Gillian Lowndes

BATH, U.K. The Holburne Museum Lowndes, who died in 2010, trained in ceramics, attending the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1955 to 1958, at a time when experimentation was at a peak. Both teachers and students were at the heart of that movement for change, and the Central School was a crucible for the new, the inventive, and the downright strange.

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Love, Hope, and Socialism: A Conversation with Camiel Van Breedam

Belgian artist Camiel Van Breedam launched his career in the late 1950s, when peinture informelle (abstract gestural painting) was still going strong. At an early stage, he made the leap from abstract geometric painting, with an emphasis on matter, to assemblage sculpture and collage—works, both formalist and historicizing, made from ordinary laborer’s tools and the remnants of shuttered factories, and often fraught with meaning.

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Going Public

Public art has undergone epochal shifts over the past half century, as Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz tells (and shows) us in The Private Eye in Public Art. A memoir and informative survey (but not a history, she says), the book demonstrates that she was in the thick of things from the 1970s onward.

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