Karen LaMonte’s Nocturne sculptures, and their expression as Etudes and Tableaux, have dominated a major portion of her career, from approximately 2012–13 to the present. They continue, but also expand upon, themes basic to her work since her early formative years, including the interaction of drapery and the female figure in conceptions of beauty, light as an element of form, the interplay of solid and void, and the inherent physical and optical character of different materials. These works, however, venture into new territory both visually and emotionally. As LaMonte herself has put it, "Inspired by the beauty of night, I call these sculptures Nocturnes—dark, seductive, and sublime. They are absent female forms rising from penumbral garments as figurations of dusk."

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In fact, the Nocturnes represent a distinctively different stage in LaMonte’s artistic trajectory, referencing key aspects of earlier work but also introducing new attributes of materiality and poetic expression. Their extended seriality hints at a special fascination for the artist, and they continue even as LaMonte ventures into new sculptural ideas, such as her recent carvings in marble of cumulus clouds. This vital role that they play in her overall productivity makes an exploration of their development and meanings all the more significant.

 

DARKNESS EMBODIED

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As with the earlier clear glass sculptures, LaMonte presents in the Nocturnes a multilayered interrogation of physical beauty, asking us to consider the appeal of the dresses themselves, the allure of the women within (recorded through the imprint of their bodies on the interior surfaces of the hollow casts), and the phenomenon of how clothes influence perceptions of the sensuality and identity of the wearer.

 

But the iconographic nature of the Nocturnes is markedly different. LaMonte has commented eloquently about her intentions: "In 2009 I became focused on night and began to think about the human body in a much larger and more abstract context. . . .I became interested in making female figurations of night . . . [and] focused on atmosphere over narrative. [Figures were] simultaneously emerging from and merging with night. . . . I wanted to wrap the female figure in dusk, exploring both beauty and darkness."

 

The achievement of this ambitious program began with an introduction of both color and new materials into her casting process. In her Floating World kimonos she had expanded her repertoire of sculptural media by adding bronze, iron, and ceramics to her practice. In the Nocturnes, she focused on glass, bronze, and iron as her media of choice, capitalizing on different properties than she did in earlier work. For her glass casts, she worked with German scientists to develop a formula for additive color that produced the right tonalities and light absorption to yield her desired penumbral effects. For the bronzes, she started working with a different alloy—known as white bronze—to create lustrous, silver-gray surfaces. The iron casts were allowed to weather slowly, resulting in powdery cinnamon patinas representing for the artist, due to the temporality of the process, the idea of transition and transformation.  

 

Light obviously responds much differently to the Nocturnes than it does to earlier glass works. Gone is the spectral luminescence of the clear glass dresses, in which light refracts through sculptures and blurs the intersections between solid edges and surrounding space, thus helping to dematerialize the forms. The Nocturnes, in contrast, seem to dimly trap light within them, giving the figures a mysterious and languorous quality, as if they were controlled by reverie or nostalgia. This shadowy coloration creates an aura that signifies the artist’s desire to relate in three-dimensional form to the nighttime visions and meditations of such composers and artists as Frédéric Chopin, John Field, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

 

At the same time, LaMonte’s investigations of glass, steel, and iron stress their inherent physical nature and tactility—one is always tempted to touch the works to better understand their beautiful physicality—helping to give them a strong sculptural presence and a weighty displacement of space. LaMonte’s interest in texture, weight, and the natural properties of materials recalls distantly such “truth-to-materials” sculptors as Jacob Epstein and Constantin Brancusi, who once opined famously that “Matter must continue its natural life when modified by the sculptor.”

 

MAKING OBJECTS OF DESIRE

 

As with all her works, the Nocturnes invite contemplation as much for their formal qualities as their iconographic implications. LaMonte strives for sculptural rigor, with an honesty and clarity of form-making that produces objects complete unto themselves, articulate in structure, and confident in their interaction with space. Always apparent is their connection across time with ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, which is appreciated for its formal strength and composure.

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Unique to LaMonte’s work is the dialogue that hollow casts create between solid and void, interior and exterior, active and calm surfaces. They both push against space and contain it. Her enduring theme of absence is carried further in the Nocturnes, with its appeal to imagine the displaced figures, but is heightened by the shadowy constitution of the forms. Her nocturnal dresses simulate in effect the glow of moonlight with shades that range from steely gray to tints of green and violet. Women represented only by their formal attire become more elusive and mysterious than ever, taking, so to speak, the objects of desire farther out of reach and increasing the sense of longing.

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Many sculptors before her have rendered such nighttime themes as dreaming, mourning, and terror through narrative devices including pose and facial expression (consider, for example, Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse and Auguste Rodin’s Night and The Three Shades), but it is a different matter to absorb that experience into the very essence of the sculptures. Medardo Rosso came close, through his impressionistic use of translucent wax to achieve the atmospheric effects championed by Tonalist painters, but LaMonte’s Nocturnes are more holistic in approach.

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ETUDES & TABLEAUX  

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The Etudes and Tableaux represent sizeable subsets of the Nocturnes. The former, more recent in chronology, are so named because of associations with concepts in Tonalist and Symbolist music and art involving ideas of materials that are unfinished, insubstantial, and ephemeral. They are essentially small-scale versions of the large sculptures—approximately one-third the scale—and sometimes relate very closely to larger works. But they do not serve the purpose of maquettes or preliminary studies. LaMonte thinks of them instead as independent works and is particularly focused on the difference of aesthetic effects produced by dramatic changes of scale and small adjustments of composition. All of them are created from scratch using small mannequins (produced sometimes by scanning models and making three-dimensional prints) that are costumed with the same care and precision as their larger relatives and then solid-cast with the same painstaking techniques.

 

Scale is a critical consideration in sculpture. Whereas some artists such as Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore freely made the same work in multiple scales, other sculptors conceive of works in a certain scale that they consider to be most correct or effective for the composition. Maquettes exist but are studies and not independent works. In LaMonte’s case, there is, as noted, a specificity of purpose with the two distinct sizes, although the precise effects conjured are hard to put one’s finger on. For this writer, the Etudes seem more delicate, refined, and precious. Their delicacy provokes memories of old master finely crafted silver and gold figurines. In a contrary sense, however, the miniaturization of form seems to concentrate the energy of effusive drapery, giving a sense of pent-up power. This conjunction of increased precision and enlivened drapery helps endow these works with a distinctive design language.

 

Behind the Etudes exists the very strong influence of the Théâtre de la Mode, an exhibition of small figurines dating from the close of World War II that were dressed by well-known French fashion designers and displayed within sets created by contemporary artists, including Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. Quickly becoming very popular through its tours in Europe and America, this miniature theater was both a sign of renewed national pride and an impetus for economic revival. LaMonte has said of it: ​“The small scale of the work with its large intention and effect mesmerized me, as it did the world in March 1945. It was a declaration of the importance of beauty and culture particularly during difficult and confusing times and reminded me of the many stories of creation in which light is born from darkness.”

 

In summing up the importance of the Etudes in her practice, she noted that they are “much more than studies for larger works. They celebrate the power of human optimism and our enduring need for beauty.”

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The Tableaux were also inspired in no small part by the Théâtre de la Mode. LaMonte has long been

interested in the theater as a conjunction of life and art, and study of the mise-en-scènes of the miniature costume theater encouraged her to install life-size Nocturnes in historic theaters with the goal of photographing them, capturing the impact of her “stories without bodies” and the resonance between her timeless couture and timeless theater. The resultant images, with their sense of nostalgia and even mystery, match the aura of her sculptures.

 

Opportunities to create the Tableaux came first in 2016 and then again in 2017 at two remarkable theaters in the Czech Republic: the Prague Estates Theater, dating from 1783, and the Baroque Litomyšl Castle Theater, founded in 1797. LaMonte considers these two presentations to be among the most moving of all the installations of her work, commenting on the emotional experience of the first installation in a theater where Mozart conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni in 1787:​​ “I felt an overwhelming sensation of the past colliding with the present.”

 

The theater in Litomyšl is immaculately preserved, including furnishings and original sets. Designed as a space for small-scale productions, it brought the hollow-cast dresses—now seen in a particularly intimate and lush environment—even more to life.

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The artist has likened these photographs of the theatrical installations to living tableaux popular in the nineteenth century, in which models, in various states of undress, struck poses for photographers in large ensembles that relate historical narratives or different moral or religious messages. Other more high-art analogies also exist with moralizing history painting in a classical tradition that was rampant in nineteenth-century academic art, including, for example, Thomas Couture’s famous, but also much maligned, Romans during the Decadence from 1847. No other installations of this kind have followed, but these two mark special moments in LaMonte’s career. The Tableaux allowed her to expand her work beyond the boundary of art museums and galleries into a real-life context that is both artful and instructive of her interest in endowing her work with meanings outside pure formalism, connecting it to the world beyond.

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LAMONTE AND HISTORY

 

It would be hyperbolic to compare Gian Lorenzo Bernini to any of our contemporary artists, but it can be said that LaMonte’s attitude toward and formal treatment of drapery invokes distantly the potent historical precedent of Bernini’s seventeenth-century marble carvings, such as the great Tomb of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa in Rome. Her draperies are a constituent part of the figures beneath them yet also take on a life of their own (as with the cascading folds of Albertoni’s habit). And both artists take delight in exposing the innate qualities of their materials with seductive textures, soft modeling, and tonal ranges that impart luminescence to drapery and skin.

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Interesting if coincidental affinities also exist with two acclaimed works from the Neoclassical period. In one of LaMonte’s Nocturne installations in Czech theaters in 2016–17, a reclining figure was placed on an Empire-style chaise longue, forming a composition related to portraits by both Italian sculptor Antonio Canova and French painter Jacques-Louis David. With Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victoria (1805–1808), it shares not just roots in ancient depictions of reclining figures but also an eroticism amplified by the visual tease of bodies at once revealed and concealed. David’s portrait is exemplary of the kind of social and cultural attributes of dress that interest LaMonte deeply. The unfinished Portrait of Madame Récamier was painted shortly after the French Revolution when, during the Directory, social strata and the importance of commerce and luxury were being reconstructed. As emblematic of a new fashion wave that succeeded revolution-era austerity and Rococo flamboyance, it proclaimed social status, fashionable taste, and consciousness of a new national order. Self-expression, self- confidence, social standing, and seductiveness are combined in one very telling fashion statement.

 

CONTEMPORANEITY

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Despite these associations with the past, LaMonte’s sculptures are very much of our own time. They take their place in the resurgence of figurative art following Minimalism’s banishment of the human figure in favor of elemental abstract forms and help underline the importance that sculpture has played in that development. Many contemporary sculptors have adopted the human body as an important vehicle for study of different aspects of the human condition, including Kiki Smith, Jaume Plensa, Thomas Schütte, Huma Bhabha, Juan Muñoz, and Georg Baselitz. LaMonte’s contributions in this arena involve both her inventive treatment of materials and form and her investigations of female identity and self-expression, which, as we have seen, strike us in both sensuous and abstract ways. Each sculpture is an individual construction of visual, haptic, and intellectual experience, totally integrated. As the acclaimed British painter Cecily Brown has opined, “Painting is very good at saying more than one thing at once.” LaMonte’s Nocturnes affirm that sculpture is as well.