In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity. Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of "bio-power"-the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture's main concerns and formal language. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. "A Rose Has No Teeth "demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
"Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive"

In this exhilarating book, Anne Middleton Wagner challenges readers to rethink the work of a range of post-World War II artists - Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Maya Lin, Bruce Nauman, and Agnes Martin among them - and thus to re-assess the relationship of art to politics and social life. The art of U.S. empire, she argues, is marked by deep dividedness. Painters and sculptors seemed entranced by American symbols, yet used them to enigmatic ends - exuberant, nightmarish, or both. Nor could postwar culture decide if it preserved sites devoted to productive withdrawal - for artists, the special zone called the studio - or simply maintained a margin where numbed subjects rehearsed the rites of vanished self-expression. This book charts the to-and-fro in recent American art between acknowledging the facts of nation and consumerism, and searching for meaningful models. And it shows that this process engages - even structures - national history and the citizen's self.