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List of illustrations

  • Plight
  • Gallery in the Hanover Landesmuseum
  • Walking Man
  • Torso of a Young Man [I]
  • Lever
  • Secretions
  • Secretions, detail
  • Weight and Measure
  • Weight and Measure
  • Boy
  • The Three Graces
  • The Three Graces, detail
  • Untitled
  • Nyssia
  • Sculpture Garden at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with Rodin's "Balzac" and "Kiss
  • Installation of Brancusi's work at the Sculptor's Gallery, New York, with "Three Penguins" and "Maiastra"
  • Sculpture Gallery of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris
  • Illustration of a Baluba sculpture from Zaire
  • Belvedere Torso
  • Laocoön
  • Venus de' Medici
  • Venus Italica
  • Hebe
  • Hercules and Lichas
  • Hercules and Lichas, side view
  • Cupid and Psyche
  • Cupid and Psyche, detail
  • Perseus with the Head of Medusa
  • Perseus with the Head of Medusa
  • Shepherd Boy
  • Ganymede with Eagle
  • Iris, Messenger of the Gods
  • Salon of 1857: "Sad countenance of sculpture in the midst of painting
  • Antikythera Youth
  • Day
  • Comedy and Tragedy: Sic Vita
  • Triumphant Youth
  • The Monument to Balzac
  • The Monument to Balzac
  • Eve
  • Water Tower
  • Meditation
  • Cyble or Seated Woman
  • Cyble or Seated Woman
  • The Age of Bronze
  • The Age of Bronze, detail
  • Thinker
  • Thinker, detail
  • Adam and Eve
  • Guitar
  • Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
  • Column
  • Oval Hanging Construction No. 12
  • Model of the Monument to the Third International
  • Model of the Monument to the Third International
  • Letatlin
  • Bottle Rack
  • Bottle Rack
  • Fountain
  • Objet: Déjeuner en Fourrure
  • Suspended Ball
  • Venice Woman IX
  • Venice Woman IX, detail
  • Night
  • Princess X
  • Brancusi's studio with "Princess X," "Prometheus," "Endless Column," and "Maiastra"
  • Leda
  • Endless Column
  • Beginning of the World
  • Adam and Eve
  • Adam and Eve
  • Brancusi's studio with two versions of "Mademoiselle Pogany II"
  • Bird in Space
  • Bird in Space
  • Reclining Figure
  • Pendour
  • Pendour
  • Two Forms
  • Cubi I
  • Cubi XVIII, Cubi XVII, and Cubi XIX
  • Sentinel I
  • Large Maternity
  • Head called "The Tunnel"
  • Australia
  • Australia
  • Sculpture by David Smith at Bolton Landing
  • Volton XV
  • Zig II (unfinished state)
  • Zig II
  • Cubi XXIV (Gate I)
  • Wagon II
  • Wagon II, detail
  • Prairie
  • Die
  • Tilted Arc
  • Tilted Arc
  • Equivalent VIII
  • Kiss of the Rhinoceros
  • Stacked
  • Circuit
  • Circuit, detail
  • Untitled
  • Untitled (L-beams)
  • Robert Morris, installation view, Green Gallery, New York
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Untitled (Quarter-Round Mesh)
  • Spin-Out (For Bob Smithson)
  • Delineator
  • One Ton Prop (House of Cards)
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Miss Lucy Pink
  • Untitled
  • Soft Switches
  • Floor Burger
  • Accumulation I
  • Slab
  • Untitled
  • Untitled, detail
  • Untitled
  • Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD)
  • Installation view of Primary Structures exhibition, The Jewish Museum, New York, showing works by Donald Judd
  • Untitled (stack)
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • West Building with permanent installation of work by Donald Judd
  • Last Ladder
  • 144 Steel Square
  • Installation view of 144 Pieces of Magnesium (in front) and 100 Pieces of Lead (behind), Dwan Gallery, New York
  • 144 Magnesium Square
  • 2 x 50 Altstadt Rectangle
  • 144 Pieces of Zinc
  • The Way North, East, South, West
  • Non-Site (Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey)
  • 36 Copper Square
  • Equivalents I–VIII, as shown at at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
  • Equivalent VIII
  • Hang Up
  • Contingent
  • Contingent
  • Laocoon
  • Several
  • Accession II
  • Accession II, detail of interior
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Vinculum II
  • Right After
  • Right After, detail
  • Untitled (Orange Bath)
  • Ghost
  • Nature Study (Velvet Eyes)
  • Fillette
  • Cell I
  • Installation view of Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures at Peridot Gallery, New York
  • Cell (You Better Grow Up), exterior view
  • Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands), detail
  • Going around the Corner Piece
  • Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera)
  • Untitled
  • Georg Baselitz's studio in Derneburg
  • Cell (You Better Grow Up), detail
Free
Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Contents
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.001
Free
Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Acknowledgements
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.002
Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Preface
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.003

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s, in the heyday of high modernist formalism, the painter Ad Reinhardt came up with a statement that enjoyed a remarkable resonance because it was so in tune with long-standing attitudes to sculpture: ‘A definition of sculpture: something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ In more traditional gallery installations, the sculptures often do feel a little out of place, either unframed and somewhat awkward intrusions on the viewer’s space …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-23
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.004

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
A new understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture began to emerge in the second half of the eighteenth century. The real issue here is not the distinction as such. Sculpture had always been thought of as different, if only because its execution required different skills, it was made of different materials and existed as solid thing rather than painted surface. In art theory, where painting and sculpture were seen to be grounded in a common mastery of drawing or dessin or …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.24-59
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.005

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
The late nineteenth and very early years of the twentieth century marked a moment of intensive yet ambiguous re-engagement with the sculptural. A crucial element in this enlivening of discussion around sculpture was a shift away from the assumption that freestanding work was of necessity classical. Sculpture, sidelined in earlier debates about art and modernity, or at best standing as the model for an ideal that modern painting was defining itself against, now became embroiled in speculation …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.61-101
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.006

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Modernist sculpture, which could roughly be defined chronologically as work produced after Rodin and before the shake-up of sculptural practice in the 1960s and early 1970s, had in its own time, and continues to have, an oddly uncertain status. There is no denying the pervasiveness of the modernist desire to create a new kind of object that would offer a radical alternative to the classicising and monumentalising tendencies of traditional sculpture, and would parallel the rethinking of picturing …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.103-144
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.007

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
The systematic characterisation of a distinctively modern tradition in sculpture first properly established itself in the art world in the 1930s. I say systematic with certain qualifications, because what counted as modern often involved what we might now see as contradictory tendencies. On one hand, the modern was thought to involve a focus on simplified compact plastic mass, for which the work of Maillol (fig. 64) was the most prominent model. On the other, it was conceived as a negation of …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.145-177
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.008

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
In the 1950s and 1960s, the norms previously governing mainstream sculptural practice were being thrown into question by a number of different initiatives, whether Pop, Conceptualist, Minimalist, Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, or performance orientated. I shall be focusing here on Minimalist work, and the critical context framing it, because it was out of this that by far the most intensive and sustained engagement with earlier understandings of sculpture emerged. Minimalist objects may not necessarily …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.178-206
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.009

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
If there was one word which dominated discussion of new departures in three-dimensional art in the 1960s, it was the object. What kind of an object could still count as art? Or, more radically, how might work be produced that escaped the closures of conventional conceptions of the object? Minimalism, along with the Neo-Dada and conceptual tendencies of sixties art, brought these issues to a head, Minimalism perhaps most dramatically because the work involved so evidently had object-like …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.207-234
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.010

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
The artists who came to prominence in the mid to late 1960s as Minimalist object makers working in three dimensions engaged in a highly self-conscious dialogue with the formalist paradigms that had dominated previous conceptions of the sculptural. This is evident both from the conception and staging of their work, and from their compulsion to reflect on and verbalise the larger imperatives guiding their practice. In the latter respect they were following the example set by David Smith, and …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.235-268
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.011

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Much of the cogency of Judd’s best-known essay, ‘Specific Objects’, comes from its being both a statement of aesthetic principle and a broad critical assessment of the new forms of sculpture or three-dimensional art making an impact in the New York art world in the mid-1960s. Because he was trying to explain why he felt impelled to depart from accepted modernist understandings of the art object, the essay has a striking sense of urgency. But it does not deal directly with his own sculpture. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.269-310
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.012

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Andre stands out from most of his Minimalist contemporaries by placing himself as a sculptor rather than as an artist who moved out into three dimensions from a practice inspired by recent modernist painting such as Jackson Pollock’s and Barnett Newman’s. He insisted that he had ‘always been drawn toward mass and weight and three-dimensional stuff and, more candidly than many other sculptors and architects for whom ‘representation, or portrayal’ were at best peripheral to their thinking, he was …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.311-356
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.013

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
The story of sculpture I have been telling has a kind of ending, though not one that resolves the obsessions circulating round the sculptural object that have been the central theme of this book. Sculpture is neither finished nor has it completely shed the conventions that once gave it its special, uneasy status in relation to painting. Over recent years, a new form of three-dimensional art has brought to an end the subordination of sculpture to painting, and opened up a more theatricalised …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.357-379
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.014

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Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Photograph Credits
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.015
Free
Description: The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
Index
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.016
The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
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