The best American sculpture, even more than American painting, is solidly virile-impressionistic, notably the work of such men as Barnard and Borghlum. Davidson has one foot firmly planted within the confines of Post-Impressionism, but he has by no means cut loose from the past. His “Decorative Panel” in the Exhibition was purely post-impressionistic, a work of the imagination, while his figures were virile-impressionistic.
It is only by comparing the work of these new men with that of St. Gaudens, French, MacMonies—to mention no others—that one begins to rightly understand what is meant by the “reaction to nature.”
There is plenty of pure observation and plenty of fine imagination in the work of those three men, but there is also much of the purely classical, and not one of them showed or shows any desire to break with tradition, while the very essence of the modern movement is a disregard, conscious or unconscious, for tradition; in many of the new men there is a violent revolt against the domination of the past.
It is when we come to the work of Brancusi and Archipanko that we find the most startling examples of the reaction along purely creative lines.
Nature is purposely left far behind, as far behind as in Cubist pictures, and for very much the same reasons.
Of Brancusi something has been said already.
Of all the sculpture in the International Exhibition the two pieces that excited the most ridicule were Brancusi’s egg-shaped portrait of Mlle. Pogany and “Family Life” by Archipanko.
Both are creative works, products of the imagination, but in their inspiration they are fundamentally different.