As for painting, also for sculpture some of the artists who in the first twenty years of the century had contributed to the renewal of the plastic language, have continued in the last decade an activity perhaps less important than their previous one, but in any case often of high quality.
In some cases it was the works of those same artists of whom we have already spoken as painters; Picasso for example, whose experience as a sculptor assumes the same importance, and reveals the same great freedom of imagination, of the more properly pictorial experience; Georges Braque, refined and imaginative researcher of plastic myths, made in sculpture with that appropriateness and fidelity to the craftsmanship that is typical of all his activity; Jean Arp, painter, poet, but above all sculptor, who was constantly in contact with the European avant-gardes and who was able to give them the contribution of his imagination, all aimed at restoring the value of the primordial form to rediscover the most hidden sense of purity some things. And younger of all Joan Miró who has instilled in the ceramics made in collaboration with Artigas the same surreal charge and the same chromatic happiness that are typical of his painting. Alongside them, some of the greatest sculptors of the century: Costantin Brancusi (born in Pestisani Gorij, Romania, in 1876 and died in Paris in 1957), daring creator of a new mythology of form, purified from all determinism, fantastic and real at the same time; Antoine Pevsner (b. 1884), creator with his brother Gabo of constructivist sculpture and still today looking for the meaning of reality of form and plastic space; Henri Laurens (Paris 1885-1954) and Ossip Zadkine (b.1890). to search for the meaning of reality of form and plastic space; Henri Laurens (Paris 1885-1954) and Ossip Zadkine (b.1890). to search for the meaning of reality of form and plastic space; Henri Laurens (Paris 1885-1954) and Ossip Zadkine (b.1890).
According to mathgeneral.com, the generation following these masters did not mark the pace and continued with originality the search for an ever new plastic expression: Alberto Giacometti (born in Stampa in Switzerland in 1901) belongs by full right to the École de Paris, for the contribution that to it he gave with his surreal sculptures, solitary and not devoid of dramatic contrasts despite the simplicity of the conception; André Bloc (b. 1896) and Émile Gilioli (b. 1911) have instead directed their research on a geometric modulation of forms, devoid of any contact and any allusion to reality. And the geometric module is also present in the works of Berto Lardera (born in La Spezia in 1911, in Paris since 1948) and Robert Jacobsen (born in Copenhagen in 1912, in Paris since 1947), but it is overcome by a certain surreal resolution that the artists arrive at working in the body itself, and in the space, generated by the metallic structures of the compositions. And the purity of geometry is used for the construction of an ideal anthropomorphic figuration in the sculptures of Henri Georges Adam (born in Paris in 1904), a painter and engraver of considerable quality as well as sculptor. Germaine Richier (born in Grans in 1904, died in Paris in 1959) also brought her figuration to a surreal level that could recall that of Giacometti or, at times, of Picasso himself, but with a different moral commitment, with a logical architecture of the form that corrected any automatic data of the compositions. François Stahly (born in Constance in Switzerland in 1911) gives a sense of almost spontaneous germination to the form,
Étienne Hajdu (born in Turda, Romania, in 1907) has passed from an anthropomorphic conception of the abstract image to a new approach to the problem of plastic relationships, in a sort of sculptural informal that does not seem to want to set limits on either space or of surfaces. A somewhat similar path is that of younger sculptors, such as César (César Baldaccini, born in Marseille in 1921), who passed from surreal figurations of enormous insects to variously wavy surfaces, with small shattered shapes on the surface, revealing a bold imagination and of great skill in the trade. And alongside César, one of the most promising of the young sculptors of the École de Paris, is JC Delahaye (born in 1928) who has already revealed his own originality in the field of autre taste.
