Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In the late 1950s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Director of Collections of The Museum of Modern Art reluctantly permitted Louise Bourgeois to make a bronze cast of a carved and painted wood sculpture that was already in MoMA’s collection Sleeping Figure 1950. Out of respect for the artist and her desire to transpose her wood sculpture into a new medium he approved a bronze cast in an edition. In return Bourgeois gave one of the bronzes to MoMA which catalogued it as Sleeping Figure // and labeled it a “replica.”” in a memo a few years later Barr articulated some of his initial reservations about having approved the casting: “The artist after selling a unique piece to the Museum has asked for permission to duplicate it in an edition of bronzes. Under these circumstances this presumably diminishes the value of the unique original. Barr’s concerns that Bourgeois’ cast might alter the status of the original work illustrates the transformative power of casting and its uneasy position in modern art An ancient process used in Egypt Greece China and Benin casting divests the quality of uniqueness through a series of phases. The two traditional methods of bronze casting-sand casting and lost-wax casting-involve intermediate steps with a mold a negative form in which the physical sculpture is absent. Sand casting is simpler and more cost-effective. The object to be cast is impressed in a sand mixture to create a mold. Molten metal is poured into the cavity and after cooling the metal sculpture is complete. The lost-wax process on the other hand is more technically demanding time-consuming. (LL)