Alyssa Dumire, Director of Education
Visitors (and staff) walking through FWMoA’s atrium are often entranced by George Rickey’s Twenty-Four Lines, its spiky arms towering over the space as they slowly tilt back-and-forth. If you’ve never read its accompanying text, you might be surprised to learn that it’s not technically a completed work of art, but a maquette. Its larger sibling is in the collection of the Smithsonian; while ours has all the polish of a finished sculpture, it was created as a scale model, a practice run for the other. Rickey’s maquettes mimic their larger counterparts in every way but scale: because his kinetic sculptures rely on precisely calibrated balance to allow for their gentle movement, he needed to test the same materials and mechanisms. Other sculptors approach maquettes in different ways, just as 2-dimensional artists adapt sketching to suit their practice. In fact, maquette is a French loanword that originates from the Italian machietta, meaning sketch. It is perhaps for this reason that it’s the preferred term in the art world, over “model,” since a maquette is analogous to a sketch (though sculptors often do 2D sketches as an even earlier preliminary step).
Sculpture materials and processes are often expensive, specialized, and labor-intensive. Maquettes, like scale models made by architects or engineers, allow artists to visualize their work without potentially ruining, say, a priceless block of marble. Mock-ups might be clay or wax and multiples may be made, starting with a smaller size before producing a full-scale version in these more affordable materials. Richard Saltonstall Greenough’s Bust of a Young Christopher Columbus (above) likely followed this process, sculpting his likeness of the explorer in clay or wax before taking his chisel to the pristine marble of the completed version. On the other hand, some artists like George Rickey (above) and Martin Blank (below) opt to employ the same materials throughout the process, but in smaller quantities.
Large-scale public sculptures are often commissions, so artists may present preparatory work to gain approval from a benefactor or committee or even to win the commission in the first place. On view now in Jewish History and Art Illuminated: 175 Years of Congregation Achduth Vesholom, Nancy McCrosky’s maquette for the Temple’s Holocaust Memorial communicates the overall composition and effect of the work, likely allowing the artist to communicate more clearly about the details planned for the finished work (see it and read more about it here). As the nation’s most celebrated sculptor at the time, Paul Manship didn’t need to earn his commission for the 1939 World’s Fair. His maquettes for The Moods of Time, below, were cast in bronze, while the much larger versions displayed in the exposition were ephemeral, made from a plaster compound.
Manship is an unusual example in that his maquettes were sculpted in a more permanent material than the full-scale versions (which no longer exist!). Many maquettes are lost to time or destroyed by their makers, but if they’re just preparatory work, why do we care? They reveal much about an artist’s practice–not just the steps in their process, but the problems they solved along the way. Compare a maquette to its completed counterpart: what changed? Martin Blank, for instance, added a fifth element to Repose in Amber, but the forms remain similar (just much larger!). Particularly astute collectors and museums have preserved maquettes for this reason, especially if the artist is well-known.
Not all sculptors make maquettes, and we can learn from that decision, too! FWMoA holds 2D studies for Mark di Suvero’s Helmholtz but no model, even though its massive size would seem to necessitate it. Di Suvero’s process is often likened to drawing in space (with a crane!) and would lose some immediacy with too much planning. While some elements of his sculptures, like the disc at Helmholtz’s apex, are fabricated specifically for them, the steel I-beams that make up their bulk are a known quantity.