From Infancy to Adulthood: Robert Cook's Family Album in Bronze
by Kim Carpenter
From the time they were infants until they reached adulthood, Jenny and Henry Cook posed for their sculptor father. Beginning in the early 1950s, Robert Cook modeled his children in wax, charting their growth and development until the middle of the 1970s. By this time, he had already created over one hundred life-size and smaller-scale sculptures, an oeuvre that developed into a three-dimensional documentation of the Cook childrenÕs lives. Aside from the sentimentality involved, modeling sessions served as a continual means for the artist to improve capturing the human figure in all its complex and nuanced forms. And to achieve this, Cook sculpted his childrenÑirrespective of age or genderÑin the nude.
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