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Ruth Duckworth delivers an extensive, thoughtful monograph on the artist’s entire body of work with new scholarship, exquisite reproductions, and the complete cooperation of the Duckworth Estate. This book firmly establishes the artist in the pantheon of twentieth-century sculptors, in a class with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Duckworth referred to herself not as a potter or ceramicist, but as a sculptor with clay, and this volume takes her at her word, foregrounding her sculptural production. As Emmanuelle Cooper wrote in her obituary: “In both her life and work, Duckworth’s background was one of non-conformity. In Germany, as a young girl, she risked prosecution by defacing a Nazi monument and resented being unable to attend art school because her father was Jewish. Most challenging of all was her determination to gain international respectability as a sculptor working primarily in clay.

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Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009) was a British sculptor who was best known for her smooth ceramic works of abstract forms derived from nature. Finding much of her inspiration from Bronze Age Cycladic sculptures, Duckworth’s oeuvre have elongated silhouettes with slight details suggesting the face and limbs. Born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, Germany to a Jewish father and Christian mother, she was forced to leave the country in 1936 due to Nazi restrictions on Jewish students, studying instead at the Liverpool College of Art in the United Kingdom. She initially worked as a tombstone engraver in England, and in 1964 moved to the US to teach at the University of Chicago. Her works are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA: and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others. Duckworth died in Chicago, IL, where she had spent the last 45 years of her life.

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