Ruth Duckworth

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.