Early Sculpture Research Articles

St Helen's Church, Skipwith, North Yorkshire

Skipwith church's west tower, of ‘pre-Norman’, ‘Saxo-Norman’ or ‘early Romanesque’ style, has been the focus of a campaign of investigation and analysis which included structural recording and archaeological excavation. A building earlier than this tower was identified; within and around it were burials, some in iron-bracketed wooden coffins, and a piece of newly discovered early ninth-century sculpture confirms the contemporary importance of this site. This building was replaced by a church incorporating the standing tower; hitherto unrecognized details of its construction are reported, together with its subsequent structural evolution. Attention is drawn to an extensive series of cross slabs and to a considerable quantity of painted alabaster fragments representing one or more altarpieces.

Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer (review)

Reviewed by: Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer Stephen C. Behrendt (bio) Carole Simmons Oles . Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer. University of Arkansas Press. Whenever any author gets involved in a biographical project a unique and frequently intimate relationship inevitably develops between author and subject. They can become acquainted in wholly unanticipated ways, and when the end product is not a conventional biography but rather a creative literary or artistic project, the results can be as startling as they are satisfying. This is exactly the case with Carole Simmons Oles's remarkable new book, Waking Stone, which traces the life and career of the nineteenth-century Massachusetts sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who defied her culture's gender conventions and the art world's odds by leaving New England to study in Rome with the English sculptor John Gibson and eventually setting up a studio there in the 1850s. Her circle of Roman acquaintances included the Brownings (she slipped unobserved into a convent one night, wearing Robert's trousers), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. In Rome she produced monumental sculptures, including figures of Medusa (1854), Oenone (1855), the Palmyran princess Zenobia in chains (1859), and the large, commissioned bronze of the Missourian Thomas Hart Benton that followed a competitive commission and was unveiled in St. Louis's Lafayette Park on May 27, 1868, as well as an extraordinarily popular small figure of Puck that was repeatedly copied during her lifetime. In Europe Hosmer became the center of a group of women artists and sculptors before she largely abandoned sculpture to pursue a project involving a perpetual-motion mechanism. Waking Stone will remind readers of Oles's earlier collection, Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell (1985), which traced the life of that pioneering nineteenth-century American astronomer. But twenty years has deepened and made richer and more resonant the ties-the depth of experience and emotion-that the poet now discovers between herself and her subject in this new collection. The poems in Waking Stone are sometimes in Hosmer's voice, sometimes in Oles's, and sometimes in a sort of fused voice that seems to shift effortlessly and seamlessly between them. The personal and aesthetic interconnections are many, and they include both Hosmer's and Oles's own families, which Oles tells us is one reason why she undertook her project in the first place. Two poems, for instance, remember their supportive fathers. Harriet-whom Oles addresses familiarly throughout as Hatty-muses soon after her arrival in [End Page 196] Rome on her mother and siblings, dead of consumption, while she works on her early sculpture, Hesper: How lucky that Father thinks my art no hobbybut profession. Lucky am I in fathers.I will never say aloud what weighs on me:Mother, Helen, the babies Hiram and George.Beating my hands to beat out from stonelives indestructible, calm. Hesper.I wish my loved ones such awakenings:after each night, rising as morning stars.Star at her crown, moon beneath her breast,poppy capsules woven in her hair,my Hesper's eyes are half-closingto a music just beyond our power to hear. ("From Backyard Studio, to Rome, 1852") Carving the great stone block of her morning star woman, revealing like Michelangelo before her the full figure hidden in the massy block, Hatty does indeed wake the stone, shaping a figure whose life will endure, though frozen in rocky sleep. Her father, unusual among the American male establishment, sees her art honestly and her work professionally, and Hatty is both proud and grateful. No less so the poet, who sculpts with words, creating sharp and recognizable shapes from the raw mass of language, awakening them to a no less indestructible existence, as she does with her own father, whose memory is implicated with Hatty's: In my Rolodex, one relic remains:"Henry Reginald Simmons, representingArchitectural Sculptors and Carvers Association"the only business card my father ever carried,in a little plastic sleeve,his thick, tool-roughened fingersfumbling to slip one out.His masters mostly Italian-Girolani, Guarino-except for Donnely at the Corcoran Art Gallery . . .And Daddy the...

The Renaissance of Museums in Britain

In this paper – given as a lecture at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 2003 – I survey the remarkable renaissance of museums – national and regional, public and private – in Britain in recent years, largely made possible with the financial support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. I look in detail at four non-national museum projects of particular interest: the Horniman Museum in South London, a remarkable and idiosyncratic collection of anthropological, natural history and musical material which has recently been re-housed and redisplayed; secondly, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century Old Master paintings, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture by Sir John Soane, which has been restored, and modern museum services provided. The third is the New Art Gallery, Walsall, where the Garman Ryan collection of early 20th-century painting and sculpture form the centrepiece of a new building with fine galleries and the forum is the Manchester Art Gallery, where the former City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum have been combined in a single building in which to display the city's rich art collections. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of which I am Director, is the most important museum of art and archaeology in England outside London and the greatest University Museum in the world. Its astonishingly rich collections are introduced and the transformational plan for the museum is described. In July 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a grant of £15 million and the renovation of the Museum is now underway.

Negotiating the “Resemblances of Surfaces”: Painterly Abstract Painting and Consumer Culture, circa 1945-1965

During the middle of the twentieth century, members of the American art world, academics from the arts and sciences, and cultural commentators all used concepts from the economy and consumer culture to describe and evaluate the meaning and significance of vanguard painterly abstract painting. Restaging their discourse reveals they perceived that consumer culture was determining the forms, uses, and values of art. However, there were alternatives, as evidenced by the early sculpture of Claes Oldenburg.

The polychromy of early Italian sculpture: the marble altarpiece by Jacopo della Quercia in San Frediano, Lucca, 1412-1422

The polychromy of early Italian sculpture: the marble altarpiece by Jacopo della Quercia in San Frediano, Lucca, 1412-1422

"in due course themselves advertisements?" Painterly Abstract Painting and Discourses of Consumer Culture in the 1950s

This essay reconstitutes the sense artists and intellectuals made of vanguard painting in relation to a consumer culture they observed burgeoning in the United States during the 1950s. In analyzing how painterly abstract painting approximated its forms and practices, they surmised consumer culture was becoming hegemonic and tending to frustrate redress thereof. However, the essay identifies an alternative to the inevitable course of culture commentators espied and disparaged. In his early sculpture Claes Oldenburg wittily engaged to revalorize the very painterliness affording commodification in the first place.

Some Long Thoughts on Early Cycladic Sculpture

Some Long Thoughts on Early Cycladic Sculpture

“Principally for Vases, etc.”: the Formation and Dispersal of the Calvert Collection

As an offshoot of the recent reevaluation of Heinrich Schliemann by Traill and others, British expatriate diplomat Frank Calvert, the father of field archaeology in the Troad, for a century consigned to being “in Schliemann's shadow”, is now receiving recognition for his extensive contributions to the topography and archaeology of the Troad. J. M. Cook pioneered a comprehensive assessment of Calvert's work in his 1973 topographical study, The Troad. He had discovered an unpublished manuscript catalogue of the Calvert Collection which a Turkish schoolteacher had saved and later given to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Cook mined it in the 1950's for information on Calvert's many identifications and excavations at over fifty sites in the Troad and the Chersonese. In the 1980's Traill published several articles, centred on Schliemann, which shed some light on Calvert. His study of Schliemann's diaries and correspondence with Calvert in the Gennnadius Library betrayed Schliemann's repeated attempt to diminish the significance of Calvert's excavations at Troy and his outfoxing of Calvert concerning the Helios Metope, a remarkable work of early Hellenistic sculpture. Wood and Easton uncovered hitherto unpublished correspondence between Calvert and Charles Thomas Newton (1816–1894), Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum (1861–1886). Nevertheless, until the 1990's, no work solely featured Calvert and his legacy. Gamer (1992) and Allen (1994, 1995a and b, 1996 and forthcoming) have focused on Calvert's archaeological legacy and Robinson has unearthed critical diplomatic documents contextualizing his life (1994).

Mysteriously Abandoned New Home: Architecture as Metaphor in the Early Sculpture of H. C. Westermann

Mysteriously Abandoned New Home: Architecture as Metaphor in the Early Sculpture of H. C. Westermann

The implications of dated monumental art from Chalcatzingo, Morelos, Mexico

Abstract Many studies, often art historical in nature, have been concerned with the Olmec stone monuments. Nevertheless, many critical Olmec issues remain unsolved. One of these is the chronological sequence of these monuments. Excavations conducted at the site of Chalcatzingo, Morelos, in the central Mexican highlands, discovered four, in situ, stone monuments which resolve some of the chronological problems. The iconography of the dated monuments forms the basis for dating many heartland Olmec monuments. It becomes apparent that the sculpture of Chalcatzingo, of 700–500 BC, shows the greatest similarities to epi‐Olmec and early Izapan sculpture. The possible contacts between regions are discussed.

Risk and Repair in Early Cycladic Sculpture

Risk and Repair in Early Cycladic Sculpture

In the Name of Picasso

Exhibit A: Picasso's Seated Bather, 1930. Against an azure wall of water, fragments of bone and bleached carapace assemble the monumental image of isolated, predatory woman. Woman-as-insect, with great mandibles in place of mouth evoking more effectively than any Masson or Mir6 the threat of the vagina dentata, this painting has functioned for years as a major emblem of Picasso's affinities with surrealism, as it has also established his preoccupation with an especially surrealizing notion of metamorphosis. The Museum of Modern Art showed the picture in 1939, and then again in 1946, at both major Picasso exhibitions. Thereafter it entered the collection to be placed on permanent and to be installed-permanently it had seemed-within a particular view of the 1930s Picasso. This was a notion of a metamorphic concerned with the body as a loose assembly or construction of parts often suggestive of found objects. This style was fundamental to the early sculpture of David Smith, as it was to the early painting of Gorky and de Kooning. They understood it as a mode or manner having a rather general application: that of biomorphic construction to create an image of transmutation. Not only artists, but generations of students imbibed this conception of the Picasso of the '30s and this particular style. Exhibit B: Picasso's Bather with Beach Ball, 1932. Against a pale cobalt sea and sky, the monumental form of female adolescence is assembled from a collection of pneumatic parts: bulbous bones so pumped with air that the figure appears to float. As a pendant to the Seated Bather, this work displays a contrary mood, a lugubrious sense of play instead of the earlier image's desicated wrath. But in all those conditions that we would call style the paintings are nearly twins. Both exploit a simple backdrop to force a sculptural experience of their theatrically isolated forms. Both conceive the figure as constructed out of parts whose provisional coherence effects a transformation from one thing (bone, balloon) to another (pelvis, breast). Exhibit C: At a lecture this fall at the Baltimore Museum of Art, William Rubin, one of the leading Picasso scholars, showed both paintings.1 With these

An early ambiguous sculpture?

An early ambiguous sculpture?

The Male Figure in Early Cycladic Sculpture

The Male Figure in Early Cycladic Sculpture

On My Sculpture Influenced by the Industrial Revolution

The author, L. R. Kitchin, describes his youth in the industrial part of Britain where the industrial Revolution began. His early sculpture dealt mainly with the human figure in the classical Greek style. When he learned that what he was pursuing was so close to what had been done by Aristide Maillol, his work underwent a major change. In 1959, he made the first principal work that reflected the influence of the heritage of his youth. Working with welding equipment, metal-working tools and machines, he continues to make sculpture stemming from this influence. He describes his recent works, in particular, his latest one, ‘Lifting Engine’, which is a very large construction whose linkage system permits the disposition of its parts to be changed at will within the limits of its design.

An early classic sculpture from El Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico

An early classic sculpture from El Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico

Early Cola Architecture and Sculpture

Early Cola Architecture and Sculpture

The Gravestone of M. Favonius Facilis at Colchester

The gravestone of a centurion of the Twentieth Legion, M. Favonius Facilis, which was found in the Roman cemetery at Colchester to the south-west of the colonia in 1868 is of particular interest for the history of Romano-British art, since it is one of the earliest sculptures known in the province. It is carved of Bath oolite and bears in a round-arched niche a full-length figure of Facilis (PL. IX), who is bare-headed but is otherwise dressed in the complete uniform of a centurion and carries a uitis in his right hand. Below the niche is the inscription, which reads: M ( arcus ) Fauoni ( us ) M ( arci ) f ( ilius ) Pol ( lia tribu ) Faci / lis c ( enturio ) leg ( ionis ) xx. Verecund / us et Nouicius lib ( erti ) posu/erunt . h ( ic ) s ( itus ) e ( st ).

Early Heian Sculpture at Its Best: Three Outstanding Examples

Early Heian Sculpture at Its Best: Three Outstanding Examples

The Christchild as Devotional Image in Medieval Italian Sculpture: A Contribution to Ambrogio Lorenzetti Studies

Sienese sculpture of the Trecento appears to have derived all its essential stimuli from two very different sources: One is the sculpture of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano; the other, painting. Several years ago Ulrich Middeldorf and Manfred Wundram traced Andrea Pisano's artistic origins back, in part, to Sienese painting.1 More recently Antje Kosegarten pointed out Giotto's influence on early Trecento sculpture in Siena.2 I myself was able to localize and date a group of Sienese-Umbrian sculptures of the second half of the Trecento by relating them to Sienese paintings attributable to followers of the Lorenzetti.3