Sculpture In Britain Research Articles

Modernist mammoth: sculpture, landscape and gravel working in the Trent Valley, 1960–1970

This article examines the place of modernist sculpture in a project of landscape design for the head office of a major British gravel company opened in 1965, in the valley of the river Trent, England. As well as gravel, excavators unearthed the tusks and teeth of mammoths; the company used an image of a mammoth as their logo and encouraged archaeological research on site. Leading landscape architect Brenda Colvin planned the grounds for the head office, as well as shaping working and restored gravel pits and designing the private gardens of the company’s owner. Nottingham architects Cecil Howitt and Partners designed the new offices in a tradition of civic architecture and contemporary model of corporate estates. The forecourt of the building featured the then largest free-standing sculpture in Britain, a 23-foot high, semi-abstract figure of a mammoth constructed of steel plate to echo the modern machines made on site as well as the antiquity they revealed. The sculptor Kim James was a leading member of the British Communist Party, and the style revived the revolutionary modernism of the early twentieth century. This article reconstructs the making and meaning of a largely forgotten designed landscape of the 1960s.

Art as industrial heritage: deindustrialisation and public sculpture in Britain’s steel-making regions, 1976–2020

ABSTRACT This study analyses the emergence of steel industry-related public sculpture in Britain in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The creation of these sculptures is viewed as part of the response of local authorities, artists and community groups to the large-scale loss of steel-making jobs and infrastructure in Britain since the mid-1970s. It posits that the rapid demolition of redundant steelworks plants after closure erased many of the physical reference points to steelmaking in its traditional heartlands, creating a material void which public sculpture has helped to fill. While belief in the ability of public art to stimulate urban regeneration lay behind the commissioning of many of these sculptures, especially from the 1990s onwards, we argue that they make more sense when viewed as a form of industrial heritage. Sometimes depicting the skills, clothing or iconic structures associated with steel, sculptures provided visual references to the industry, often in places where it no longer existed, thus becoming important sites of steel industry memory in Britain.

‘Peculiarly fit for statues’: the contribution of Coade’s fired artificial stone to sculpture in the eighteenth century

This article considers the enduring ‘value’ of Coade stone as artefact. Using insights from Alois Riegl’s The Modern Cult of Monuments , it examines the contribution of fired artificial stone as a key enabler of the eighteenth-century passion for sculpture in Britain, as replicated sculptural forms entered interiors, gardens and architecture. This durable stoneware first crossed into statuary in the 1720s. From 1769, Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) became its figurehead, successfully positioning Coade stone as superior to natural stone. Formulation and production were collaborative processes dependent upon specialist, often overlooked fabricating skills. This article considers factors that led to the success of Coade stone, as well as its composition and production. It concludes with a brief case study of the Coade stone caryatids that Sir John Soane took as a personal motif.

Alienation in Contemporary Sculpture between the Works of Anthony Caro and Tony Cragg (A Comparative Study)

The subject of this research is the study of the formal alienation of contemporary English sculpture, by comparing the most important sculptors of the new contemporary generation. This research problem is to look for the important factors in the formation of the contemporary sculptural structure of the exotic, and what is the mechanism of formation and output of these forms. The research seeks to explore (Alienation in contemporary sculpture between the works of Anthony Caro and Tony Cragg) in a comparative study. The importance of the research is to identify the concept of alien forms in contemporary British sculpture, especially in the cases of Anthony Caro and Tony Cragg that this research is considered a knowledge research that has importance in highlighting the construction of contemporary sculptural form, and the processes of alienation in the plastic art achievement. The temporal and spatial limits of the research are from 1965 to 2014 with all the materials, methods and techniques of modern sculpture in Britain. It also included a definition of the terms used in it, and it is made of two sections, the concept of alienation in thought, which addressed the most important intellectual and philosophical approaches that were a major cause of alienation of the new form or they called for it. The second section involves the alienation in the sculptural form and deals with the exotic forms of ancient and contemporary history and the formal transformation of the stage. The methodological framework included research procedures, i.e., the research community, sample, methodology, and justification for the selection of four samples. They were chosen in accordance with the rationale of their representation of the research community and its temporal limitations through which the purpose of the research is reached after analyzing them and getting the most important results and conclusions and discussing them including: The alienation in the works of the sculptors through the first new production of each sculptor was shown at the beginning of any new experiment. These shapes are new and strange to his other shapes and also strange to the surrounding productions produced by the British sculptors. Thus the alienation was represented in form, technique, material, style, concept, presentation and installation of elements. The alienation has been shown in a specific time and place, and the exotic works have exceeded that time and place in their style, form, techniques. The exotic presentation methods are governed by a specific time and place because each product after passing the temporal or spatial period becomes a naive subject that has been consumed because of the many experiments based on its concept, idea or style

‘Mapping the practice and profession of sculpture in Britain and Ireland, 1851-1951’ Victoria and Albert Museum, London 25-26 February 2011

IntroductionBack in 2004 Ann Compton proposed a project to set up an online database of sculptors, entitled Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851 to 1951. This would complement the printed A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, then being prepared by Ingrid Roscoe and her co-authors, Emma Hardy and Greg Sullivan, which was itself an expanded and thoroughly revised version of Rupert Gunnis's Dictionary, first published in 1953. A development phase followed, supported by the Trustees of the Henry Moore Foundation, with work proper on the database commencing in 2008.This issue of the Sculpture Journal is in part a celebration of Ann Compton's achievement in bringing her ambitious plans to fruition, as director of the project, working with Alison Yarrington as principal investigator, Marjorie Trusted as co-investigator and Matthew Barr as systems developer. The project was enabled by a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and a team of dedicated and active collaborators and researchers, not least colleagues at the University of Glasgow.1 After three years the database went live in February 2011 (http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/). An additional dimension, Mobilising Mapping, enabled through AHRC Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) funding, was originated and developed by Matthew Barr. This secondary project, with Alison Yarrington as principal investigator and Ian Anderson as co-investigator, has further enhanced the database's public accessibility by making it available on handheld devices. The project's public launch was a culminating conference held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, when a range of papers both arising out of, and inspired by, the Mapping Sculpture database were presented.During the period of research and implementation Mapping Sculpture held the imprimatur of British Academy Research Project status. This 'kitemarking of academic excellence' is awarded to 'major infrastructural projects or research facilities intended to produce fundamental works of scholarship, in most cases for the use of a variety of disciplines, rather than to produce interpretative works or monographs'. One of the significant aspects of the Mapping Sculpture database is the way in which it communicates the changing concepts of the practice of sculpture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It helps reveal sculptors' training, workshop practices, exhibition histories and the productive networks among sculptors and between artists and patrons. It is clear that, as published studies of studio practice have previously shown in relation to individuals or families of sculptors, practitioners were almost invariably part of a team, with assistants and collaborators. …

‘Fashioning Archaeology into Art: Greek Sculpture, Dress Reform and Health in the 1880s’

Drapery in sculpture and art has a function. It acts as clothing: as a way of both seeing and yet obscuring the figure. It draws attention to the body while covering it. It often lies next to a nude as fallen clothing. It plays a part in the narratives of sculpted story telling. It indicates how the female form should be seen and what parts of the body should be made visible through the draped veiling. Drapery has been an influential artistic conceit in the Western world since early antiquity and artists have revisited the form and function of drapery and the body since the early Renaissance. Gillian Clarke has argued that classical drapery is so prevalent in European art that “classicists tend to think of it not as clothing but as an example of Greek and Roman art” (105). Drapery has long been an ‘artistic conceit’, a device showing artistic flair and rendering. This is brought to an apogee in the large paintings by the contemporary artist Alison Watt. The contours of flesh hidden by the folds of cloth are searched for in vain as there is no body hidden. Alison Watt’s work is a study of cloth, of folds, of voids, of form for its own sake. It is what Anne Hollander has referred to as empty drapery (36), or, perhaps more positively as Gen Doy ventures, arranged cloth as art (230). The natural instinct to look for the body beneath the drapes is dictated partly by the use of drapery to show off the body, particularly in the work of nineteenth-century artists. By the end of the nineteenth century, Greek sculpture and the clothed female form was being used in an ideological and social battle – the battle for the uncorseted body. The influence of Greek sculptural ideals and Greek clothing are relatively well known, as is the connection between the aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite artists and dress reform (Newton; Cunningham). The exhibition The Cult of Beauty. The Aesthetic Movement 1869–1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2011 made these connections through a display of clothing, dress manuals and other items. The Cult of Beauty also illustrated the influence of Greek clothing on contemporary art and dress reform through the display of two ‘Tanagra’ terracotta figurines, on loan from the British Museum, as part of the section on “Grecian Ideals.” 1 In 1879 the writer on fashion in clothing and furnishings Eliza Haweis included four sketches of these ‘Tanagra’ terracottas to illustrate how Greek women dressed using “numberless folds to both reveal and conceal the body” in her dress reform book The Art of Beauty: How gracefully the dress followed the movements of the body, may be perceived better from the small coloured clay figures in the British Museum [Greek Room], than even from marble statues, for they represent their ordinary domestic manners and are not carefully posed and idealised goddesses. (46) Dresses on display in The Cult of Beauty showed how there was an attempt to shape fabric to reveal natural contours through artful drapery and bodices with minimal or no boning (Ehrman 206). The principal artists of the mid to late nineteenth century led a revival of classicism in painting and sculpture in Britain, which was a major influence on the theatre, decorative style and fashion in this period. However, it was the dramatic

Mapping Sculpture in context: art history in an online environment

This article looks in detail at the origins, development and research potential of Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (Mapping Sculpture), a major digital humanities project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and launched publicly in February 2011. It begins by providing a brief overview of recent art historical research in an online environment and identifies the open space of Web 2.0 as one of the principal challenges (or opportunities) facing the academic community. The article goes on to describe Mapping Sculpture's methodology, the implementation of the research programme and concludes with an overview of the project's initial findings.

The ‘Essential Quality of Things’: E.B. Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Indian Art and Sculpture in Britain, c. 1910–14

The ambivalent attitude in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain towards the display of Indian art meant that first-hand access to Indian sculpture and painting remained difficult, even in London, the so-called ‘heart of empire’. The well-illustrated publications of the India Society (founded by William Rothenstein in 1910) were, therefore, an important vehicle for disseminating knowledge and information about Indian art among artists, writers and collectors in Britain in the years preceding the First World War. This article examines the complexities of the contributions made by the former colonial administrator and principal of Calcutta Art School, E.B. Havell and the Sri Lankan-British art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy to the re-evaluation of Indian art in the early twentieth century and the impact this had in shaping a modernist sculptural aesthetic in Britain. Focusing primarily on the examples of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, the article argues that such intersections are about more than a search for visual semblances, and that Gill and Epstein were not simply undertaking what Helen Carr has described as ‘the aesthetic equivalent of imperialist pillage’, the rifling of colonized cultures for inspiration. Undoubtedly, artists in Britain were stirred by their exposure to new and different forms and systems of representation – how could they not be? Yet, what I emphasize here is that these cross-cultural encounters – which were sometimes direct and real, and at other times imagined and projected – manifested themselves in other, more oblique, ways in early twentieth-century artistic discourse, identities and practices at the ‘heart of empire’. Thus, I demonstrate that, while Coomaraswamy’s and Havell’s ideas concerning art and culture were fostered by the connective webs of communication and travel made possible by the British Empire, they are also emblematic of the transnational contacts made with those involved in anti-imperial and anti-industrial movements both in Britain and India. In so doing, the article highlights the ‘double nature of the imperial system’: extending power and domination over colonized countries, on the one hand, and bringing the imperial metropolis and its artists into contact with other artistic practices and subjectivities, on the other, creating interconnected networks of encounter which conventional histories of sculptural practice (often isolated within national boundaries) have at worst ignored and at best mapped only in terms of stylistic influence.

Paul Mellon Centre Rome Fellowship: Marble mania: the art history and historiography of sculpture in Britain since 1790

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The diagnosis of art: Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet – the ears have it?

The bust of Sir George Savile (1726–1784) by Joseph Nollekens (1737–1830), based on Savile's death mask, is currently on display at Tate Britain as part of the 'Return of the Gods: Neoclassical Sculpture in Britain' exhibition, with its permanent home being the Victoria and Albert Museum. It reveals Sir George exactly as he was, a thoughtful, but finally defeated man, in his blemished glory. Notably, on Sir George's left ear, there is a crease visible running diagonally across the earlobe, most likely to be Frank sign. Frank first described a link between this dermatological sign and coronaryartery disease in 1973.1 There is also known to be a significant association with carotid intima-media thickness and with cerebrovascular disease.2 Sir George Savile was a remarkable 18th century political figure who eschewed the laid-back life of huntin', shootin' and fishin' (sic) commonly pursued by his fellow acolytes. Instead, he engaged himself in public life, taking many unpopular positions and steered by his own opinions arrived at by ‘integrity and disinterestedness’.3 Like his famous grandfather the Marquis of Halifax, he had a major impact on the political saliences of his day – American republicanism, Catholic emancipation and electoral reform. His portrait hung in Benjamin Franklin's house a decade before the American Revolution.4 A man interested in evidence and rationality, he was Member of Parliament for Yorkshire from 1759 to 1783, a fellow of the Royal Society and a patron of the Westminster Infirmary. Savile died in the arms of his friend David Hartley in January 1784 eight months after he collapsed while speaking in Parliament. ‘He was proceeding to speak in favour of the motion when finding himself too weak to speak with that animation that he wished to express, he sat down, to the great mortification of the House, who were distressed Figure 1 Joseph Nollekens. Portrait Bust of Sir George Savile, 1784. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Figure 2 Closer view of left ear of bust to see so good a man in so infirm a state of health.’5 This sudden weakness and his subsequent demise over a short period offer us but the slightest clue to the condition or disease process that killed him. However, taken together with his Frank sign, the differential diagnoses include uncontrolled angina and ischaemic stroke. An angina attack brought on by the stress of public speaking is certainly a possibility. An adrenaline-associated increase in heart rate and heightened vasoconstriction could well have prompted an acute attack in Sir George who was 57 years old at that time, but against this is the fact that he was as a well-practised orator. The weakness described in the Parliamentary record is associated with an inability to speak, which may have been dysphasia. His steady slide to death in less than a year is consistent with a neurological diagnosis. Of course, both cardiac and neurological events may have occurred in combination with an underlying atherosclerotic aetiology. Perhaps it was the bed rest that finally brought about his end. His immobility will have further added to his risk factors for cardiovascular disease and thromboembolic events. In conclusion, Sir George Savile, a man who bore the aural stigmata of cardiac/cerebrovascular disease, collapsed under stress and died shortly after at the age of 57 years. As to the precipitant being angina or stroke, we can only speculate. Atherosclerosis, towards which his Frank's sign may point, is a stage upon which either or both could have played a part.

A major contribution to public sculpture in Britain: Patricia, Lady Gibberd (1926–2006), and the Harlow Sculpture Collection

A major contribution to public sculpture in Britain: Patricia, Lady Gibberd (1926–2006), and the Harlow Sculpture Collection

REVIEWS

Books reviewed:Oliver Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics – An IntroductionHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve‐Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and PostmodernismFrancesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art Cartography and Politics in Renaissance ItalyJohn Onians, Atlas of World ArtRosemary Lloyd, Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still LifeDavid J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905

Martina Droth. Review of "Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905" by David J. Getsy.

Martina Droth. Review of "Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905" by David J. Getsy.

George Kennethson: a modernist rediscovered

First full-length study of George Kennethson (1919-1994), an often-overlooked artist who carried the torch of Modernist-Primitivist sculpture in Britain after Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Dobson and Henri Haudier-Brzeska. This book places Kennethson's life and work in the context of Modernism in Britain and is lavishly illustrated with new colour and archival photographs, drawings and writings, many of which are published here for the first time.

Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905, and: Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880-1930 (review)

Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905, and: Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880-1930 (review)

Popularising public sculpture in Britain: From landscape gardens to forest trails

Popularising public sculpture in Britain: From landscape gardens to forest trails

Book Reviews

Journal of Art & Design EducationVolume 4, Issue 2 p. 203-210 Book Reviews First published: June 1985 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1985.tb00163.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: EDITORIAL: New Fields of Art Design History Pictures to Print: the Nineteenth Century Engraving Trade Anthony Dyson The Artists' Colourmen's Story Don Pavey The Complete Guide to Calligraphy Judy Martin The Student's Guide to Western Calligraphy Joyce Irene Whalley Bauhaus Frank Whitford Has Modernism Failed? Suzi Gablik Modernism: Criticism: Realism Charles Harrison and Fred Orton (eds) Open Air Sculpture in Britain W. J. Strachan Volume4, Issue2June 1985Pages 203-210 RelatedInformation

Parts of British Buildings as Sculpture by Architects

While studying 20th-century publicly sited sculpture in Britain in 1970 [1], I came upon many contemporary functional parts of buildings such as chimneys, cooling towers and textured walls that might be compared to the works of sculptors but were designed by architects. Considerable thought is devoted by some architects to the aesthetic impact of such features, unrelated to their functionalism and unguided by the idea that 'form follows function'. My interview with about 40 architects and 70 sculptors revealed various reasons why sculptors were not called upon by architects for such projects. One common reason given by architects was that their limited budgets did not permit sculptors' fees. Others were that they enjoyed acting as sculptors as a distraction from their routine work, that they were capable of designing total environments and that they knew of few sculptors interested in architecturally related work.

Sculpture in Britain: TheMiddleAges. By LawrenceStone

Sculpture in Britain: T<scp>he</scp>M<scp>iddle</scp>A<scp>ges</scp>. By L<scp>awrence</scp>S<scp>tone</scp>