The expression 'the Zola of Sculpture' was coined in the circles of the Royal Academy in the 1880s as a term of abuse. Rodin: 'The Zola of Sculpture' reveals how the appraisal of Rodin in British culture was shaped by controversies around the literary models of Zola and Baudelaire, in a period when negative notions about French culture were being progressively transformed into positive expressions of modern sculpture. Embedded within this collaborative book is the editor's proposition that Rodin came to play an important role in the cultural politics of the Entente Cordiale at a critical juncture of European history. Encompassing new scholarship in several disciplines, drawn from both sides of the Channel, Rodin: 'The Zola of Sculpture' offers the first in-depth account of Rodin's career in Britain in the period 1880-1914 and weaves this historical trajectory into a complex investigation of the interactions between French and British cultures. The authors examine the cultural agencies in which conceptions of Rodin's practice played a defining role, dealing in turn with artists' professional associations, art criticism, private and public collectors and the education of women sculptors.

Pierre Culot (1938-2011) was a Belgian ceramist and sculptor who was trained by Antoine de Vinck and English master potter Bernard Leach. He is one of the ceramists of the 1950s who transformed their craft into an art form. In his work, Pierre Culot passionately expresses his desire to be in the world, to be on earth and to be in nature the sole generator of life and beauty. The clay that he molds into slabs, scratches and enamels becomes containers for daily use with majestic presence. Over his career Culot aimed at mastery of his practice, shaping his pieces in terms of size and in surface effect, by combining the raw earth in each item with luxuriant enamels that had unique variations.   All of Culot’s life he remained faithful to his initial experience as a potter, evolving his ceramic works from basic forms (bowls, plates, jugs) to more daring shapes (cruciform vases, gourds, compound pots, inkwells), and even into the landscape space by sculpting garden walls. This book offers a complete overview of his unique and multi-faceted career in pottery, sculpture and landscaping.   Distributed for Mercatorfonds

First opened in 1873, the Victoria and Albert Museum's Cast Courts were purpose built to house copies of architecture and sculpture from around the world. They contain some of the Museum's largest objects, including casts of Trajan's Column (shown in two halves) and the twelfth century Portico de la Gloria from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. Among the Museum's most popular galleries, the Cast Courts are an extraordinary expression of Victorian taste, ambition and public spirit. Published to celebrate the opening of the refurbished Cast Courts at the V&A, this book presents a fresh perspective on the Museum's diverse collection of reproductions including plaster casts, electrotypes and photographs.

A reassessment of self-taught artist William Edmondson, exploring the enduring relevance of his work This richly illustrated volume reintroduces readers to American sculptor William Edmondson (1874–1951) more than 80 years after his historic solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Edmondson began carving at the onset of the Depression in Tennessee. Initially creating tombstones for his community, over time he expanded his practice to include biblical subjects, the natural world, and recognizable figures including nurses and preachers. This book features new essays that explore Edmondson’s life in the South and his reception on the East Coast in the 1930s. Reading the artist through lenses of African American experience, the authors draw parallels between then and now, highlighting the complex relationship between Black cultural production and the American museum. Countering existing narratives that have viewed Edmondson as a passive actor in an unfolding drama—a self-taught sculptor “discovered� by White patrons and institutions—this book considers how the artist’s identity and position within history influenced his life and work. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation  Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (June 25–September 10, 2023)  

This title was first published 2003. In the twentieth century, Britain was rich in artistic achievement, especially in sculpture. Just some of those working in this field were Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro, Richard Long, Mona Hatoum and Anish Kapoor. The work of these and other known and less well-known artists has an astonishing variety and expressive power, a range and strength that has placed Britain at the hub of the artistic world. Alan Windsor has compiled a concise biographical dictionary of sculpture in Britain in book form. Richly informative and easy-to-use, this guide is an art-lover's and expert's essential reference. Written by scholars, the entries are cross-referenced and each concise biographical outline provides the relevant facts about the artist's life, a brief characterization of the artist's work, and, where appropriate, major bibliographical references.

This book elaborates on the social and cultural phenomenon of national schools during the nineteenth century, via the less studied field of sculpture and using Belgium as a case study. The role, importance of, and emphasis on certain aspects of national identity evolved throughout the century, while a diverse array of criteria were indicated by commissioners, art critics, or artists that supposedly constituted a "national sculpture." By confronting the role and impact of the four most crucial actors within the artistic field (politics, education, exhibitions, public commissions) with a linear timeframe, this book offers a chronological as well as a thematic approach. Artists covered include Guillaume Geefs, Eugene Simonis, Charles Van der Stappen, Julien Dillens, Paul Devigne, Constantin Meunier, and George Minne.

Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside takes a journey through the artist's key experiments in visual art presenting works never seen before, commissioning new critical thinking, and amplifying knowledge of an artist whose ideas are fundamental to how we define art today. Over the course of fifty years, Nancy Holt's rich output spanned concrete poetry, audio, film and video, photography, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, and public sculpture. Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside details her unique and significant contributions, situating an important female voice within the narratives of land art and conceptual art. Initiating her art practice in 1966 with concrete poetry, she soon expanded her ideas into other media and the landscape. Through each of the mediums she worked in, Holt explored how we understand our place in the world by investigating perception and site within and outside of traditional museum contexts. In the mid-1970s Holt completed her most influential earthwork, Sun Tunnels, an artwork central to the definition of land art. Rigorous documentation of Holt's work, as well as contributions by key scholars, previously unseen photoworks and drawings, and a revealing, never-before-published "self-interview" by the artist bring her work into far fuller context. Developed in close consultation with Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed organization dedicated to preserving and extending the work of Nancy Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, this expansive publication will serve as a major contribution to the critical ongoing research into the art of our time. This new book is published to coincide with an exhibition anchored at Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden, and traveling to MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and further internationally.

Richly illustrated, Early Gothic Column-Figure Sculpture in France is a comprehensive investigation of church portal sculpture installed between the 1130s and the 1170s. At more than twenty great churches, beginning at the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and extending around Paris from Provins in the east, south to Bourges and Dijon, and west to Chartres and Angers, larger than life-size statues of human figures were arranged along portal jambs, many carved as if wearing the dress of the highest ranks of French society. This study takes a close look at twelfth-century human figure sculpture, describing represented clothing, defining the language of textiles and dress that would have been legible in the twelfth-century, and investigating rationale and significance. The concepts conveyed through these extraordinary visual documents and the possible motivations of the patrons of portal programs with column-figures are examined through contemporaneous historical, textual, and visual evidence in various media. Appendices include analysis of sculpture production, and the transportation and fabrication in limestone from Paris. Janet Snyder's new study considers how patrons used sculpture to express and shape perceived reality, employing images of textiles and clothing that had political, economic, and social significances.

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art's power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.

In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking and sometimes provocative new book, leading sculptor Antony Gormley, informed and energised by a lifetime of making, and art critic and historian Martin Gayford, explore sculpture as a transnational art form with its own compelling history. The authors' lively conversations and explorations make unexpected connections across time and media. Sculpture has been practised by every culture throughout the world and stretches back into our distant past. The first surviving shaped stones may even predate the advent of language. Evidently, the desire to carve, mould, bend, chip away, weld, suspend, balance - to transform a vast array of materials and light into new shapes and forms - runs deep in our psyche and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression. With more than 300 spectacular illustrations, Shaping the World juxtaposes a rich variety of works - from the famous Lowenmensch or Lion Man, c. 35,000 BCE to Michelangelo's luminous Pieta in Rome, the Terracotta Warriors in China to Rodin's The Kiss, Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Olafur Eliasson's extraordinary Weather Project and Kara Walker's Fons Americanus, and Tomas Saraceno's ongoing Aerocene project, as well as examples of Gormley's own work. Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford take into account materials and techniques, and consider overarching themes such as light, mortality and our changing world. Above all, they discuss their view of sculpture as a form of physical thinking capable of altering the way people feel, and they invite us to look at sculpture we encounter - and more broadly the world around us - in a completely different way.

This is the first full-length, English-language study of eleventh-century figural sculpture produced in Dalmatia and Croatia. Challenging the dependency on stylistic analysis in previous scholarship, Magdalena Skoblar contextualises the visual presence of these relief carvings in their local communities, focusing on five critical sites. Alongside an examination of architectural setting and iconography, this book also investigates archaeological and textual evidence to establish the historical situation within which these sculptures were produced and received. Croatia and Dalmatia in the eleventh century were a borderland between Byzantium and the Latin west where the balance of power was constantly changing. These sculptures speak of the fragmented and hybrid nature of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean as a whole, where well-connected trade routes and porous boundaries informed artistic production. Moreover, in contrast to elsewhere in Europe where contemporary figural sculpture was spurred on by monastic communities, this book argues that the patronage of such artworks in Dalmatia and Croatia was driven by members of the local secular elites. For the first time, these sculptures are being introduced to Anglophone scholarship, and this book contributes to a fuller understanding of the profound changes in medieval attitudes towards sculpture after the year 1000.

The first book to devote serious attention to questions of scale in contemporary sculpture, this study considers the phenomenon within the interlinked cultural and socio-historical framework of the legacies of postmodern theory and the growth of global capitalism. In particular, the book traces the impact of postmodern theory on concepts of measurement and exaggeration, and analyses the relationship between this philosophy and the sculptural trend that has developed since the early 1990s. Rachel Wells examines the arresting international trend of sculpture exploring scale, including American precedents from the 1970s and 1980s and work by the 'Young British Artists'. Noting that the emergence of this sculptural trend coincides with the end of the Cold War, Wells suggests a similarity between the quantitative ratio of scale and the growth of global capitalism that has replaced the former status quo of qualitatively opposed systems. This study also claims the allegorical nature of scale in contemporary sculpture, outlining its potential for critique or complicity in a system dominated by quantitative criteria of value. In a period characterised by uncertainty and incommensurability, Wells demonstrates that scale in contemporary sculpture can suggest the possibility of, and even an unashamed reliance upon, comparison and external difference in the construction of meaning.

Histories of sculpture within the Nordic region are under-studied and the region's influence upon and translation of influences from elsewhere in Europe remain insufficiently traced. This volume brings to light individual histories of sculptural mobility from the early modern period onwards. Examining the movement of sculptures, sculptors, practices, skills, styles and motifs across borders, through studios and public architectures, within popular and print culture and via texts, the essays collected here consider the extent to which the sculptural artwork is changed by its physical movement and its transfigurations in other media. How does the meaning and form of these objects performatively respond to the pressure of their relocations and rematerialisations? Conversely, how do sculptures impact their new contexts of display? The contributing authors engage with a wide variety of objects and media in their essays. Each focuses on the contextualisation of sculpture in an original and timely way, exploring how mobility acts as a filter offering new perspectives on iconography, memorialisation, collecting, iconoclasm and exhibiting. From the stave churches of early Norway to the decoration of International Style monoliths of the twentieth century, from Italian quarries to Baroque palaces, from fountains to figurines, from text to performance, these wide-ranging and fascinating case studies contribute to the rich history of the Nordic region's sculptural production.

The world that shaped Europe's first national sculptor-celebrities, from Schadow to David d'Angers, from Flaxman to Gibson, from Canova to Thorvaldsen, was the city of Rome. Until around 1800, the Holy See effectively served as Europe's cultural capital, and Roman sculptors found themselves at the intersection of the Italian marble trade, Grand Tour expenditure, the cult of the classical male nude, and the Enlightenment republic of letters. Two sets of visitors to Rome, the David circle and the British traveler, have tended to dominate Rome's image as an open artistic hub, while the lively community of sculptors of mixed origins has not been awarded similar attention. Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, c.1770-1825 is the first study to piece together the labyrinthine sculptors' world of Rome between 1770 and 1825. The volume sheds new light on the links connecting Neo-classicism, sculpture collecting, Enlightenment aesthetics, studio culture, and queer studies. The collection offers ideal introductory reading on sculpture and Rome around 1800, but its combination of provocative perspectives is sure to appeal to a readership interested in understanding a modernized Europe's overwhelmingly transnational desire for Neo-classical, Roman sculpture.

First published in 1935, this book was intended to provide westerners with a more definite and comprehensive understanding of Chinese Art and its achievements. Newly available opportunities to study authentic examples, such as the Royal Academy exhibition that provided the impetus for this volume, allowed for greater opportunities to conduct in-depth examination than had previously been possible. Following an introduction giving an overview of Chinese art and its history in the west, six chapters cover painting and calligraphy, sculpture and lacquer, 'the potter's art', bronzes and cloisonne enamel, jades, and textiles - supplemented by a chronology of Chinese epochs, a selected bibliography and 25 images.

Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini's work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically, geologically, politically, or in terms of art theory) to his immaterial twin. Here immaterial Bernini and the historiography that sustains him is finally confronted by material Bernini. Central to the volume are Bernini's works in clay, a fragmentary record of a large body of preparatory works by a sculptor who denied any direct relation between sketches of any kind and final works. Read together, the essays call into question why those works in which Bernini's bodily relation to the material of his art is most evident, his clay studies, have been configured as a point of unmediated access to the artist's mind, to his immaterial ideas. This insight reveals a set of values and assumptions that have profoundly shaped Bernini studies from their inception, and opens up new and compelling avenues of inquiry within a field that has long remained remarkably self-enclosed.

A new and revised edition of the 2002 popular title, The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden, this exquisitely produced book showcases the garden in St Ives throughout the seasons, with new photography and updated information on the plants from the Head Gardener, Jodi Dickinson. Barbara Hepworth's studio at Trewyn in St Ives is a unique combination of sub-tropical garden and sculpture museum. A haven of peace, it provided Hepworth with a working environment, a showcase for her sculpture, and the opportunity to pursue her love of gardening. The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden is a beautiful record of the plants and sculptures at Trewyn through the seasons, exploring the relationship between Hepworth's sculpture and the natural forms that surround them. With specially commissioned photographs and full descriptions of both plants and sculptures, this is a comprehensive record of Barbra Hepworth's years in St Ives, and a beautiful souvenir of the garden. Texts from art historian and previous curator at Tate, Chris Stephens, along with Miranda Philips contextualises the work of Hepworth and the decisions made to create one of the most famous artists gardens in the world.

The British School of Sculpture, c. 1760-1832 represents the first edited collection exploring one of the most significant moments in British art history, returning to centre stage a wide range of sculpture considered for the first time by some of the most important scholars in the field. Following a historical and historiographical introduction by the editors, situating British sculpture in relation to key events and developments in the period, and the broader scholarship on British art more generally in the period and beyond, the book contains nine wide-ranging case studies that consider the place of antique and modern sculpture in British country houses in the period, monuments to heroes of commerce and the Napoleonic Wars, the key debates fought around ideal sculpture at the Royal Academy, the reception of British sculpture across Europe, the reception of Hindu sculpture deriving from India in Britain, and the relationship of sculpture to emerging industrial markets, both at home and abroad. Challenging characterisations of the period as 'neoclassical', the volume reveals British sculpture to be a much more eclectic and various field of endeavour, both in service of the state and challenging it, and open to sources ranging from the newly arrived Parthenon Frieze to contemporary print culture.

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism is structured around four distinct but interrelated projects initially realized in Italy between 1966 and 1972: Yayoi Kusama's Narcissus Garden, Michelangelo Pistoletto's Newspaper Sphere (Sfera di giornali), Robert Smithson's Asphalt Rundown, and Joseph Beuys's Arena. These works all utilized non-traditional materials, collaborative patronage models, and alternative modes of display to create a spatially and temporally dispersed arena of matter and action, with photography serving as a connective, material thread within the sculpture it reflects. While created by major artists of the postwar period, these particular projects have yet to receive substantive art historical analysis, especially from a sculptural perspective. Here, they anchor a transnational narrative in which sculpture emerged as a node, a center of transaction comprising multiple material phenomenon, including objects, images, and actors. When seen as entangled, polymorphous entities, these works suggest that the charge of sculpture in the late postwar period came from its concurrent existence as both three-dimensional phenomena and photographic image, in the interchanges among the materials that continue to activate and alter the constitution of sculpture within the contemporary sphere.

This book is the companion to Public Sculpture of Edinburgh, volume 1, 'The Old Town and South Edinburgh', extending the coverage to the First New Town and its environs, and beyond that to the former independent burgh of Leith. It provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the entire spectrum of public sculptures to be found in these parts of the city, including free-standing commemorative monuments, architectural carvings, and contemporary site-specific interventions. Based on extensive new research, the text is structured as a catalogue raisonne, with each entry comprising a detailed description of the work, an account of how it came to be commissioned, and an analysis of its cultural significance. There are also separate appendices dealing with important works that have been lost or destroyed, minor works and sculptural coats of arms. The study of public sculpture is now recognised as offering a range of new insights into the development of the urban realm. Those insights are brought together here to provide a comprehensive resource for historians, architects, urban planners and conservators, and a narrative history that will be of interest to all who care about Edinburgh, and wish to celebrate its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

By taking simple ways of looking at sculpture, this book uncovers unexpected affinities between works of very different periods and types. From sundials to mirrors, from graves to way-markers, from fountains to contemporary art, a wide range of illustrated examples expands the definitions of sculpture and proposes that we understand this art as something more fundamental to the way we experience and construct our rites of passage. Penelope Curtis argues that there are some basic functions shared by many kinds of three-dimensional objects, be they more or less obviously sculptural. Even contemporary sculpture, with no apparent purpose, makes use of this deeply embedded vocabulary. Together, the qualities of vertical, horizontal, closed and open are consolidated in the ensemble, which places the viewer at its heart, on the threshold of sculpture and on the threshold of change. This book elides the usual notions of figurative and abstract to think instead about how sculpture works. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim’s artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim’s work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.