The Language of Sculpture

In this fascinating survey, one of the ablest and most articulate of British sculptors gives an artist's view of what really happened when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sculpture re-emerged from decades of semi-eclipse. 

In the hands of the academic sculptors (or their assistants) sculpture had become, even more than painting, an art of bland, smooth craftsmanship. William Tucker shows, in an incisive analysis of the true achievement of Rodin, how that great artist recalled sculpture to a close contact with the nature of its material and with the observer's own awareness of weight and physicality.

Degas, whom Tucker rates more highly as a sculptor than as a painter, is another key figure in the evolution towards the full exploitation of gravity in sculpture; and there are memorable chapters on Rodin's rebellious pupil Brancusi, on Matisse, and on the contributions of Picasso (in the Cubist constructions) and Gonzalez to the validation of the 'object' in the art of sculpture.