Tools as art

Tools as Art presents more than two hundred works in full color from the Hechinger Collection - an impressive collection celebrating the amazing variety of twentieth-century art that represents or incorporates tools and hardware.

There are elegant and witty sculptures of tools - from common hammers, saws, screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches to machine tools such as the lathe and the drill press - in wood, glass, metal, paper, and stone; constructions of found objects and building materials that use familiar forms to make works of imaginative power; and paintings, prints, and photographs depicting tools of all sorts. The artists range from well-known figures such as Jim Dine, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Lucas Samaras, Richard Estes, Claes Oldenburg, and Walker Evans to younger men and women, some of whom are published here for the first time.

They all share the strong attachment to everyday things that undergirds much modern art, and it is this quality that makes their work so evocative.