The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity

Los Angeles / Seattle: Los Angeles County Museum of Art / University of Washington Press, 1995. Hardcover. VG+/VG. Black cloth, gilt lettering, black DJ. 248 pp. Numerous color and bw plates. Text essays by Ilene Susan Fort, with contributions by other authors. A wonderful publication! Exhibition held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Feb. 26 to Apr. 30, 1995, three other dates. Although most modern art historians viewed the figure as regressive, early-20th-century American sculptors embraced the human form. Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fort presents a wide selection of works from this period, not as a movement from the naturalistic to the abstract but as a reflection of a rapidly changing American society. While she sees much modern American sculpture as rooted in the works of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), she shows how the figure?whether represented in genre, primitive, folk, archaic, or classical styles?allowed artists to criticize or praise modern society. Fort's selection of minority and female artists for the work is especially refreshing, and the biographies at the end of the book are useful because several are not well known. Unfortunately, the mostly black-and-white plates are small and cannot properly represent the lines and textures of the pieces. Regardless of the quality of the photographs, this highly original work complements Donald Martin Reynold's Masters of American Sculpture (LJ 4/1/94) and is recommended for fine arts collections and academic libraries. --Review by Julie C. Boehning from Library Journal. Contents as follows: Introduction / Ilene Susan Fort -- The cult of Rodin and the birth of modernism in America / Ilene Susan Fort -- "Sculpture has never been thought a medium particularly feminine" / Marlene Park -- "Mere beauty no longer suffices" : the response of genre sculpture / Ilene Susan Fort -- Primitivism, folk art, and the exotic / Roberta K. Tarbell -- Creating the new black image / Mary L. Lenihan -- Avant-garde or kitsch? : modern and modernistic in American sculpture between the wars / Susan Rather.