For nearly thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Franklin D. Murphy, chancellor at UCLA and later chief executive of the Times Mirror Company, was a dominant figure in the cultural development of Los Angeles. The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, one of his landmark projects, is also one of the great treasures of the UCLA campus. Serving as a model for sculpture gardens internationally since its dedication in 1967, the Murphy Sculpture Garden features seventy-two important modern and contemporary sculptures on a five-acre site designed by landscape architect Ralph Cornell. Among the artists represented in the garden's collection are Deborah Butterfield, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith.
This fully illustrated catalogue documents the entire Murphy Sculpture Garden collection, including a scholarly entry devoted to each artist and new photographs of the sculptures and their setting. Essays by Victoria Steele, Cynthia Burlingham, and Marc Treib focus, respectively, on the role of Franklin Murphy in the garden's planning and execution, the acquisition of the sculptures, and the garden's significance within the history of sculpture garden design. Along with a site map, the catalogue features historical photographs that show the garden's development and use over the last forty years. James Welling, an artist and faculty member in UCLA's Department of Art, has also contributed a new series of photographs that convey a sense of the garden's role in contemporary campus life.