For nearly thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Franklin D. Murphy was a dominant figure in the cultural development of Los Angeles. As chancellor of UCLA and later as chief executive of the Times Mirror company, Murphy channeled more than a billion dollars into the city's universities, museums, concert halls, and libraries. The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, one of his landmark projects, is also one of the UCLA campus's great treasures. Standing as a model for sculpture gardens internationally since its dedication in 1967, the Murphy Garden features seventy-two important modern and contemporary sculptures in a five-acre site designed by landscape architect Ralph Cornell.

This fully-illustrated catalog documents the entire Murphy Garden collection and provides a scholarly entry for each artist—a sampling of which includes Deborah Butterfield, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith. Three 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.