Painting and Sculpture
For Michelangelo, it was natural to be a painter and sculptor at the same time; he is still considered one of the greatest geniuses in both art forms. This was to change for the artists of later times. They were either one or the other, and art schools and academies kept the disciplines strictly separate in their classes. It was not until the twentieth century that it again became accepted to work on canvas and paper as well as in the third dimension. It is one of the hallmarks of modernism that painters such as Picasso, Beckmann, Immendorff, Lüpertz and Chagall enthusiastically embarked on experiments with clay, wood, and metal, thus giving new impetus to sculpture.
Renoir's "Mother and Child" from 1916 is an early example of this awakening. It is still strongly oriented towards Renoir's work as a painter and draughtsman; the motif comes from an old sketchpad. And yet the work has already moved away from the academic sculpture of its time. It shows the beginning of a search for new forms of expression that would lead the next generation of artists to entirely new perspectives - and it is a very personal object, showing his wife Aline, who had died the year before, with his first-born son Pierre.
