Anne Wagner

The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art. By then, work...

The​ sculptor Elisabeth Frink had her first London show in 1955. She was 24 and already teaching at St Martin’s College and the Chelsea School of Art. She dated her formation, however, not to these precocious achievements but to her earlier discovery of Rodin: it was on encountering his work in Paris in 1951, she insisted, that her life as an artist began. Rodin made it possible for...

The Swiss artist​ Sophie Taeuber grew up without a father. Carl Emil Taeuber, a pharmacist, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1891, two years after her birth. Her mother, another Sophie, never remarried. Instead she moved back to Trogen, her birthplace, and designed a new house for her young family; supervising its construction, planting and tending its garden, and looking after a series of...

Over the last​ twenty years the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square has played host to 12 commissions, each a reminder that there’s no easy path to relevance, let alone aesthetic success. More than one work has breached the fine line separating populist eloquence from authorial laziness. In Antony Gormley’s One & Other (2009), 2400 volunteers (one an hour) took turns standing...

Currently​ on view at the Nasher Sculpture Centre in Dallas is a show whose high ambitions gradually unfold from its title. First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone (until 28 April) has in its sights the deepest origins of art. The usual art historical strategy has been to tiptoe around the problem of where and how art, as we think of it, began, building the origin story on a few...