The most recommended books about sculpture

Truitt’s last journal, published after her death, harvests a sculptor’s long lifetime, paying attention to the experience of living: working, creating, family and friendship, loving and losing, and aging and death.

A renowned sculptor, although increasingly frail as she ages, she never stops creating. Instead, she adjusts the scale of her work, yielding, and accepting the limits of her aging body. As a young woman, she chose to be a sculptor rather than a writer but is a close observer and exquisite describer of everything she encounters, including weather, great art, history, family dynamics, and personalities.

I live just blocks from her former home and studio. It is inspiring to be able to walk to the alley behind her house and imagine her at work in her backyard studio.  

This biography is a must-read for anyone who is interested in art, history, and strong, powerful women. It was the first book I read about the great 19th-century sculptress, Camille Claudel. “As recently as twenty years ago, in France, Camille Claudel was known only to a handful of admirers. The brief moments of applause she had enjoyed during her lifetime had never led to important commissions, and the sales of her pieces remained few and far…Camille Claudel displayed many characteristics that contribute to the weaving of myths: she was beautiful, talented, witty, and fiercely independent. She was connected to some of the most visible artists and writers of the era; she even had a romance with Auguste Rodin, the greatest sculptor of the nineteenth century. But hidden among the magnificent gifts nature had bestowed upon her was the seed of an illness that eventually brought her to a mental asylum.”… show more.

The Tashjians’ book challenged the idea that Puritans rejected visual art. Their study is important in documenting a new aesthetic, where the skull (death’s head) gives way to the winged faces of angels (cherubs), which were more gentle and sentimental in style rather than dark and threatening. Specific stonecutters discussed in this book include John Bull, William Codner, Zerrubbabel Collins, William Young, Henry Christian Geyer, Joseph Lamson and his shop, William Mumford, John Stevens and family, and Jonathan and Moses Worster. These are names well-known to anyone versed in this art form.

I was taken by the fact that new motifs in gravestone design could spread through the stonecutter community with such personalized innovations and styles. Further, in chapter 8: "The Icons of Essex," County provided a contrast with another style of cutting faces in stone. This book significantly broadened my view of stonecutting styles in New England. It also… show more.

Both reference book and travel guide, this second edition includes over 90 sculpture parks in 27 European countries. The parks featured are those that have an ‘art and nature’ element, in which artists collaborate with nature, working in and with nature to create artworks and situations that help us think about and enjoy both. One to take with you on your next trip around Europe!

This is a beautiful coffee table book to read at home rather than take on your travels. Langen explores 25 private sculpture parks founded by individuals, most art collectors or artists. She weaves in the stories of these characters as their passions inform the themes of the collections. Note that not all of the sites that Langen visited are open to the public.

Where else can we find 159 sheep and 49 lambs sketched by a celebrated modern sculptor? This flock is a treatise of graphic easiness and uncompromising observation exercises. A must-see for anyone armed with a ballpoint pen and a rural disposition. There are also texts by Moore himself and Kenneth Clark, the art historian dethroned by Berger as the great British Broadcasting cultural oracle. Although Clark suggests that Moore’s drawings show some love for the sheep, the latter’s text is a love letter to drawing, simply.  

I first met Klyukin’s huge, foldable-section metal sculptures at the Venice Biennale.

I had heard of him, but was overwhelmed by the size and quantity—plus his writings that appeared on ceiling-height, painted fabric banners. Particularly of note: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and his collection called In Dante Veritas, which pulls the characters and their sins out of Dante’s Inferno, and updates them in sculpture and words to the 21st Century.