Welded sculpture evolved as an art-form in the 1930s as artists began to adapt an industrial method for aesthetic purposes.This historical survey explores the plentiful and varied approaches to sculpture possible through welding and its companion processes. Many twentieth-century artists have produced a prestigious body of welded sculpture, often contributing to the development of this method by experimentation.With its strong European artistic roots, welded sculpture has transcended several 'isms' and trends, by-passing ephemeral styles and marketing mechanisms. This book presents a detailed examination of a technique, its artist exponents, and its associated social and political milieux over the last three quarters of the twentieth century. It records and comments on the history of welded art as it has occurred in our time, contributing to and expanding artistic parameters.Artists featured in this book include Pablo Picasso, László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Bertoia, Phillip King, Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi, to name but a few.

Joan Murray discusses social and political events in combination with the movements, ideas, attitudes, styles, and important groups in Canadian art of this century.

In this generously illustrated guide, newly revised and updated, a well-known American sculptor shares his forty years of experience working with welded sculpture techniques. Nathan Cabot Hale begins with the basic assumption that it is necessary for a sculptor-welder to have the same professional skills as a good job-welder. To help readers gain those skills, he demonstrates both traditional and comparatively new welding methods step by step, including the oxyacetylene technique in modeling small-scale figurative sculpture. Mr. Hale first discusses the basic tools and techniques of welded sculpture, then addresses the construction of abstract and organic shapes and modeling solid figures. This is followed by detailed coverage of finishing techniques, arc welding, and welding large-scale commissioned works. He even dispenses helpful practical advice on the economics of fine art — exhibiting work, staying alive, searching out public and private support, and more. Over 80 helpful diagrams and more than 100 photographs accompany the text, demonstrating techniques and procedures and depicting works in progress as well as finished works. In a new chapter written specially for this edition, Mr. Hale shares the heartening artistic philosophy he has developed over his long and distinguished career. Sculptors at many levels of accomplishment will find his book instructive and inspiring.

In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture’s radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art. From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genres: poems, lectures, transcribed interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and artists’ statements. These diverse text selections offer valuable insight into the development of the critical language of sculpture and its connections to other media in an era of increasingly conceptual artistic practice. Many of the essays highlight key ongoing concerns such as sculpture’s physical properties and conditions of display, both of which have important implications for the viewer’s tactile and emotional interaction with sculptural works.