Because sculpture involves the use of materials that can be cast or modulated, it is considered one of the plastic arts. Most public art is sculpture. Many sculptures together in a garden could be called a sculpture garden.

Sculptors do not always make sculptures by hand. With the rise of technology in the 20th century and the popularity of conceptual art over technical craftsmanship, more sculptors have turned to artistic fabrications to produce their work. With fabrication, the artist creates a design and pays the fabricator to produce it. This allows sculptors to create larger and more complex sculptures from material such as cement, metal and plastic that they would not be able to create by hand. Sculptures can also be made using three-dimensional printing technology.

The increasing tendency to elevate painting, and to a lesser extent sculpture, above the other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions painting was perceived as the highest degree of the artist’s imagination, and the most distant from manual labor – in Chinese painting the styles of “scholarly painting,” at least theoretically practiced by gentlemanly amateurs, were most valuable. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar views.

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Historically, the main methods (also called media) are wood engraving, line engraving, etching, lithography, and screen printing (serigraphy, silkscreen), but there are many others, including modern digital technologies. Prints are usually printed on paper, but other media range from cloth and parchment to more modern materials. The main tradition of printing is Japan (ukiyo-e).

European history

Prints in the Western tradition, issued before 1830, are known as old type prints. In Europe, from about 1400 BC, woodblock prints were used for master prints on paper, using printing methods developed in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Michael Wolgemuth improved German engraving from about 1475, and the Dutchman Erhard Reuwich was the first to use cross-hatching. At the end of the century, Albrecht Dürer brought Western printmaking to a stage that has never been surpassed, increasing the status of single leaf woodblock prints.

Chinese origins and practice

In China, the art of engraving developed about 1,100 years ago as illustrations along with text cut into wood blocks for printing on paper. Originally the images were mostly religious, but in the Song dynasty, artists began to carve landscapes. During the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1616-1911) dynasties, the technique was refined for both religious and artistic prints.

Development in Japan 1603-1867

Woodblock printing in Japan (Japanese: 木 版画, moku hanga) is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e art genre; however, it was also very widely used for book printing during the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books long before the movable type, but was widely adopted in Japan surprisingly late in the Edo period (1603-1867). Although similar in some respects to woodblock printmaking in Western printing, moku hanga differs greatly in that it uses water-based ink (as opposed to Western woodblock printmaking, which uses oil-based ink), allowing for a wide range of bright colors, glazes, and color transparency.

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Materials that can be carved or shaped, such as stone or wood, concrete or steel, have also been included in the narrower definition, since with the appropriate tools such materials are also capable of modulation. [Right] This use of the term “Plastic” in art should not be confused with the use of Piet Mondrian and the movement he called, in French and English, “Neoplastic.”

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