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Leonardo, Vol. 4, pp. 161-163. Pergamon Press 1971. Printed in Great Britain ON CARVING NON-TRADITIONAL IVORY SCULPTURE Carson I. A. Ritchie* Ivory sculptures differ considerably from those made in other materials. For one thing, most ivory sculptors have clung to traditional figurative subjects treated in a representational way. It has even been suggested, with some plausibility, that because ivory is basically an organic material, it will never lend itself to abstract or non-figurative works. For a long time-since the 'thirties in fact-sculptors who wanted to carve ivory and yet claim modernity sought recourse to the accidental cracks and fissures that appear in the surface ofsome tusks. They stopped carving the inside of the tusk and concentrated on the outside. Black spots and 'shakes' in a tusk's crust, which would have been sawn away by the old style ivory carver, now became the point d'appui for a whole series of forms. The greatest exploiter of these 'accidental forms' in ivory is undoubtedly Jan Holschuh. Like most nontraditional ivory sculptors, he is a German, working in Erbach. Although he is still alive and very influential, I cannot help feeling that much of the impetus of his approach has now worn itself out. For one thing, because most elephant tusks present a fairly unified exterior with few cracks and blemishes , Holschuh has had to resort to mammoth tusks, which provide all the cracks and fissures he wants, but are in such bad condition otherwise that it is almost as though a painter had deliberately opted to paint on mouldy canvases, full of holes. For another, because Holschuh is necessarily concerned with the accidents which have happened to the outside of the tusk, he does not go far enough into the ivory to suit my taste. It is as though someone had picked up a packet of modelling clay, with the intention ofmaking a figure from it and then decided to do something with the wrapper. Ifwe are to abandon 'accidentalism' as I think we must, what avenues remain to the modern ivory sculptor? There is no reason why ivory carving should not use non-figurative subject matter. Indeed, Michel Belloncle recently suggested that it was only by having recourse to abstract art that the Dieppe school, once so famous but now reduced to two carvers, could manage to keep going. It is very curious that abstract art has, hitherto, appeared much more frequently in the work of unsophisticated indigenes such as the Central Eskimo, than among Western sculptors. A lot of *Artist living at 4 Hurst Place, Stanham Road, Dartford, Kent, England. (Received 23 September 1970.) 161 work has been done in Germany-which is the most advanced school ofivory carving in Europe-to take carvers right up to abstract art but, somehow, carvers have always stopped on the threshold of the non-figurative. Such splendid carvings as the works of Albert G. Theodor Mayer, though extremely stylized or abstracted, are still recognizable as the familiar subjects for which they are meant-provided you read the titles first, that is. However, there are various objections to ivories becoming non-figurative. First of all, there is an open field for such subjects already provided in the shape ofivoryjewellery, much ofwhich has beenconceived along the lines ofabstract art at least since the 'thirties. The work of William Wegel and George Frolich provides examples of what I mean [1]. So if an ivory carver has a strong urge toward abstract art, I would strongly advise him to make jewellery, which he can sell and put on exhibition much more readily. I feel that ivory carving may well become a sort of sanctuary for representational figurative artists, just as did the School of Siena for those painters who did not want to assume the style of the Renaissance . There are good reasons why ivory carving should stay figurative and representational. For one thing, most ivories are bought by an entirely different type of patron from the people who buy other kinds of sculpture, just as for example, the patrons who buy sporting pictures and prints are often different from the regular art collector. Another reason for clinging to representational figurative...

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