Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
The Road to Minimalism
By Jack Flam
The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
by Alex Potts
Yale University Press, 417 pp., $55.00
Sometime around 1960, the painter Ad Reinhardt defined sculpture as 'something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.' This summed up the longstanding prejudice against sculpture, which for centuries had been considered an art that was distinctly inferior to painting. Leonardo da Vinci famously argued that the practice of sculpture required less intellectual effort than painting and that sculpture could draw on distinctly poorer means, lacking such basic elements as color, chiaroscuro, and perspective. Leonardo also asserted that the sculptor was too dependent on nature, especially because it lighted his work in the same way as it did 'other man-made things that would otherwise be invisible.'[1]
Review, 4739 words
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