When did craftsmanship become part of the art, since even as recently as Rodin, the sculptor made a model executed by the trades?  Rodin, trailblazing experimenter, charaded the artist into the work, inserted the primary self, the maker, he mimed into performance his own fingerprints left in clay, in bases that look like nothing other than hand-modeled clay, the hand the hand the hand of the maker.   When art began to aim for other than resemblance, when art became about impression and expression, not that it went in a line down a straight narrow bypass of the unexplainable.

Lipchitz, did he sculpt with his own hands?  where are the Rayonists in all this? The parlor gamers, the card readers, the Egyptophiles, and turban-wearing seancers with ambassadors from the dead and trick cameras, who open the door to the hand, how many did Rodin make, studies like relics, a hundred hands or more. The gates of hell, Rodin got the gates of hell commission, and thinker sits at the gates of hell, as if we didn’t already know. it’s not like there was no history of the imagined, see scores of little bronze satyrs, their hind hooves situated just so as to excite dinner conversation.