An ancient feeling of life John-Paul Stonard on the ‘physical presence and silent withdrawal’ of Hans Josephsohn’s sculpture . (This link opens in a new tab).

By John-Paul Stonard 

Hans Josephsohn began to gain public recognition for his sculpture around the turn of the century, when he was eighty. Among these late works at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, four roughly modelled wall reliefs stand out, showing forms that might be interpreted as an artist and a model, a heavy lintel-like beam weighing down on the scene. Here and there a detail might suggest a face or body part, but these are quickly submerged in the overall sense of a non-specific yet hardly arbitrary object. Back too far away and you detach, the sculpture becoming a static image, a mere work of art in an art gallery. Get too close in and you lose yourself in optical detail.

Hans Josephsohn began to gain public recognition for his sculpture around the turn of the century, when he was eighty. Among these late works at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, four roughly modelled wall reliefs stand out, showing forms that might be interpreted as an artist and a model, a heavy lintel-like beam weighing down on the scene. Here and there a detail might suggest a face or body part, but these are quickly submerged in the overall sense of a non-specific yet hardly arbitrary object. Back too far away and you detach, the sculpture becoming a static image, a mere work of art in an art gallery. Get too close in and you lose yourself in optical detail.

The artist offered a description of this experience from his point of view: “It’s quite a remarkable thing when you have a model in front of you, and instead of approaching the woman … you stand at a distance of one or five metres and make a figure. I am often asked why I make such large semi-figures. I then say that I don’t know.” In fact the answer seems plain – such “large semi-figures” are those with the greatest physical affect, and are the best vehicle for an approach to sculpture entirely dependent on qualities of volume and surface (rather than, for example, on subject matter or outline).