R. Tess Korobkin

My dissertation argues that figurative sculptors in the 1930s significantly reinvented the materiality, practice, and politics of sculpture in response to the era’s societal turbulence and new aesthetic possibilities. Sculpture is a profoundly under-examined dimension of Depression-era American visual culture, yet the medium’s correspondence with the human body—as surrogate, memorial, and ideal— made it crucial to the era’s urgent expression of particular human experiences. The grotesque gesture of Seymour Lipton’s direct carving Flood (1938), the collective “body” of heads and torsos brought together in Minna Harkavy’s American Miner’s Family (1931), the metallic gleam of Isamu Noguchi’s Monel metal figure Death (A Lynching) (1934) all reimagine the possibilities of the human body as a central sculptural motif. In each, the sculptural body becomes a site where the aesthetic inventions of modernist abstraction merge with the struggle to represent the era’s natural disasters, labor struggles, and racial violence.