Raymond Mason - Tapa dura

Raymond Mason, the English sculptor and painter born in 1922, has lived and worked in Paris since 1946. A close friend of Giacometti, Balthus and Bacon, he has established an international reputation chiefly through a number of monumental works in Paris, Montreal, New York, Washington, and his home town of Birmingham. Although his large retrospectives in Britain and in France attracted record-breaking attendances, the fact of living abroad, and of following his own path in defiance of passing fashions, has prevented his full recognition as an original artist of his generation. Often conceived on a large scale, and concerned with a wide variety of subjects having universal appeal, his works continue the line of narrative art, and recover the long tradition of polychrome, figurative sculpture. His art as a whole is sustained by a vivid and coherent body of ideas expressed in numerous essays, and while reclaiming the past it with new sculptural forms, and explores the limits of realismn and of figuration itself. In this book devoted to Mason's work, the author raises questions about the nature of art, and about its place in contemporary experience. He offers several interpretations, and a reflection on the implications of Mason's practice and theory.

Michael Edwards has held a chair of comparative literature in Paris and is Professor of English at the University of Warwick.