Venus and the dead king

Denys Peter Myers, Assistant Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, discusses sculpture. He first describes, and displays, sculptures as artistic expressions existing in the round and being representational, semi-representational, or non-representational. He then argues that to understand the purpose of a sculpture, one must consider the culture that produced it and will generally find that it is either humanistic (making a statement about the human condition) or cult (serving as a bridge from this world to the next). As examples of cult objects, Mr. Myers exhibits the bronze head of the dead king of the kingdom of Benin in Nigeria. He also shows an Egyptian rose quartz sculpture of a pharaoh, an 8th century Indian temple corner graced by two dancers, a 14th century French Madonna and child, a second century Gandharan stucco head in the Roman tradition, and a 5th century sculpture similar to a Roman sarcophagus. To contrast humanistic examples of sculpture, Mr. Myers displays the remainder of a Greek Venus sculpture, the ideal of feminine beauty. The neo-humanism of Dante's era led to contemporary individualism as expressed in Maillol's 1898 "Bather Fixing Her Hair," Degas' "Little Dancer," and Matisse's "Serf," "Reclining Nude," and "Serpentine." He compares Renoir's 1916 bronze Venus to the ancient one and Henry Moore's abstract "Reclining Woman" with previous examples. Mr. Myers maintains that modern artists are the prophets and moralists of society and their return to abstract ideas and figures are a balance of otherworldliness and worldliness, with Venus and the dead king coalescing. He concludes the program showing two abstract metal sculptures: Giacometti's "Man Pointing" and Ibram Lassaw's "Planets."