$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with jacket
132 pages with 77 color plates by the artist:
54 drawings, 1 oil painting, and 22 photographs
11.75″ x 14″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978–1–938086–40–3
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
casemateipm.com
by Henry Adams, with a foreword by Irvin Lippman
A new retrospective book about one of America’s most renowned living sculptors and artists!
John Raimondi (b. 1948) is a contemporary American artist whose more than 100 monumental works of outdoor sculpture have earned him international distinction and acclaim. During his forty-five year career, he has experimented with a wide variety of styles, ranging from the simplicity of strong, angular lines and planes to the more graceful, curvilinear renditions of the natural world and human figure, to improvisational elements in his dignified series on American jazz greats and Indian chiefs.
A constant in every style and approach in Raimondi’s sculpture is his classical sense of design and craftsmanship along with his keen appreciation for scale and a subject’s social meaning. His sculptural works are also distinctive in how not cast in bronze but formed, rolled, welded, and fabricated into shape from large sheets of bronze or Cor-Ten steel. The results are unforgettable pieces that are monumental yet elegant, solid yet ethereal.
Behind most of Raimondi’s sculptural pieces are his conceptual drawings, which are works of art in their own right. These drawings—based on astute observations in the field and an immersion into scholarly readings—become fundamental, singular translations of the artist’s feel for and understanding of a subject. The drawings are then rendered into cardboard models that become templates for larger-scale models for the eventual work of art. Raimondi then makes new drawings of the completed sculpture in order to provide a sense of closure and complete the artistic process.
John Raimondi: Drawing to Sculpture is a seminal new book that presents not only an unprecedented number of Raimondi’s sculptures and drawings, but also a sense of his ever-evolving career and creative approach to making unforgettable art. The book also complements a forty-five-year retrospective of Raimondi’s work at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.
About
About the Author
Henry Adams is the Ruth Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. He earned his B.A. at Harvard University and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University, where he received the Frances Blanshead Prize for best doctoral dissertation in art history. Other honors include the Arthur Kinglsey Porter Prize of the College Art Association, the first time the award was given to a museum curator or Americanist, and the Northern Ohio Live Visual Arts Award. Dr. Adams has been singled out by Art News as “one of the foremost experts” in American art, and he is the author of more than 300 scholarly and popular articles and more than fourteen books and book-length catalogs, including Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Oxford, 2005), which the painter Andrew Wyeth described as “the most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist,” and Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (Bloomsbury, 2009).
About the Essayist
Irvin Lippman is Executive Director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art who previously was Director of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale (2003–2012), Executive Director of the Columbus (OH) Museum of Art (1994–2002), and Assistant Director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1988–1994) in Fort Worth, Texas. At each institution, he has spearheaded and developed innovative programs and critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, Cradle of Christianity: Jewish and Christian Treasures from the Holy Land, and Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Lippman received his B.F.A. from the University of Denver and his M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.
Praise
“John Raimondi is one of America’s finest living sculptors and artists. This book, along with the exhibition that it complements, shows the artist’s remarkable progression and his great skill in a multitude of media: from abstract and representational drawings to twisting metal sculptures that soar into the air, from graceful undulations of curvilinear marks relating to the natural world and human body to improvisational elements of jazz in drawings and sculpture. Both forms of his art—drawing and sculpture—wonderfully encompass a sense of weightlessness and fluidity.”
—Walter Lippman, Executive Director, Boca Raton Museum of Art
Slide Show
Study for Cage, 1971, marking pen, 7 x 8 in., Artist’s Collection 
Cage, 1971, bronze, 9 x 12 x 2 ft., Artist’s Collection 
Study for Erma’s Desire, 1975, marking pen, 4 x 17 in., Artist’s Collection 
Erma’s Desire, 1976, cor-ten steel, 26 x 47 x 33 ft., The Nebraska Interstate-80 Bicentennial Sculpture Corporation, Grand Island, NE 
Final study for Lupus, 1982, chalk, 36 x 18 in., Josh Conry, Loveland, CO 
Lupus, 1985, cor-ten steel, 40 ft. tall, Lotus Development Corporation, Cambridge, MA 
King Rally, study for Spirit Ascending, 1988, ink, 30 x 20 in., Tom Newton, Minneapolis, MN 
Memphis ‘68, study for Spirit Ascending, 1988, inks, 10 x 10 in., John and Suellen Solodar, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 
Study for Grace, 1991, ink on paper, 60 x 40 in., Artist’s Collection 
Grace, 1991, stainless steel, 34 ft. tall, Lois Pope, Snowmass, CO 
Children Becoming Adults, study for Journeys, 1996, sumi ink, 22 x 30 in., Brian and Dr. Kathyrn Rutenberg, New York City, NY 
Journeys, 1996, bronze, 24 x 48 x 36 in., Artist’s Collection 
Ill Wind, study for Billie, 2000, ink, 30 x 22 in., Joel and Nancy Hart, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 
Billie, 2000, bronze, 11 ft. tall, Artist’s Collection 
Study for Broncos I, 2014, oil stick, 30 x 21 in., Artist’s Collection 
Broncos, 2014, bronze, 5 ft. tall, Artist’s Collection