Cyble or Seated Woman

The late nineteenth and very early years of the twentieth century marked a moment of intensive yet ambiguous re-engagement with the sculptural. A crucial element in this enlivening of discussion around sculpture was a shift away from the assumption that freestanding work was of necessity classical. Sculpture, sidelined in earlier debates about art and modernity, or at best standing as the model for an ideal that modern painting was defining itself against, now became embroiled in speculation …