Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford History of Art)

Sculpture 1900-1945 provides a new critical analysis of the fascinating development of sculpture in Europe and America during this important period in art history. The most comprehensive concise history of modern sculpture available, this account puts sculpture back into relation with a range of other phenomena, encompassing many kinds of architects, sculptors, and painters, with widely differing kinds of practices. Penelope Curtis takes Rodin as her point of departure and recurrent point of reference, building a story that necessarily begins in Paris, the major artistic center of the era, and evolves around responses to Rodin by sculptors in France, Germany, Britain, and America. She charts the key developments in the practice and reception of a wide variety of sculpture, from the avant-garde to public monuments. Covering all the major figures, including Duchamp, Le Corbusier, Dali, El Lissitzsky, Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture 1900-1945 focuses on specific themes in each chapter, ranging from the public place of sculpture, to the private arena, to the figurative ideal. Filling a gap in the literature, Sculpture 1900-1945 is the only critically up-to-date book on the subject.

Arts & Photography

Curtis, Penelope

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

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.

Sculpture Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open

Paul Mellon Centre

Patio and Pavilion examines the relationship between modern sculpture and architecture in the mid-twentieth century, an interplay that has laid the ground for the semisculptural or semiarchitectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and artists such as Dan Graham. The first half of the book looks at how the addition of sculpture enhanced several architectural projects, including Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Campus (1934). The second half of the book uses several additional case studies, including Philip Johnson's sculpture court for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1953), to explore what architectural spaces can add to the sculpture they are designed to contain. Curtis argues that it was in the middle of the twentieth century, before sculptural and architectural forms began to converge, that the complementary nature of the two art forms began clearly to emerge: figurative sculpture highlighted the modernist architectural experience, and the abstract qualities of that architecture imparted to sculpture a heightened role.

Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture (Getty)

Architecture

J.paul Getty Museum

Born in Bangor, Wales, in 1949, Richard Deacon has been at the forefront of sculpture for the last 35 years and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1987. His work employs curvilinear forms made from a wide range of materials that are traditionally associated with the manufacturing of industrial and domestic products. Language and speech have played an important role in Deacon’s approach to his work: “I think of making things, structuring, as being an activity not unlike the power of speech, in that it is a means of giving shape . . . a means whereby the world, a chaotic universe, is actually made understandable.”

Tate Modern Artists: Richard Deacon

Wallis, Clarrie

Gleadowe, Teresa

Tate

Dynamism: the Art of Modern Life Before the Great War

Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd

Barbara Hepworth's career spanned five decades, from 1925 to 1975. Her style moved from figuration, through geometric and organic abstraction, to the internationally acclaimed grandeur of her large-scale, post-war work. Her best known sculpture is associated with the landscape around St. Ives in Cornwall: 'I used colour and strings in many of the carvings ... The colour plunged me into the depths of water, caves or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.' This publication focuses on Hepworth's unique carvings. It reassesses her reputation in the light of attention recently paid to her contemporaries, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore and offers the opportunity to look afresh at a major British artist.

Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective

Yale Center for British Art

Wilkinson, Alan G.

HEPWORTH, Barbara

Tate Gallery Liverpool

Art Gallery Of Ontario

Individual Artists

Tate Gallery Pubn

One of a series exploring the lives and work of major artists associated with St Ives, this is a study of Barbara Hepworth and her work as a sculptor, which spanned five decades. Her art is discussed in the light of her contemporaries, including Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, her second husband. Hepworth's style developed from figurative to geometric to abstract, culminating in the grandeur of her large-scale post-war work. Her best-known work is associated with the landscape around St Ives, where she lived for most of her working life. She remains a central figure in 20th-century art, and the book provides an overview of recent critical thought, and describes how her international reputation was built and sustained.

St. Ives Artists: Barbara Hepworth

Sculpture

This work includes text by Penelope Curtis. Imi Knoebel re-visits his founding vocabulary by showing and reworking the key works he made after his study alongside Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf in 1968. This exhibition shows a number of key pieces which constituted his original practice. The works, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, highlight the importance of support and the addition of line, colour or light. They will be shown in their original format, or where the technology has changed, in the most appropriate form for today. Despite his international reputation Knoebel's work has rarely been seen in this country. Displaying early and recent works this exhibition examines the relationship between painting and sculpture, demonstrating not only the constructed quality of painting, but also the relationship between painting and installation. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Imi Knoebel at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 24 September - 16 December 2006.

Imi Knoebel

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Institute

Semi-sculptural or semi-architectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, and by artists such as Dan Graham or Anish Kapoor are now well known. What precedes them is less familiar. This book is the first to attempt to understand how sculpture and architecture have come to be fused in such an uncertain alliance.

Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture. Penelope Curtis

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