Outstanding!

The Relief from Rodin to Picasso.

No artistic medium challenges and expands the limits of perception quite like relief. Its inherent ambiguity—hovering between two and three dimensions—has long captivated some of the world’s most visionary artists. 

Beginning with neoclassical works that echo the reliefs of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the book examines artists who boldly redefined their medium, including Jules Dalou, Auguste Rodin, and Medardo Rosso. Their experiments are considered alongside those of painter-sculptors such as Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso, whose works blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. The narrative continues through the radical interventions of the Dadaists—Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp—who reinvented relief through collage and assemblage, transforming everyday materials into art. Later chapters explore how figures like Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, and Lee Bontecou revived the monumental scale and expressive power of relief in the mid-twentieth century.

Featuring superb reproductions and archival photographs, this volume celebrates the relief as a vital and independent form of artistic expression—one born from the dialogue between genres and continually renewed by modernity’s restless spirit of experimentation.