On re-displaying Victorian sculpture

Abstract

The exhibition Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 takes place at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 11 September-30 November 2014, and Tate Britain, London, 25 February-25 May 2015. It is curated by Martina Droth, Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art; Jason Edwards, Professor of Art History, University of York; and Michael Hatt, Professor of Art History, University of Warwick. The organizing curator at Tate Britain is Greg Sullivan, Curator, British Art 1750-1830. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Martina Droth, Michael Hatt and Jason Edwards, published by the Center in association with Yale University Press, ISBN 978 0 300 20803 0, $80 / £50.Jon Wood in email conversation with Martina DrothJW: Perhaps you can start by saying why the Yale Center for British Art and then Tate Britain are staging an exhibition of Victorian sculpture in 2014 and 2015.MD: There has never been a museum exhibition examining the broader spectrum of sculpture in the Victorian period. Once I made this realization, it seemed astonishing. And yet it is an omission entirely in line with the marginal place that Victorian sculpture occupies either in art history or within the sub-field of sculpture studies, let alone as a facet of Victorian culture in any context. The important point to realize is that this marginalization is a consequence of scholarship, or how we construct history, rather than a historical fact. This may sound obvious, but the notion that we can write and think about the Victorian era without paying attention to its sculpture is - implicitly or explicitly - based on the assumption that sculpture was not all that significant. And yet all the historical evidence suggests otherwise - the unprecedented proliferation of sculpture, and the enormous investment it demanded, point to its important standing in the period.JW: With an extraordinary public life...MD: Yes. Sculpture was the most public of arts, with a unique capacity to materialize as well as to symbolize, to stand both for history and for progress. As such it provided the Victorians with the emblem par excellence of their nation and empire. Far from being peripheral to the culture, it was central. Indeed, if we want to understand the Victorians, a very good place to start is with their sculpture. The question for the exhibition, therefore, was not whether, but why sculpture became such a critical form of representation at this point in time. In that sense, the exhibition is intended not only as a corrective, but as an opportunity to rediscover the meanings of sculpture and the roles it was given to play.JW: What is the broad rationale of the exhibition and what are the main strands of its argument?MD: The premise of this exhibition is very straightforward: it examines a particular art form during a particular period. Although this may appear a rather traditional approach, it also is an important part of our rationale; examining Victorian sculpture through an open and unrestricted framework seems the right way of treating a subject that is so often predetermined by art historical categories. The exhibition moves away from the idea that sculpture can be divided into a simple chronology of types and styles, that it is necessary to distinguish between its functional, decorative or aesthetic roles, or that concepts like 'eclecticism' and 'historicism' provide an explanatory arc of its development. I don't find these to be helpful tools here, as they suggest limited kinds of questions - how a sculpture looks, rather than what its appearance signifies. Yet this question of signification is precisely where the historical debate was located, and this is what we wanted to address - why, and in what ways, sculpture became important.JW: So a retrospective reconsideration that both takes 'sculpture' on its own, complex period terms and that revisits it through the lens and later knowledge of what sculpture can be? …