"The book begins in the late eighteenth century, when a systematic formal distinction began to be made between painting and sculpture. Following changing attitudes toward sculpture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Potts analyses for the first time the radical transformation that has occurred not only in the nature of sculptural works but also in their display and reception.

He focuses on a broad range of texts by major writers who have in some way been obsessed by sculpture, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Einstein, Adrian Stokes and Clement Greenberg, and such artist-theorists as Adolf Hildebrand and Donald Judd. Potts also offers a detailed view of selected iconic works by sculptors ranging from Antonio Canova and Auguste Rodin to Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois - key players in modern thinking about the sculptural.

The impact of minimalism features prominently in this discussion, for it disrupted accepted understanding of how a viewer interacts with a work of art, thereby placing the phenomenology of viewing three-dimensional objects for the first time at the center of debate about modern visual art."--BOOK JACKET.