sculpture

Charles Alphonse Combes (1891-1968), born in Paris, moved to the Côte d’Ivoire in 1925 and never looked back. He began taking art students and in 1937 his studio became the École des Arts Appliques, the first art school in the country. It is now a museum in Abidjan, Musée Charles Alphonse Combes.

In 1897, an unauthorized party of 250 British merchants and African soldiers disguised as porters approached the powerful city of Benin, located in what is now southern Nigeria, intending to overthrow its king and reestablish a once lucrative trade outpost. They were ambushed en route, only two men survived. In revenge, the British sent a punitive expedition to Benin which destroyed the city.

This exhibition catalog explores the 2010 monumental work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, created by internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese artist and social activist Ai Weiwei. The work is a reimagining of a Qing dynasty zodiac water-clock system at the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, which was looted in 1850 during the Second Opium War. Ai reinterpreted the original fountainheads in a gold series and a bronze series, as his first monumental public art installation.

"The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. I tend to see it as a glorious intense victory over death," writes art historian Rudi Fuchs in this creative guide to the making of British artist Damien Hirst’s sculpture For the Love of God, a platinum cast of an 18th-century skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds and produced at a cost of £14 million. The catalog is a companion publication to the 2007 exhibition “Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief,” at London’s White Cube, where the skull made its debut.

Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and printmaker. At the age of 79, Braque turned his attention to jewelry. He teamed up with master jeweler Baron Heger de Löwenfeld to turn 110 gouache maquettes into intricately textured gold sculptures inlaid with precious stones. The collection, inspired by Greek mythology, incorporates themes of flight and metamorphosis. The two artists worked so closely together that Braque referred to De Löwenfeld as the “continuation of my hand.”

Lawrence Weiner is a conceptual artist who has used language as his primary medium since 1968, when he concluded that viewers could experience the same effect from reading a verbal description of his work as they could from viewing the work itself. Since that point, he has been best-known for his word sculptures—short poems and witticisms applied to walls in plain lettering, always translated into the language of the country in which they are shown. In 1995, the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp commissioned Weiner to create a work for its permanent collection.

The works of Lucas Samaras can be understood through one unifying principle: the artist’s “natural instinct for subversion.” Rather than springing from an urge to rebel, however, Samaras’ originality and nonconformity are centered in treating art as a mutable subject. Samaras spent two years crafting gold jewelry, modeling them first in chicken wire, then casting them in solid 22-karat gold.

The “objects” of American artist Man Ray’s affection were small, limited-edition sculptures.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn, founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was an avid collector and supporter of Pablo Picasso. The two became friends after being introduced by photographer Edward Steichen.

The British Punitive Expedition against the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 spawned an outpouring of curiosity about this African kingdom, its stunning bronze sculpture (confiscated booty), and its tyrannical king. H. Long Roth’s Great Benin is one of the classic pieces of literature written about Benin. It is not a product of direct observation—the author never traveled in West Africa—but rather of careful research on eyewitness accounts and museum collections.

Although black—the color that contains all colors—has been American sculptor Louise Nevelson’s signature color, the artist began incorporating white and gold into her work in the 1960s. This announcement for an exhibition of sculptures by Nevelson at The Pace Gallery, New York, October 23-November 28, 1992, reflects her limited palette. Reproductions of her assemblage sculptures are presented in three die-cut printed pop-ups, printed in silver and gold. Nevelson herself is pictured in a silver-printed portrait on the front cover. The entire elegant presentation is ribbon-tied.

This book is an invaluable tool for art historians, scholars, dealers, and collectors interested in metal sculptures of Northern India, the Himalayas, and Tibet. It is also an important work for scholars studying Chinese bronzes of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Published in 1981, it remains the only publication providing a timeline of the evolution of the art of these types of metal sculptures. The author, Ulrich von Schroeder, has been studying Buddhist art and culture as an independent scholar since the early 1960s.

In the early 1900s, wood sculptures from Africa (long regarded as curios in the West) suddenly caught the attention of Picasso and other artists who were intrigued by the stylized treatment—simple yet powerful—of human and animal figures. Their experiments with this “new aesthetic” announced the beginning of Modernism, the shift from realism to increasing abstraction.