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The Paris Art Mission introduced European developments and training into Utah art at the turn of the century. Today, loose alliances like the New York Mormon Artists Group have supplanted efforts to create a self conscious style (as with the Art and Belief Movement). World class sculptors as well as prominent painters emerged by mid-century. A regular international art competition is the major vehicle for opening the church to cultural influences from beyond the United States.

This chapter argues that the production of funerary sculpture should be regarded as one of the most important stone-related industries in medieval England. For the most part, the production of sculpted monuments appears to have been undertaken at quarries, although in some parts of England before the 14th century travelling sculptors may have been active. In the 15th century a vigorous industry in the production of alabaster monuments was based at Chellaston, near Derby. The evidence suggests that only the engraving of brasses was based in towns, perhaps because of the engravers' dependence on imported latten.

This concluding chapter explains how Medardo Rosso's posthumous reputation is another story that remains to be told. Except for a handful of enlightened art historians, such as Carola Giedion-Welcker and H. W. Janson, who included Rosso in their histories of modern art, Rosso was forgotten by the world after his death. In 1963 he was suddenly propelled back onto the international art scene by Margaret Scolari Barr, who wrote the first English monograph on Rosso. Since the 1970s, Rosso has been fully reclaimed by Italy and reframed within the nineteenth-century Italian Scapigliatura movement, a tale of local origins that Rosso himself had denied. Today, due to the many international artists inspired by Rosso's work, he has become the only Italian sculptor of his time to be globalized.

This chapter begins by providing a brief description of Harlow Shapley's biography and early life. It then discusses Harlow's life as a student of the University of Missouri and Princeton. It narrates his study with Henry Norris Russell about the discovery of approximate mathematical methods for analysing the behaviour of binary stars. It tells of Shapley's efforts to make himself known in other places. It mentions Shapley's other important works such as his guess that RR Lyrae variables might also be standard candles, the distances of the globular clusters, the discovery of the centre of the Milky Way, and finding the Sculptor and Fornax dwarf galaxies. It also tells of the criticisms and oppositions that he encountered.

Concetta Scaravaglione was a critically acclaimed American sculptor. Among the awards and grants she received were major commissions from the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix de Rome award from the American Academy, the first such award to be given to a woman. During the early 1920s, Scaravaglione had a love affair with a fellow art student that ended badly. The disruption it caused to her art helped shape her lifelong conviction: she would never marry. Scaravaglione was elected to membership in the New York Society of Women Artists, a group of thirty painters and sculptors. Scaravaglione said, “To sculpture I am grateful for enjoyment and for an opportunity to be free and independent, to create to the extent of my capacities.”

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Grand Rue sculptors. Although not formally trained in high-art institutions, the Grand Rue sculptors are highly autodidactic, self-aware, and fully mindful artists who are cognizant of art traditions—Haitian, US, African, and European—and their self-designed locations and locatedness within these traditions. The chapter then presents three central, interrelated theses: the first thesis is social and asserts that the artist collective is the product of historical, economic, political, geographic, and complex fields of cultural circumstance, literally “produced” in, of, and from Haiti; the second thesis is art historical and contends that the artists “produce” art that reflects and reproduces Haitianness even as they simultaneously participate in artistic self-technologization; and the third thesis is urban geographic and asserts that the artists aesthetically “produce” Port-au-Prince and an artistic right to the city.

This chapter assesses the concept of faux-dou, in contrast to the dominant framing of the art collective under the signs and symbols of Vodou. While actively resisting the art-historical reduction of the Grand Rue collective as merely productive of Vodou arts inspired by the lwas or spirits, Jean Hérard Celeur nevertheless does incorporate Vodou elements, but he does so in an ecstatic, métis (or mixed) fusion. Faux-dou, then, may be defined as a sort of “faux” Vodou or the artificial imposition or strategic marketing of the Grand Rue sculptors as “Vodou” artists: it functions, thus, as a sort of gallerist shorthand or even a facile fabrication that obscures the myriad, eclectic influences on the artists, particularly on Celeur and his wildly eclectic sculptures that are amalgams of aesthetic styles.

This chapter studies the postprimitivist altermodern styles—visually and sculpturally—and the eclectic, communal performances exhibited at the 2009 and 2011 Ghetto Biennales curated by Leah Gordon and hosted by the Grand Rue sculptors at the E Pluribus Unum Musée d'Art. The biennials were groundbreaking international art events that were more antibiennial than biennial proper: they were alter/altar art exhibits held at the Grand Rue Galerie in Port-au-Prince, or in the self-stylized and sardonically punchy “ghetto.” The Ghetto Biennale was not only a dramatic and democratic experiment in artistic form, genre, style, and mode of exhibition but also a purposive and political disruption of the classical biennials that present “the best of” in cities across the globe. That the Ghetto Biennale was held at the Grand Rue Galerie in and of itself constituted a radical disruption of the norm in the art world.

Von Sternberg and Dietrich were creating a smoke screen to mask their true intentions. It was revealed a few weeks later when Dietrich abruptly refused to appear in the film in pushing the production of The Songs of Songs. Dietrich plays Lily, an orphan peasant girl in braids and dirndl (shades of Dishonored), who comes to the city to live with her bookseller aunt. Richard, a penniless sculptor (Brian Aherne), asks her to pose for him. Inevitably they become lovers, and he creates a life-size nude statue, as stylized as an automobile hood ornament.

This chapter describes the home, now a museum, of sculptor Wharton Esherick. In 1926 he built a studio up from his farmhouse, on the top of the hill called Mount Misery. Later he moved up the hill into the studio and added on to it over the course of his life. Esherick not only went to the woods as a source of inspiration but also to the essence of wood, devoting his life to the pursuit of his craft, living impoverished while influencing younger wood masters who were eventually lucky enough to make good money from their craft. He carved out an existence for himself and his family, winning some recognition for his work, but no real fame or fortune in his lifetime.

This chapter describes the life and work of Etienne-Maurice Falconet. The discussions cover Falconet's work as sculptor of Madame de Pompadour; his association with Sèvres; his intellectual pursuits; his friendship with Diderot, which resulted in an epistolary debate that has come to be known as Le pour et le contre; and his relationship with sculptress Marie-Anne Collot.

‘In the beginning, Homer was just a very good poet living in Ionia’ (Snodgrass 1998: 11). That premise is more controversial than perhaps it seems at first sight: if Homer appeared to his contemporaries an extraordinary genius, a poet uniquely privileged with divine inspiration, then one might indeed argue that he directly catalysed the coming of Greek literacy, and the development of figure scenes in early Greek art.1 But suppose, for present purposes, that the reputation of an eighth-century BC Homer was local to Ionia, and that the poet died (as one legend had it)poor and obscure. So his genius was only recognised/created/celebrated later; and so ‘a very good poet’ became Homer the great founding father of Classical literature. How important was it that visible form was given to this transfiguration? We can argue about what Homer did for artists. What did artists do for ‘Homer’?

“Ronald Moody, from Primitive to Black British” offers the first thorough, academic account of this British sculptor’s career, work, and evolving ideology as he negotiated more than fifty years in the British and European art worlds. This research suggests that although Moody’s sculpture was—like that of so many artists of this generation—influenced by the experience of world war, European modernism, and decolonization, his reception by critics was dictated by the racial and imperial politics of the day. Whether he was exoticized as an exponent of Jamaican primitivism, praised as a Commonwealth artist, or hailed as a pioneer of Black British visual art, Moody’s dedication to universalism ranked him among the modernists of British sculpture.

This chapter discusses the history of modern Japanese sculpture from Edo to Meiji up to the postwar period. From the opening of Japan in the Meiji period, beginning in 1868, there had been substantial changes in the art of sculpture in Japan that could be attributed to influences from the West. However, fresh trends had already been developing in the Edo period. This chapter begins by taking a look at Japan’s first sculptors and their works, such as bronze monuments. It then considers naturalism in Japanese sculpture, along with Auguste Rodin’s influence on Japanese sculptors like Ogiwara Morie. It also examines the establishment of academism and the development of wood sculpture as well as various phases in Japanese sculpture between the two world wars. Finally, it assesses Japanese sculpture from the Great Kantō Earthquake to World War II and the postwar era.

Chapter 1 focuses on the founding of Mexico’s Communist Party in 1919, and the Party’s links to the influential national and international artistic movement active in Mexico throughout the 1920s. Although during these early years the Party’s official membership numbers remained relatively insignificant, this chapter argues that the extraordinary influence of these creative participants, both female and male, on the politics of the period was far from trivial. Art and politics intertwined as artists played major roles in political affairs, and government officials appropriated the arts to transmit the “official” national history.

The practice of slavery meant an absence of apprenticeship in ancient Greece: young men who lacked property and wanted work would rely on kinsmen to teach them a craft. This chapter examines training in skilled occupations, from poets, playwrights, sculptors, painters, potters, and musicians, to doctors and philosophers, as well as slave families, loans to kin, and kin as guarantors.