In 600 BC (if you believe Pliny the Elder), Kora of Sicyon simultaneously invented painting and inspired history's first portrait relief when she traced a silhouette of her lover on a wall. Her father Butades then moulded clay into the outline, turning two dimensions into three.

Apocryphal origin stories aside, sculptures have been sprouting from drawings for much of art history. In a Renaissance bottega (an artist's workshop), apprentices who couldn't yet be trusted with a chisel spent their time sketching models and existing works. Academies in Italy and France codified the practice, and drawing formed the foundation of the curriculum at London's Royal Academy.

For academicians, drawing was a non-negotiable of the sculptural process. But eventually, drawing's primacy started to chafe on the twentieth-century avant-garde. Why, then, did so many of Britain's modernist sculptors remain prolific draughtsmen once drawing lost its mandate? With a new emphasis on idea over technique, their drawings evolved from systematic reproduction to what art historian Terry Friedman called 'the personal gesture of the artist in his struggle to create.'

In 1958, Reg Butler, an ascendant sculptor associated with Britain's Geometry of Fear group, narrated a BBC documentary on his practice. As Butler speaks, a sketch emerges on screen. 'The important thing about drawing is to start off with a sheet of paper,' he says. 'Then you make a mark on that sheet of paper, then you make another mark and gradually a drawing grows, the same way a sculpture grows in one's studio.'

After finishing his drawing for the BBC, Butler – a member of his own avant-garde – tells his viewers that art is at its best when it is used to 'project oneself into a new world,' and is not limited to mimicking reality. Freed from the obligation to draw, he and many of his contemporaries still chose to project themselves with a pencil.

Before Butler's cohort rose to fame, Henry Moore – whom Butler and his contemporary Bernard Meadows both assisted – had used drawing to explore a new world of his own.

Preparatory drawing birthed iconic works like Family Group, but Moore also used the medium to create a kind of cipher: his first solo show at the Tate Gallery in 1951 included sketches of 'pebbles and stones,' which he would transmute into abstracted figures to lend them a primeval inevitability. Curator David Sylvester described them as Moore's 'vocabulary of natural forms.'

Just one year later, Britain's exhibition at the 1952 Venice Biennale was something of a baton pass, with a sculpture by Moore standing outside the pavilion that would launch his successors' careers. Inside, Butler, Kenneth Armitage, Robert Adams, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Bernard Meadows, William Turnbull and Geoffrey Clarke displayed sculptures in a new, angular visual language – alongside the drawings they had used to build its vocabulary.

Titled 'New Aspects of British Sculpture', the exhibition made it clear that there was a conscious interplay between drawings and sculptures for this new wave of artists by including both in the gallery. Modernist debates about medium specificity were gathering steam, as artists like these continued to fuel them.

The critic Clement Greenberg, who had argued for medium specificity in his 1940 essay 'Towards a Newer Laocoön', cannot have been a fan of the show. He famously disdained Henry Moore and was dismissive of Chadwick and Butler. In his view, they made sculptures that filled space – he preferred those that 'shaped', 'divided', or 'enclosed' it. Greenberg and Herbert Read – who had curated the exhibition and given the Geometry of Fear group its name – would share a well-documented rivalry later in the 1950s.

Even so, the drawings displayed alongside the three-dimensional works at the British pavilion in Venice could actually have emphasised what was essential about each medium, and visitors were able to see how forms behaved in two and three dimensions.

Lynn Chadwick quickly emerged as a biennale favourite. He guessed at the origins of his style, which pavilion visitors described as a 'revelation'.

'It seems to me that art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark,' he said, 'caught by the imagination and translated by the artist's skill...'

For Chadwick and others, drawing was a means of bringing that vital force into the light. Requiring fewer materials, it was often the first milestone in the journey from abstract idea to physical object: the point at which ideas were 'caught' and crystallised, bridging thought and creation. Once captured, ideas could be developed on the page and in three dimensions.

It is not always easy to determine whether the idea or the drawing came first. Barbara Hepworth described the process as a sudden discovery of form, while those watching Bernard Meadows sketch described 'almost automatic scribbles', akin to surrealist automatism.

Meadows' output was far from accidental – he revisited figures like crabs and cockerels deliberately throughout his career. It would seem, though, that some of the forms he used to create those figures were unearthed by plumbing his subconscious, following his hand across the page.

The generation that followed would also let drawing lead. In sculptor Phyllida Barlow's words, 'It is often only just a more intense form of doodling and scribbling. Ideas begin from landscape, rooms, figures and piles of rubbish and debris... but the action of making marks seems to take over from the original observation.'

If Barlow was echoing Meadows' practice, then David Nash inherited Lynn Chadwick's belief in pinning down a vital force. Nash described using his notebook to capture 'slight events that occasionally give me a profound wink,' and the fleeting moments when he was able to 'catch sight of a larger world.'

Nash used drawing to generate ideas for sculptures, but also to record and explain his constantly changing works of ecological art. Drawings extended their scope, and in some cases, their lifespan. Even more recently, British sculpture has found its way back to drawing in a new way, in the work of Claude Heath.

Heath blindfolds himself, feels a three-dimensional object with his hands, and records those feelings on a page. Picking up a plaster replica of the Venus of Willendorf in 1996, he set about flipping Pliny's origin story on its head.

As Butades' portrait relief sprang from an outline on a wall, so Heath's sketching is shaped by the Venus – and one of the world's oldest surviving sculptures returns an ancient favour to drawing.

Alex Cohen, writer

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Lund Humphries, 2014

Alan Bowness and Penelope Curtis, Bernard Meadows: Sculpture and Drawings, Henry Moore Foundation, 1995

Reg Butler, BBC, first broadcast 21st September 1958

Terry Friedman, Four Centuries of Sculptors' Drawings from the Collection of Leeds City Art Galleries, Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, 1993

David Getsy, 'Tactility or Opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on the Art of Sculpture,' 1956, Sculpture Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, Dec 2008, pp. 75–88

Martin Hammer, 'Ambivalence and Ambiguity: David Sylvester on Henry Moore' in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publications, 2015

Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.), British Sculptors: Attitudes to Drawing, Sunderland Arts Centre, 1974

Henry Meyric Hughes, 'The Promotion and Reception of British Sculpture Abroad 1948–1960: Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and the 'Young British Sculptors'' in British Art Studies, no. 3, 18th July 2016

W. J. T. Mitchell, 'Architecture as Sculpture as Drawing: Antony Gormley's Paragone' in Antony Gormley: Blind Light, The Hayward Gallery, 2007

Rachel McGarry, 'The Invention of Drawing', Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2014

Alina Payne, 'The Sculptor-Architect's Drawing and Exchanges Between the Arts' in Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini: Sculptors' Drawings from Renaissance Italy, Isabella Gardner Museum, 2014, pp. 57–73