Description
The aim of this module is to introduce students to the various cultures of sculpture in Britain, Europe and America from c.1760 to c.1914. The course will proceed historically, and will be concerned with a sequence of stylistically innovative movements, which in any one year, might include examples ranging from the baroque, through neoclassicism, romanticism, neo-Gothicism, realism, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the New Sculpture, through to Impressionism, Symbolism, and Vorticism.
The course may also be concerned with the European and American reception, in the same period, of works of historic and contemporary sculpture from across the world, in museological, popular and vanguard forms of culture. The course will be self-consciously object-focussed in methodology, but with a complementary concern to overturn the pieties and conventional stories told in the limited extant historiography.
Preliminary reading
Baudelaire, C. ‘Why Sculpture is a Bore’ (1846), in P.E. Charvet (ed.), Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, (1972), 97-100.
Bluhm, A. The Colour of Sculpture 1840-1910 (1996).
Collins, J. Eric Gill: Sculpture (1992).
Cork, R. Jacob Epstein (1999).
Coutu, J. Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments from the 18th-Century British Empire (2006).
Craske, M. and R. Wrigley, eds, Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea (2004).
Craske, M. The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England 1720-1770 (2008).
De Margerie, L et al (eds), Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827-1905): Ethnographic Sculptor (2005).
Gilroy, P. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993).
Hildebrand, A von. ‘Remarks on The Problem of Form’ (1893), College Art Journal 11.5 (Summer 1952), 251-8.
Janson, H.W. ‘Rediscovering Nineteenth-Century Sculpture’, Art Quarterly 36.4 (1973), 411-414.
Johnson, G. Sculpture and Photography. Envisioning the Third Dimension (1998).
Morris, R. ‘Notes on Sculpture’ (1967), in Harrison and Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990 (1988), 813-22, 863-73.
Nelson, C. The Colour of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007).
Potts, A. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000).
Pound, E. Gaudier-Brzeska (1916).
Roach, J. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996).
Rogers, L.R. Relief Sculpture (1974).
Silverman, D. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (1989).
Stewart, S. ‘The Miniature’, ‘The Gigantic’, On Longing (Durham, 1993), 37-104.
Summers, D. ‘Form and Gender’, in Norman Bryson et al (eds), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, (1994), 384-413.
You might like to start familiarising yourselves with the work of, and scholarship on
- John Flaxman
- Thomas Banks
- John Bacon
- Francis Chantrey
- Antonio Canova
- Charles Cordier
- Jacob Epstein
- Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Medardo Rosso
- Eric Gill
- Augustus Saint Gaudens
- Bertel Thorwaldsen
- Herbert Ward
You might also like to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and begin thinking about the displays of sculpture at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham and the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862.