaller. Vine is 80-some-odd inches tall and Slavonic Dancer is just over a foot.
Vine actually started out small. Frishmuth was more of a tabletop kind of sculptor, as far as I’ve seen, and made these smaller figures in limited casting. The Vine sold so well in its smaller incarnation that Frishmuth blew it up two years later into the version now on display at The Met.
This is a neat side effect of the economics of art. When an artist is hired to do a big piece – Rodin and the Gates of Hell – they have a certain amount of stability built into the contract. You get paid a little as things progress. When you’re making stuff to sell on your own, you’re limited by the amount you can plop down upfront. For a modern solution to this problem, see Kickstarter.
A thing I like about both the Frishmuth pieces is the way they show off the benefits of bronze. Marble is – as I’ve said before – a fancy sand castle. There are stress points and weaknesses in the underlying stone and limitations on what kind of pose you can display. Thin lines and off-center balances are straight out. Instead, we get hidden, structural tree stumps.
Bronze is happy to take the abuse. You can cast thinner pieces with thick bases to offset the weight and generate all sorts of cantilever poses. You can have people – as with Dancer – standing on one small foot, in ways that would generate way too much stress for marble. Frishmuth leaned into that strength and captured dancers in these impossible seeming poses.
It’s also the complementary reason I like marble. Marble needs this weird structural planning and that varies for every single piece. Michelangelo may have had more freedom with a better block of marble, but the limitation led to something amazing.
I’ll wrap up here, but with a request. If you’ve got a sculpture or artist or painting that you love, let me know. I’ve been lucky enough to see lots of different museums, but I depend largely on myself to figure out what to look for. I’ll happily take some guidance.