This catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition of the same name in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (8 February-11 May 2014). The exhibition is a unique meeting of the work of three of the most influential artists of the twentieth century: Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) and Man Ray (1890-1976). The works exhibited and discussed in the catalogue, forty-five sculptures and some hundred photographs they took of them, offer a glimpse over the shoulders of these artists.Not only were Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray all crucial in the development of modern sculpture, they were innovators in the way they involved photography in their work-not so much for recording it, but as a means of explaining how viewers should look at and interpret their sculptures. They played with the possibilities of the medium-experimental for the time-using overexposure, innovative camera angles and blurring the foreground or background.

How does photography shape the way we see sculpture? In David Smith in Two Dimensions, Sarah Hamill broaches this question through an in-depth consideration of the photography of American sculptor David Smith (1906Ð1965). Smith was a modernist known for radically shifting the terms of sculpture, a medium traditionally defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to use industrial welding as a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, influencing a generation of minimalists to come. What is less known about Smith is his use of the camera to document his own sculptures as well as everyday objects, spaces, and bodies. His photographs of his sculptures were published in countless exhibition catalogs, journals, and newspapers, often as anonymous illustrations. Far from being neutral images, these photographs direct a pictorial encounter with spatial form and structure the public display of his work. David Smith in Two Dimensions looks at the sculptorÕs adoption of unconventional backdrops, alternative vantage points, and unusual lighting effects and exposures to show how he used photography to dramatize and distance objects. This comprehensive and penetrating account also introduces SmithÕs expansive archive of copy prints, slides, and negatives, many of which are seen here for the first time. Hamill proposes a new understanding of SmithÕs sculpture through photography, exploring issues that are in turn vital to discourses of modern sculpture, sculptural aesthetics, and postwar art. In SmithÕs photography, we see an artist moving fluidly between media to define what a sculptural object was and how it would be encountered publicly.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition The original copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 1-November 1, 2010)"--T.p. verso.

Contains photographs of sculptures created by Henri Matisse.

The pure, abstract sculptures made by Constantin Brancusi have had a large and enthusiastic audience in New York ever since they were first shown on American soil at the 1913 Armory Show. The numerous American collectors, muses, friends, and exhibitions that enabled his success had a profound influence on the eccentric Romanian artist who lived in Paris. And the feeling was definitely reciprocated. From the trial concerning his Bird in Space--which helped define modern art--to his first museum retrospective, and his dream of a skyscraper sculpture, New York was the place where Brancusi's career unfolded. Over the last one hundred years his effect on the city's art scene has never waned. Through stunning archival images and text by Brancusi authority Jérôme Neutres, Brancusi New York tells the story of the mutually beneficial relationship between the sculptor and the Big Apple. The book also features gorgeous new photographs of the five bronze sculptures on display at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York for the exhibition Brancusi in New York: 1913-2013.