Instruction

Last semester you learned to make surfaces a hand can read. This semester asks how the parts of a work are arranged: its composition. In three dimensions composition is harder and richer than on paper, because the viewer moves, and a hand meets the work one part at a time.

Balance. Symmetrical balance mirrors the two halves; it feels stable and formal. Asymmetrical balance sets unequal parts against each other so they still feel settled — a large, plain area against a small, busy one. Radial balance spreads from a center, like a flower. In sculpture there is also actual balance: the work must physically stand.

Rhythm. Rhythm is repetition with a pattern: regular (the same element at equal intervals), alternating (two elements in turn), progressive (an element that grows or shrinks step by step) and flowing (curving repetition that carries the eye or hand along).

Proportion and scale. Proportion is the size relationship of parts to each other and to the whole; scale is size relative to us. A small object held in the hand and a life-size figure ask for different compositions.

Spatial arrangement. Where forms sit in space, how they overlap in depth, how much empty (negative) space surrounds them, and from how many viewpoints the work can be read.

Five works. The Saluting Protective Spirit (883-859 BCE, Cleveland Museum of Art) is one of hundreds of gypsum reliefs from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud. The winged figure strides forward in profile, and an inscription about the king’s conquests runs in horizontal lines straight across the carving — a regular rhythm of text laid over the figure. Hundreds of similar reliefs lined the palace, so the rhythm worked at the scale of architecture.

Auguste Rodin’s A Burgher of Calais (Jean d’Aire) (plaster, modeled 1889, Art Institute of Chicago) is one of six figures commemorating citizens who offered themselves as hostages to Edward III during the Hundred Years’ War. The figure’s weight sinks into planted feet; the heavy key he holds pulls the composition down. Balance here carries meaning: resolve under a terrible load.

Edmonia Lewis — a sculptor of Mississauga Ojibwe and African American ancestry who moved to Rome in 1866 — carved Indian Combat (1868, Cleveland Museum of Art). The museum describes it as a spiralling composition of three intertwined figures, her most dynamic and complex work. A spiral invites the viewer to walk around it; no single view shows everything.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze relief portrait Robert Louis Stevenson (1887-88, cast 1910, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) is very low relief. Notice how much flat background he leaves and where he places the figure within it; in low relief, empty space is part of the design.

Finally, Hokusai’s Great Wave (1830-33, Art Institute of Chicago) is a model of asymmetrical balance: the huge wave on the left is answered by the tiny Mount Fuji low in the center, and the curling foam repeats in a flowing rhythm.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.