Download Free Mother Stone The Vitality Of Modern British Sculpture Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Mother Stone The Vitality Of Modern British Sculpture and write the review.

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.
Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been associated explicitly with the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all linked the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, it is vision and visuality which have tended to dominate art historical research in recent decades. This book introduces a new impetus to the discussion of the relationship between touch and sculpture by setting up a dialogue between art historians and individuals with fresh insights who are working in disciplines beyond art history. The collection brings together a rich and diverse set of approaches, with essays tackling subjects from prehistoric figurines to the work of contemporary artists, from pre-modern ideas about the physiology of touch to tactile interaction in the museum environment, and from the phenomenology of touch in recent philosophy to the experimental findings of scientific study. It is the first volume on this subject to take such a broad approach and, as such, seeks to set the agenda for future research and collaboration in this area.
"A graduate of Leon Underwood's Brook Green School of Art in London, Gertrude Hermes (1901-83) trained as a painter and sculptor. Hermes and her husband, Blair Hughes-Stanton, who she met at Brook Green, went on to become leading lights in the early twentieth-century's wood-engraving revival. Although their marriage was short-lived, their exuberant visual inventions for Bunyan;s 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and T.E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' Brought them critical acclaim. Much has been written about Hermes' career as a wood engraver. In contrast, her contribution as a sculptor has been somewhat eclipsed--until now. 'The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes' presents for the first time a full analysis of the artist's entire sculptural oeuvre. Along with a comprehensive catalogue of Hermes' sculpture, Jane Hill provides a full account of the artist's life in the context of her career as a sculptor. What results is a picture of a pioneering spirit who created busts and heads, functional designs, decorative work and reliefs that are dynamic and unpredictable. Featuring over 140 images, 'The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes' is a groundbreaking study of an artist so long associated with one art form. This book redresses the imbalance and creates a new and fresh perspective on an important female artist of the twentieth century."--Publisher's website.
“In this much-needed and courageous book, Anne Wagner lays down a gauntlet to all those interested in modern and contemporary art: to think anew about these works by canonic artists, and about the relationship of art to recent history and politics. Wagner presents an exhilarating and innovative set of closely worked historical arguments that are remarkably timely, and her lucid prose makes complex ideas and critical debates accessible to a broad audience.”—Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art, UCL “In A House Divided, Anne Wagner takes on the so-called post-war era in American art and asks searching questions about what that term might mean now, amid cultural division and perpetual war. Far more than a sum of its parts, this collection of essays is essential reading on American artists' ‘post-war’ responses to nationalism, state violence, and the 1960s.”—Mignon Nixon, author of Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art
This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history. A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500 Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world
During the years following World War II debates about the British landscape fused with questions of national identity as the country reconstructed its sense of self. For better or for worse artists, statesmen, and ordinary citizens saw themselves reflected in the landscape, and in turn helped to shape the way that others envisioned the land. While landscape art is frequently imagined in terms of painting, this book examines the role of landscape in terms of a broader definition of visual culture to include the discussion not only of works of oil on canvas, but also prints, sculpture, photography, advertising, fashion journalism, artists' biographies, and the multi-media stage of the national exhibition. Making extensive use of archival materials (newspaper reviews, radio broadcasts, interviews with artists, letters and exhibition planning documents), Catherine Jolivette explores the intersection of landscape art with a variety of discourses including the role of women in contemporary society, the status of immigrant artists in Britain, developments in science and technology, and the promotion of British art and culture abroad.
Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-1975 redresses an important art historical oversight. Histories of American and British sculpture are usually told separately, with artists and their work divided by nationality; yet such boundaries obscure a vibrant exchange of ideas, individuals, and aesthetic influences. In reality, the postwar art world saw dynamic interactions between British and American sculptors, critics, curators, teachers, and institutions. Using works of art as points of departure, this book explores the international movement of people, objects, and ideas, demonstrating the importance of Anglo-American exchange to the history of postwar sculpture.
In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture’s radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art. From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genres: poems, lectures, transcribed interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and artists’ statements. These diverse text selections offer valuable insight into the development of the critical language of sculpture and its connections to other media in an era of increasingly conceptual artistic practice. Many of the essays highlight key ongoing concerns such as sculpture’s physical properties and conditions of display, both of which have important implications for the viewer’s tactile and emotional interaction with sculptural works.
Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.