‘A series of surfaces’: The New Sculpture and Cinema

Abstract

This article examines New Sculpture in the context of the emergence of cinema, arguing that chronophotography had a major impact on the temporalization of sculpture in late nineteenth-century Britain. Departing from the demonstrable impact of motion studies on Rodin’s sculpture, the article compares Sir Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877) to Rodin’s work on the basis of the works’ shared temporality and self-reflexivity. The article charts the influence of cinema’s prototypes on the democratization of sculpture in the Victorian period, the contingencies of the viewer’s temporal encounter with the work extending to sculpture’s ‘everyday’ context of exhibition and its ‘everyday’ subjects.