The Visible Nude: Artists and Foundries Speak about Public Sculpture
by Ellen B. Cutler
Sculptural ornament is the traditional remedy to the emptiness of plazas and parklands. Monuments honor great achievements and mourn shared losses. A vocabulary of symbols and expressive gestures accrued over centuries provide artists with a rich resource of forms, and members of the public with ways to understand messages encoded in stone and bronze. Among the most common of motifs has been the nude figure. At least this was the case prior to much of the twentieth century. It is now the twenty-first century, however, and "the public," it seems, casts a harsher light on the nude. Are recent controversies based in regional attitudes that many describe as "provincial"? Or is there a fundamental change in the perception of the human form that has subverted our understanding of the nude and undermined its potential for metaphor? In an effort to consider the outlook for the nude as a motif in contemporary public sculpture, Sculpture Review polled several artists and fabricators about their experiences and their expectations.
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