Modern Philosophy - 20th Century, Postmodernism, General & Miscellaneous Sculpture, Modern Art

Sculpture in the Age of Doubt

Name: Sculpture in the Age of Doubt
Author: Thomas McEvilley
ISBN: 9781581150230

by Thomas McEvilley

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Overview

Framed in a lucid discussion of the intellectual issues surrounding the postmodern movement, the essays in this book re-examine the course of twentieth-century art through the work of twenty-five major sculptors. McEvilley masterfully traces the evolution of modern sculpture from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp to the anti-painting statements of the 1960s to the spiritualism and conceptualism of the 1980s and 1990s. This is a groundbreaking work in the field of art criticism and a fundamental text for anyone interested in the history of current art and culture.

About the Author, Thomas McEvilley

Thomas Mcevilley is Distinguished Lecturer in Art History at Rice University, where he has been on the faculty since 1969. The author holds a Ph.D. in classical philology. In addition to Greek and Latin, he has studied Sanskrit and has taught numerous courses in Greek and Indian culture, history of religion and philosophy, and art. He has published countless scholarly monographs and articles in various journals on early Greek poetry, philosophy, and religion as well as on contemporary art and culture. He has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant in 1993 and has been awarded an NEA critic’s grant and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism by the College Art Association. His other books include Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (Allworth Press). He lives in New York City.

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Editorials

Library Journal

In a series of dense, thoughtful essays on sculpture and sculptors from Duchamp to today, McEvilley (art history, Rice Univ.) argues that the dissolution of belief and trust in this century--the rise of skepticism and doubt about universal truth and common assumptions--is reflected in the interdependent development of sculpture and postmodern theory. He is at his best in showing this interdependence in the works of individual artists such as Jannis Kounellis, Lucas Samaras, and Louise Bourgeois, but the reading will be hard going at times for those not deeply immersed in postmodern critical theory. Still, McEvilley does look at the works of art, which ground his discussion, and the essays do reinforce one another in the end. Recommended for academic collections supporting graduate art studies.--Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Harriet Zinnes

Not didactic, and neither a moralist nor a propagandist, this distinguished lecturer of art history of Rice University with great clarity and force, and, yes, with brilliance, has presented through an analysis of twenty-five significant sculptors the changes in the conception of sculpture from Duchamp's Readymades to the present.
— The Hollins Critic