Shaping Wood: Art’s Eternal Raw Material

Shortly before his death in 1564, Michelangelo returned to wood. He had last worked in the medium as a teenager in the previous century; his mature years had been spent with paint and marble. But letters show that in 1562 he requested wood-working tools to begin a crucifix for his nephew Leonardo; in July of 1563, a friend wrote that he had heard Michelangelo labouring on the ‘wooden Christ’. A worked block of wood, 26.5 centimetres high, in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, is usually associated with this last of Michelangelo’s sculptures, though, as the curators of the recent British Museum exhibition ‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades’ remind us, there is nothing to which to compare it, so the attribution remains conjectural. The legs, muscular midriff and chest cavity are vividly established, though unsmoothed; the head and shoulders are still confined within the block, the contours awaiting a finer chisel.

Why Michelangelo returned to wood, and why this work – if it is his – remained unfinished, is impossible to tell. Perhaps both the medium and its incompletion were the result of declining dexterity; alternatively, as the curators suggest, the work might have been a late-life practice of spiritual meditation: the consolation of process rather than the satisfaction of finality. Or perhaps, as in his incomplete marble pieces, Michelangelo recognized the pathos and intensity in an unfinished work – the way that, still bearing the marks of the labour of making and displaying the material from which form emerges, it speaks of the limit and genius of human invention, a relinquishing of power which is also the carving’s religious subject.

Compare an object with striking similarities, but a radically different story of origin: the apparent miracle of the 13th-century Kranenburg crucifix. Its legend claims that a shepherd, unable or unwilling at mass to swallow the consecrated host, secreted it afterwards in a tree, in an act of sacrilege. He confessed to a priest, but when they tried to retrieve the wafer, it had disappeared. Years later, the tree was cut down for firewood: when the axe split the trunk, it revealed a crucifix, formed by the wonder-working host. Compared even to the Buonarroti figure, the crudeness and rudeness of the Kranenburg crucifix are marked, suggesting that the representational powers of miracle are surprisingly limited. But together, the works demonstrate something central to wood sculpture: that its power rests not in the fineness or finishedness of the object, but in the story of emergence which harnesses the natural form of the material and the tree to the intervention of human hands. Finding, as much as making, is fundamental to the wood sculptor’s work.

‘Sometimes,’ the American sculptor Thaddeus Mosley said in a 2023 interview with The New York Times, ‘I feel like just taking off the bark and standing up the log.’ Though not Mosley’s practice – he prefers to ‘see what [he] can come up with’, faced with a particular found piece of wood – the sense that the wood sculptor’s fundamental impulse might be the gestural display of the material itself is both widespread and historical. In his short tract De statua (c. 1464), this is how the renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti suggested that sculpture itself began: artists who wanted to make images, he claims, would sometimes see the outlines (lineamenta) of a figure in ‘tree trunks, or clods of earth, or other lifeless objects’, which needed only a few small changes to be realised. Greek statuary originated in xoana, unworked pieces of wood set up for worship which were later replaced with figural images of gods, and later still with stone. In central and northern Europe, archaeologists have discovered ‘pole gods’, such as the Broddenbjerg idol, preserved in bogs: rough-worked found wood, often forked, set up for veneration.

Finding, as much as making, is fundamental to the wood sculptor’s work.

Mosley’s own work harnesses such archaic impulses, while also drawing on the abstractions of modernism, the stylisations of African sculpture and the improvisatory processes of jazz. His recent exhibitions have clustered skewed vertical forms, some poised in unlikely precarity: weighty wings projecting from columns apparently too tenuous to hold them, or roughly circular or spherical objects piled on a slanted base; others rise, like a Brâncuși, as rhythmic totems of similar forms, or compile ingeniously jointed shapes of worked wood. In Bark (2008), instead of standing up the log for admiration, Mosley shows the stripped cortex of a walnut tree in a loose spiral like an unscrolling comma: a collaboration between the irregular corrugations of the tree’s outer tissue and the geometry that the artist’s eye and hand make of it.

Mosley describes his works as ‘animate abstractions’. To call his work ‘abstract’, however, belies the way that his sculptures, as a particular case of the general condition of working in wood, operate within overlapping regimes of representation. While Mosley’s work with shape and geometry certainly stimulates the formal imagination, the pareidolia that Alberti claims as the origin of sculpture –

the perception of meaningful images in natural objects or chance patterns, like pictures in clouds – means that we discover images despite ourselves: Mosley’s own forms variously suggest to me birds, gramophones, corkscrews, trees, rhetorical gestures. And, inescapably, unpainted wood foregrounds itself as wood, in ways which engage the viewer beyond abstraction or representation, and make the tree’s original life manifest.

A preference for visible wood has a long history. The late 15th century saw a shift, in the limewood sculpture of Germany, from polychromy – the use of paint to colour statues of saints and Biblical scenes – to holzsichtig works, in which the grain of the wood remains visible, treated only with stains and oils for preservation. The turn to the monochrome enabled attention to texture and surface, playing with distinctions between skin, leather, cloth, hair and wood itself. Michael Baxandall, in the most influential study of German renaissance wood-carvers, writes of the sculptor’s need to practise the ‘chiromancy of limewood’ – to discern, through an almost magical divination, the power and character of a particular wood and tree. Holzsichtig works foreground the mantic power of the sculptor, showing their ability to win animation, movement and texture from the wood. The full panoply of effect is already visible in the first known work in the style, Tilman Riemenschneider’s altarpiece of Mary Magdalene for Münnerstadt, made 1490–1492, some sections of which are now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich. The tight coils of her hair – a sign of her self-neglect in her desert devotions – make of Mary’s body an uncanny scrollwork. Each angel is a study in contrasting textures: the wings mimic painterly stippling and the planishing of metalwork before resolving into feather. Mary’s prayerful stillness is contrasted with the baffled cloth of the angels’ flouncing garments as they usher her to heaven. Riemenschneider’s skill implies both the air and the flying limbs beneath the flamboyant fabric.

If Mary Magdalene prompted Riemenschneider to play with texture and surface, in scenes of martyrdom the representation of bare skin highlights the different vulnerabilities of wood and flesh. The single most carved figure in medieval Christian contexts is, after all, a tortured body: in crucifixions, the brutal nails rammed through the hands and feet of Christ treat a body like timber. The anonymous pearwood Grablegung Christi (1496) contrasts bravura renderings of fabric – the folds of Nicodemus’s boot on the left, the sleeve of Joseph of Arimathea – with Jesus’s slumping torso, his ribs separately distinguishable. The stud of his nipple, probably separately turned and inserted into the sculpture, radiates damage into the surrounding wood. The spear wound in his side is the single blow of an axe: a trace of the felling of the tree through which the carving came to be, and the inescapable interruption of the life of a living thing which wood sculpture always requires.

The tight coils of her hair make of Mary’s body an uncanny scrollwork.

Contemporary artists, too, take on the woundedness of wood. Kader Attia’s J’Accuse (2016), recently exhibited at the Berlinische Galerie, shows 17 wooden busts that resemble the injured faces of soldiers from World War I, as well as damaged African masks, the techniques of whose making Attia deploys. Hewn in untreated and unvarnished teak, using a traditional tool which leaves the traces of its cutting, the busts use the trunk, bark and knots of the tree, its visible rings and grain, to signal both damage and repair. The Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, meanwhile, intervenes in trees in ways which engage the devotional history of the medium. He transforms mature trees into reliquaries of their own past, as in the Cedro di Versailles (2000–03), in which the artist exhibited the immense bole of a cedar felled in a storm, stripped back and excavated at its centre, using the internal traces of its growth to uncover the slim form of the younger tree. Other works enlist trees’ future animacy: in L’albero ricorderà il contatto (The tree will remember the contact, 1968), Penone embraced a tree and marked the points of contact with barbed wire, like a crown of thorns, around which the tree grew, leaving seams and scars; in Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (It will continue to grow except at that point, 1968), Penone affixed a steel cast of his hand to the tree at a place where he had grasped it, the trace of the sculptor’s gesture slowly enveloped by future growth, like the transformative host which supposedly formed the Kranenburg crucifix.

Artists continue to take up the latent life of wood and refresh this sculptural tradition.

Sanctuary, made by the American sculptor Martin Puryear in 1982, likewise makes reference to wood-sculpture’s religious history, and the tension between the sculptor’s impulse to display the wood itself or work it to his formal ends. A box is mounted three metres high on the gallery wall, an enclosure or display too high for reach or vision. It surmounts two unworked saplings, which cross near the floor to meet the axle of a wheel, like feet on pedals. The natural twists of the saplings’ length, their impression of a certain cross-legged nonchalance, introduce a tonal instability in the work, also suggested by the unworkable wheel, with its simultaneous sense of whimsicality and utter frustration. But the crossed ‘ankles’ of the saplings also recall Jesus’s crossed feet in depictions of the crucifixion, and the mounted box a kind of tabernacle or reliquary.

Puryear’s C.F.A.O (2006–07), meanwhile, named for the Compagnie Française de L’Afrique Occidentale, a colonial trading company, combines a wheelbarrow, taken from a residency at Alexander Calder’s studio, with an inverted reconstruction of an Ngil mask made by the Fang people of Gabon, painted white and surrounded by a bristling scaffold of radiating pinewood spars, suggesting the crown of thorns adorning crucifixes. The references to Christian and West African sculpture, the acquired wheelbarrow and the combination of ‘found’, carved and carpentered elements are at once a critique of colonial appropriation, and a synthesis of the influences and modes of making in wood to which Puryear is heir.

This combination of critique and synthesis is a vital part of the best contemporary making in wood. Artists continue to take up the latent life of the medium and to explore the transcultural history of its artistic and ritual uses, while also refreshing the tradition in the immediate encounter of particular sculptor with particular tree – preferring the traces of that encounter over qualities of finish and finality. The first lines of Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also die, 1953) by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet, an essay film on African wood sculpture and its commodification under colonialism, claim that, ‘When humans are dead, they become part of history. When statues are dead, they become part of culture’. Both contemporary artists and the history of the medium, however, suggest that wooden sculpture retains an animacy that even exhibition in a gallery or museum cannot extinguish.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters, London 2024 under the title ‘Old Growth, New Growth’.

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^{Main image: Giuseppe Penone, It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point, 2004–10, bronze, 332 × 87 × 77 cm. Courtesy: © Giuseppe Penone and Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park}