The Gates of Hell was an ambitious and astonishing work by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin that was never realized in his lifetime.

The sculpture exists in two versions, one of which was cast in bronze posthumously from reconstructed plaster casts. The work stands almost 30 feet (6m) high and 12 feet (4m) wide, with over 180 figures representing themes from Dante Alighieri’s Devine Comedy.

The sculpture contains many figures and sets of figures that were eventually developed into independent works by Rodin, including his famous The Thinker. Rodin worked on the doors off and on for 37 years, never actually finishing the work.

There is a video here that discusses the the work and the two different versions created by Rodin.

There are three original bronze casts, at the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Rodin Museum here in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Three more were subsequently cast by the Musée Rodin, and are in Zurich, Seoul, Korea and Stanford University in California.

Microbiologist and photographer J.W. Kern has taken a rather remarkable high-resolution (112 megapixel) photograph of the Stanford casting and made it available on Flickr (click on “Original” for the high-res version, which is 18mb). Here is Kern’s article about the sculpture and the photo.

[Via MetaFilter]

Shintaro Ohata is an artist from Hiroshima, Japan who is both a painter and a sculptor.

Artists who are both sculptors and painters are not unusual. Ohata, however, frequently combines the two mediums in single works in which a painting and sculpture are displayed together as a mixed two dimensional – three dimensional work.

The sculptures are textured and painted in a way that carries forward the colors and textures of a painting. The painting and sculpture are then arranged and lit in a way that gives them additional visual continuity. These form scenes, in which the painting acts as a backdrop for the sculpture and the sculpture acts as a three dimensional projection of the painting.

As remarkable as the effect is in photographs, I would love to see these in person.

Ohata also paints stand-alone paintings in acrylic, in which the figures in the paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to his sculpted figures (above, bottom).

[Via Gizmodo]

Charles Parks was a well known and much loved sculptor familiar to many in the Brandywine Valley area of Delaware and Southeastern Pennsylvania. His works grace public buildings and spaces in the region and across the country.

Parks was originally from Virginia, moved to Delaware with his family when he was young, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

He produced a body of over 500 sculptures, many of them in his studio in Wilmington overlooking the Brandywine River. The sculptures, primarily cast in bronze, range in size from a few inches to monumental public works almost 40 ft high, such as “Our Lady of Peace”, seen above in progress in his studio, outside the studio and in place in Santa Clara, CA (above, second and third from bottom).

I was delighted a few years ago to have the opportunity in my role as a website designer to create a new website for the Charles Parks Studio. In the course of working on the site I had the pleasure of visiting the studio and meeting the artist and his wife, Inge, both completely delightful.

Having grown up in Wilmington, I was of course familiar with Parks’ work; it can be found in many public spaces in the city and the state of Delaware, even more so since 2011, when the Charles Parks Foundation donated a large body of work to the state.

Parks was a steadfast defender of realism and naturalism in sculpture in the midst of the tides of Modernism that swept through the art world in the mid 20th century. His direct and unpretentious evocations of people, nature and fantasy subjects resonated with the public, and carried forward in many ways the traditions of imaginative realism embodied by the Brandywine School of painters and illustrators.

His statue, Boy with Hawk (above, bottom) stands outside the entrance to the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA.

Charles Cropper Parks died last month on October 25, 2012 at the age of 90. (See the Studio’s News and Information page for links to obits and articles.)

There will be a public memorial service tomorrow, Saturday, December 1, 2012 at the Chase Center on the Waterfront in Wilmington, DE.

The wonderfully idiosyncratic graphics of Oleg Denisenko have a feeling of arcane instructional diagrams from some otherworldly past.

Denisenko is a Ukrainian printmaker, painter, calligrapher and sculptor. His intricately rendered images of figures, horses and fantastical mechanisms always seem connected to the past, and rich with potential meaning, but unfettered in imagination.

Since I originally wrote about Denisenko’s work back in 2007, he now has a dedicated website on which you will find an array of his graphics, his equally whimsical sculpture and works in color he identifies as levkas (image above, second from bottom).

As near as I can tell, the term refers to the grounds used by medieval Russian iconographers. Denisenko’s works in this category are rough surfaced, texturally three dimensional and apparently done in oil and/or tempera.

His graphics, however, steal the show, inviting you to spend time delving into their elaborate rendering and fascinating details.

[Originally via BibliOdyssey]

Since March of last year, a series of wonderful and whimsical paper sculptures have been anonymously left on tables and shelves in libraries in Edinburgh, Scotland.

It feels like something from a novel, and may in some way have a connection to the detective novels of Ian Rankin, but there is no indication he is involved, other than perhaps in inspiring a fan.

The sculptures are made from books and pages of books, and extol the virtues of book and libraries. They were often accompanied by notes, one of which reads in part: …” In support of Libraries, Books, Words, Ideas [...] and All things ‘magic’…”

There were, over a period of months, 10 sculptures left by the mysterious artist, who on the last sculpture left a note signing off with “Cheers Edinburgh it’s been fun!”

Most of the articles I’ve come across refer to images from this Flickr set of photos by Chris Scott.

Books, we are told, are on the way out — soon to be replaced by iPads and other widgets, complete with fake page-flipping gimmicks to assure us that we are in fact, still reading a book.

We’ll forget for the moment that movies were supposed to be the death of books, just as surely as TV was to be the death of movies and the internet the death of TV, and assume the pundits are correct. So what to do with the remaining dead-tree editions?

UK artist and art director Su Blackwell has one answer, in the form of beautiful cut-book sculptures.

She cuts the pages with a scalpel, forming the printed paper into various forms. Some are elaborate scenes, sitting atop the books from which they were formed, some as simple as flowers in which the ink from the printed lines is arranged to form the dark-hued edges of the blossoms. Some are arranged as dioramas in wooden and glass cases, at times theatrically lit.

In addition to her website, Blackwell also maintins a blog in which she lists upcoming exhibitions and installations.

Her themes frequently seem to be of fantasy, escape, freedom or enchantment — apt for the medium that has so long captured the ephemeral; even if the medium itself were to become ephemeral.

[Via A White Carousel by way of Sean Cowen and Eric Orchard]

When I was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1970′s there were two factions in the school, traditionalists and modernists.

Those of us, both faculty and students, who were in the traditionalist faction thought the Academy, of all places, should be bastion of academic art tradition, steeped in the teachings of Eakins and his predecessors. Those in the the modernist faction thought our values hopelessly irrelevant, just as we thought theirs spurious and insubstantial.

Times have, of course, changed somewhat; traditionalism and modernism seem to be in a kind of uneasy détente in the art world as traditional values and representational art have been reestablishing their prominence, and the Academy is perhaps a prime example of the current mix.

That mixture has become evident on the outside of the venerable school and museum as well as the inside, with the creation of the Lenfest Plaza, a reclaimed section of Cherry Street in Philadelphia, linking the Samuel M. V. Hamilton building, where most classes are now conducted, with the Academy’s Landmark building, an architectural marvel from the mind of Victorian era American architect Frank Furness that has been the Academy’s main building for most of its history.

The plaza gives the Academy a “campus” of sorts for the first time in its history (when I was there, the majority of classes were in a building called the “Peale House”, named for Charles Wilson Peale and located several blocks away form the Academy’s main building).

The centerpiece of the new plaza is the “Paint Torch”, a new large scale sculpture by modernist sculptor Claes Oldenberg.

Those who have been reading Lines and Colors for some time will know that I am generally not enthused about post-war modernism (i.e. American modernism), but there are exceptions and Oldenberg is one of them; partly because his sculptures of giant household objects are hilarious, and a breath of fresh air among modernists who take themselves way too seriously, and partly because they accomplish what I think art does for us at its best, allowing us to see the world around us, and the objects we take for granted, with fresh eyes.

Oldenberg’s Paint Torch is a 51ft (15m) high paintbrush, hanging out over the Broad Street sidewalk at a 60° angle, complete with a 6ft (2m) high dropped dollop of paint. It’s called the “Paint Torch” because the brush will light up at night, for the first time tonight, October 1, 2011.

The Academy is celebrating with a day long “Party on the Plaza” which is free and open to the public, as is the Academy’s superb museum of American art today.

As usual, Oldenberg’s work, and its placement, is stirring up a little controversy, but this is one hidebound traditionalist Academy alumni who likes it just fine.

(Photographs from PAFA)

[Addendum: photos from the event, as well as another good photo of the Paint Torch on the OLIN blog as well as extensive PAFA Flickr set.]

It is often said that architecture is a form of sculpture.

At its worst, this means that many of our cities are chock-a-block with horribly soulless and mind-numbingly boring modernist sculpture that we would be hard pressed to think of as art.

On the other hand, perhaps the most obvious and beautiful manifestation of this idea is the work of the remarkable Catalan architect Atoni Gaudí, also known as Antonio Gaudí, whose overtly sculptural buildings are shaped with Art Nouveau grace and leap into the sky with surreal incongruity to the everyday structures around them.

Someone has posted a beautiful 1984 documentary by Hiroshi Tesigahara titled Antoinio Gaudi to YouTube. The film is a little over an hour long and is in large part simply music and scenes in which the camera lingers lovingly on the details of Gaudí’s amazing buildings, so language is not a barrier.

The film is available on Amazon as Antonio Gaudí: The Criterion Collection.

For more on Gaudí, see my previous post on Antoni Gaudí.

[Via MetaFilter]