Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

"Not long ago the respectable Tate Gallery in London came under heavy public attack for purchasing a sculpture by the young American Carl Andre, because it seemed to be no more that a double layer of old bricks. Critics defended the work, but the public continued to believe that it was a "put-on" and failed to accept it as art. In doing so, they were enacting a familiar drama of modern art, whereby something that is difficult to grasp is thought of as fraudulent. For this public, Rodin's sculpture would constitute a standard of clarity and accessibility, while the other works of artists such as Andre, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer are rejected as meaningless. But it can be argued that Rodin's work itself defined by the same attitudes toward the body and its movement that were proposed a century later by these young artists. In this brilliant study of modern sculpture from Rodin to the present, Rosalind Krauss examines major works in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues in order to illuminate the connections between them. By focusing clearly on such different examples as Brancusi's Bird in Space, Picasso's Construction in Metal Wire, David Smith's Tanktotem I, and Robert Morris's Columns, the author allows us to observe and understand the logical progression from the figurative works of the nineteenth century to the range of abstract styles of the 1970s. The book is illustrated with many fine photographs of the works discussed, several made especially for this book. Since one of the most difficult problems involved in a sensible and clear analysis of sculpture is the photographing of works themselves, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on visual grounds as well as on critical and historical levels." -- Publisher's description

Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at ^IOctober^R, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and work, ^IRosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism^R comprises the first book-length study of its subject. Written in the lucid style of analytic philosophy, this accessible commentary offers a consideration of her arguments as well as discussions of alternative positions. Tracing Krauss's development in this way provides the best method of understanding the changing styles of American art criticism from the 1960s through the present, and thus provides an invaluable source of historical and aesthetic knowledge for artists and art scholars alike.

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

Potts also offers a detailed view of selected iconic works by sculptors ranging from Antonio Canova and Auguste Rodin to Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois - key players in modern thinking about the sculptural. The impact of minimalism features prominently in this discussion, for it disrupted accepted understanding of how a viewer interacts with a work of art, thereby placing the phenomenology of viewing three-dimensional objects for the first time at the center of debate about modern visual art."--Jacket.