Brâncuşi, Britain and the Idea of Modern Sculpture

Godfrey Worsdale OBE, Director of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Trained as an art historian in London, Godfrey Worsdale’s career began in the early 1990s at the British Museum, where he worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings. In 1994 he simultaneously established Cultural Instructions; an exhibition space in London dedicated to contemporary projects. He joined Southampton City Art Gallery as a curator in 1995 and became its Director three years later.

In 2002 he moved to the North East to establish MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. This was followed in 2008 by seven years as Director of BALTIC in Gateshead, where he also founded BALTIC 39; a new space dedicated to research and experimentation, developed in partnership with the Northumbria University.

Worsdale has served as a judge and selector for the 2011 Turner Prize and the 54th and 57th Venice Biennales. In 2015 he became the Director of the Henry Moore Foundation, dividing his time between Perry Green in Hertfordshire where Moore lived and worked, and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. In 2016 Worsdale was awarded an OBE for services to the visual arts.

Dr Jonathan Vernon is an art historian specialising in modernism, sculpture and post-War politics. His PhD thesis, completed at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2019, studied how Brâncuşi’s work was written into American, Western European and Romanian art histories.

In 2020-21 Vernon was a Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also served as Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld (2018–19, 2022–23) and Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at The Burlington Magazine (2014-17).

Vernon’s research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Moore Institute and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Alexandra Parigoris first encountered Brâncuşi’s work aged 11 or 12 on a visit to Târgu Jiu in the company of her aunt Sanda – daughter of Arethia Tătărescu, who had commissioned the work in 1935 – and vividly remembers sitting on the stools around the Table, like everyone could at the time.

After her baccalaureate at the French lycée in London and an amazing year spent at the Study Centre close to the V&A, she studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute for her BA, MA and PhD.

In 1979, she spent six months in what was then the Socialist Republic of Romania researching Brâncuşi on a British Council grant which was used in her MA thesis and subsequently published in the Burlington Magazine in 1984.

From 1985 to 1987, she benefitted from a Leverhulme Junior Research fellowship which enabled her to conduct archival research in Paris and the United States.

Her PhD thesis, titled “Brâncuşi – a Peasant in Paris”, examined the sculptor’s persona and œuvre from a post symbolist perspective and led to a number of scholarly papers.

In 2004, she was invited by Matthew Gale to write for the catalogue of the Tate’s exhibition, Brâncuşi: The essence of things, and almost twenty years later was invited by Ariane Coulondre to discuss Brâncuşi and write for the catalogue of the Pompidou Centre’s Brâncuşi: l’art ne fait que commencer exhibition.

Alexandra was made Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Fine Arts, History of Art and Cultural Studies, following her three-year appointment as Henry Moore Postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Leeds. Here she was responsible for coordinating the MA in Sculptural Studies, a position she still occupies.

She has taught at a number of universities, in particular the University of York from 1991 to 1994 as Henry Moore Lecturer.

From 2002 to its close in 2019, she was a director of the Infinitului Foundation created by Mica Ertegun to protect the landscape environment around  Brâncuşi’s Endless Column in Târgu Jiu, Romania. Since 2012, she has been a member of the Conseil Scientifique at the Rodin Museum in Paris.

Natalie Rudd is a curator and writer. In her former role as Senior Curator of the Arts Council Collection, Rudd managed the Collection’s centre for sculpture at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2003-21) and produced many touring exhibitions of sculpture, including Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945.

Rudd has written widely on art and artists including Peter Blake, Permindar Kaur, Paul de Monchaux and Veronica Ryan. Her books include The Self-Portrait and Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2021, 2023). Her recent essay, ‘Going With the Flow: Ways of Bringing Sculpture to Life’ features in When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture (Hayward Publishing, 2024).

Rudd is currently a Midlands4Cities PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, exploring precariousness in sculpture by women, 1978-1993.

David Ward is a practicing artist with a long-term interest in Brâncuşi, his sculpture and his photography.

Whilst working as a visiting artist at Harvard University for a semester in 1994, Ward became familiar with the sculpture The Hand of Mademoiselle Pogany, 1920 by Brâncuşi in the Fogg Museum collection. Sidney Geist noted that the sculpture is perhaps both a representation of a hand and also, metaphorically, a touching gesture towards the collector John Quinn.

The relationship of this singular sculpture to the pair of attenuated hands that are part of the marble and bronze sculptures of Mlle Pogany is noteworthy and Ward’s paper will focus on the sense of touch embodied in these works. Ward seeks to extend the haptic physicalities of Brâncuşi’s making, through the experience of the viewer, and, by a certain intuitive association, to the making of the sculptor’s own photographs of his work.

The confluence of the gesture, subtly present as “touch” in the various Pogany sculptures as a performative act, leads into Brâncuşi’s engagement with photography both in terms of the theatre of the studio and in the physicality of his handling of the medium. Ward pursues a poetic connection between The Hand of Mademoiselle Pogany and Brâncuşi’s handling of the medium of photography, suggesting that aspects of these relationships resonate with the work of sculptors including Barbara Hepworth, Alison Wilding, Barry Flanagan and Nicholas Pope. Showing images is essential to the presentation of this paper.

David Ward is an artist working in light and time based media, photography and performance. The body and the dynamics of light are central to his work, together with elemental themes of the natural world, relating to a wide range of contemporary and historical associations. Ward was Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 1995 and has been artist-in-residence at King’s College, Cambridge and Harvard University. He has curated exhibitions including The British Art Show 3, 1990 (co-selector) and Seeing Round Corners for Turner Contemporary in 2016 (co-curator).

Ward is represented in collections including Tate, The National Portrait Gallery, Arts Council England, the Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums. He taught at a number of institutions, including Goldsmiths’ College, London (1987-95), Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (1995-97), the Architectural Association, London (1998-2005).

davidward-artist.co.uk

“The sculptures are the size of fists, and with their polished surfaces and impeccable ergonomic forms, they recall miniature Brâncusi sculptures. If Modernist sculpture was often influenced by the machinery of the factory (and the battlefield), Christian’s sculptures are informed by the prosthetic forms of technological interfaces.” 

George Vasey, ‘Bruised Stones: On the Work of Toby Christian’, 2019

Toby Christian is an artist and educator whose practice centres around writing and sculpture. Over the course of sixteen years he has developed an evolving series of direct stone carvings in marble, and during the past six years specifically, a series of works which aim to explore the simultaneous legacies of technological ergonomics and modernist sculptural practices, including the work of Constantin Brâncuşi. Having exhibited these works in solo exhibitions internationally, he has more recently developed a new extension of this series for the exhibition Flash_Looking, at Belmacz, London, 2024.

Christian’s video presentation contextualises the production of the above series of stone carvings from the studio he has established in the converted 1960s garage of his home in Lewisham, South East London. Through this, Christian conveys the technical process of his work whilst both drawing on research into the questionably patriarchal approaches of 1970/80’s ergonomics studies for efficiency in the workplace, and the Eco-Asemic images produced by unknown insect colonies in the marble dust of his studio window.

Toby Christian (b. 1983, Boston, Lincolnshire, UK) studied at Wimbledon College of Art, London before completing his postgraduate training at the Royal Academy Schools in 2012, where he was awarded the Gold Medal. Christian’s practice is wide ranging, multifaceted, incorporating installation and sculpture, drawing as well as animation and importantly writing. Precise and objective, his works can be seen as post-modern ‘dérives’; close readings which position a viewer, a reader, in new emotive proximities with the ‘stuff’ of his subject matter – be this the arbitrary or the museological.

Christian is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

In the mid-1970s, Nicholas Pope lived and worked as a British Council scholar in the high pastures of the Romanian countryside, working with local peasants and craftsmen making wooden spoons and a wooden house and pantiles. Through contemporaneous images he will demonstrate how Romanian cultural and political life have interwoven with his own sculpture over 50 years of working as an artist. Pope can still communicate with Romanians using his limited peasant vocabulary and outrageous English accent. From holding back on buying a Romanian cottage by credit card in the 1980s, Pope still visited Romania numerous times with his wife, Janet Pope, a botanical artist and British Council scholar.

From leaving Romania to take part in the seminal exhibition, The Condition of Sculpture, Pope cannot escape the heavy influence Romania and its people, including Brâncuși, have had on his working life, including the memorable incident of sharing the village hospitality bed with the local political educator.

Nicholas Pope was born in 1949 in Sydney.  After studying at Bath Academy of Art, he won a British Council Exchange Scholarship at Institul de Arte Plastice ‘Nicolae Grigorescu’, Bucharest, later becoming a British Council Cultural Visitor to Romania (1976).

Recent exhibitions include Tate Britain, London; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands; The Holburne Museum, Bath; Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury; Roche Court Sculpture Park, Salisbury; and The Sunday Painter Gallery, London.

His work is included in the collections of Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Kröller-Müller Museum, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and many others, as well as in private collections. Pope lives and works in Herefordshire.

Sam Rose is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of two books on modern art in Britain and art writing/art theory: Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (Penn State, 2019); and Interpreting Art (UCL, 2022).

The sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși proved particularly magnetic and paradigmatic to a number of poets in the modernist period; from Ezra Pound to W.B. Yeats, Ernest Walsh to Carl Sandburg, and Mina Loy to William Carlos Williams. Several such poets even crossed paths in Brâncuși’s studio. Loy and Yeats’s enduring fascination with the bronzes of Brâncuși, in particular – through poems, prose and exhibition reviews – can be interpreted as critical interventions in and against the Vorticist art writing of Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Competing verse interpretations of Brâncuși appear across the 1920s and 30s, from The Little Review, Poetry and The Dial, to Yeats’s sprawling mythography A Vision, 1925 and some of Pound’s most ambitious Cantos.

Taken together, this writing about sculpture characterises and creates a distinct thing from the material object in stone or steel. Sculpture is rendered as a curiously fluid medium, which is metaphoric and metamorphic in the hands of the modernist poet. A ‘poetics’ of Brâncuși’s sculpture has been thoroughly documented by Alex Potts, who notes that the modern medium ‘exists both as a distinct art form and as a set of ideas or phantasies about sculpture’. These phantasies offer ‘an alternative to the traditional sculptural object’, troubling its association with monumentality, solidity and durability.¹

The centrality of Brâncuși to the poetic reimagining of sculpture is the principle concern of Quin’s paper. Beyond a poetics of sculpture, he examines the precise poems and art writing of modernist poets on their own terms. From an art historical perspective, these respective poets might contribute to the textual foundations of discrete art movements: whether Futurism, Vorticism, Dadaism, the Chicago Renaissance or the Celtic Revival. What emerges, however, from closely attending to the poems is a dialogue on the status of sculpture from the 1920s to 30s, and the possibilities of ekphrastic poetry to dematerialise modern sculpture for the reader and viewer.

Jack Quin is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Dublin City University, and previously held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Birmingham. His research explores the relationship between poetry and sculpture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the poet W.B. Yeats. He has published articles on literature and the visual arts in Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, and Irish Studies Review. His monograph W.B. Yeats and the Language of Sculpture was published in 2022 with Oxford University Press.

¹ Alex Potts, ‘Introduction’, Modern Sculpture Reader, xviii; Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 135-136

When Brâncuși created Bench and Arch, between 1914 and 1916, the artist defined a turning point in the ontological understanding of his artefacts. These shapes, made in salvaged architectural remnants of an architrave, experience their random nature: simultaneously exhibition supports and unique forms in space. Intended as visual accents, they evolved over time. In Brâncuși’s atelier, Arch framed Premier Pas; integrated later into the collection of Walter and Louise Arensberg in the 1920s, it framed Princess X. Intended to surround other sculptures, these forms emancipated from themselves “iconically increasing their unspeakable experience”¹. As such, homeless, these forms have entered into a close relationship with not only the environment but, above all, other shapes.

In perpetual development, Brâncuși composed sculptures as plastic collages regulated by the semiotics of montage. Between waiting and becoming, his work was part of a creative attitude linked to the aesthetic potential of narration, assemblage and fortuitous encounter, which find widespread use today in visual arts practices. Likewise, Brâncuși’s associative habit made visible other modes of existence of forms, giving life to what Pontus Hulten defined as objects “with emotional supercharge”². Sculptures were constructed through the addition of disparate elements (edification) but also through the subtraction of details and the extraction of intrinsic qualities³. Far from abstraction, Brâncuși abstracted, in the sense of “bringing out” from the model⁴ the sensitive qualities of a natural shape, which then become a stimulus of substitution⁵ capable of acknowledging new dimensions of experience. This abstract sense of reality reflected, for instance, the work of Jocelyn Chewett or, even more evidently, that of Barbara Hepworth, who grounded abstraction in nature and emphasised “the expression of the transient in forms of timeless character”⁶.

Between modularity and rhythmic discontinuity of materials and means, from sculpture by extraction to the sharp cutting of stone up to the narrative assemblage anticipating contemporary concerns, Brâncuși’s sculptures seem to ask themselves: “What next?”. “What remains of reality?” This paper aims to look beyond so, and not only explores the subtle but structured influence Brâncuși had on Hepworth’s practices but also the upward momentum which allowed him to go beyond the forms themselves to explore their unspeakable nature, thus anticipating contemporary visual approaches.

Pamela Bianchi is an art historian specialising in the relationship between art and architecture, history of exhibitions and display practices. She obtained a PhD in Art History from the Paris 8 University in 2015. Currently, she is a Professor in Art History at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design in Toulon and a Lecturer in Art History at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Belleville (ENSAPB) in Paris. She was a researcher for the Kandinsky Library and the Pompidou Centre for the two research programs “Exhibitions History” (2013) and “Gallery / Anti Gallery” (2021).

Her publications include ‘The Drama of the Exhibition Space: hybrid overlaps between display and design’ , in Theatre and Performance Design, 8:1-2 (2022). She is the author of three monographs: The Origins of the Exhibition Space (Amsterdam: AUP, 2023); Dressing up Spaces. Ibridazioni espositive tra display e design (Milan: Postmediabooks, 2021); Espaces de l’œuvre, espaces de l’exposition. De nouvelles formes d’expérience dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2016).

¹ Paul Ricoeur, La Critique et la Conviction : entretien avec François Azouvi et Marc de Launay (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1995) p269

² Pontus Hultén, Natalia Dumitresco, Alexandre Istrati (eds), Constantin Brancusi. Tout l’art. Monographie (Paris: Flammarion, 1995)

³ Paul Klee, Théorie de l’art moderne (Paris: Gallimard, [1956] 1999), p95

⁴ Anne Beyaert, “Brancusi, la ressemblance et le rythme”, Protée, 31/2 (Fall 2003), p73-81

⁵ Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (London, Secker and Warburg: [1997] 1999), p365

⁶ Helen Rosenau, Woman in Art: From Type to Personality (London: Isomorph, 1944), p93

“In sculpture the tangible presence of the MASS is fundamental, as Brâncuși demonstrates, for it is through this ‘presence’ that the IDEA of sculpture is felt. The problem posed is then how to escape from volumetric space while retaining the idea of the work as a kernel, a nucleus, a core.”

Tim Scott, 1961

Sam Cornish’s paper discusses Tim Scott’s sculpture of the first half of the 1960s. Scott sought to reconcile spatially open sculpture with a tangible sense of mass, with the example of Brâncuși very much in mind. Working through a productive paradox between open and closed form, innovation and conservation, Scott produced a succession of dramatic sculptures, at first concise and then increasingly extravagant.

What Cornish has elsewhere called ‘horizontal Brâncușism’ was a fundamental aspect of the New Generation Sculpture produced in Britain in the 1960s by Scott and his contemporaries; considering the impact of Brâncuși opens-up discussion around an under-thought but highly original moment in post-war British art. In the 1960s much advanced sculpture jettisoned the plinth. Not wanting to abandon the idea of sculpture existing in its own special realm, Scott looked to Brâncuși (as well as the Cut-Outs of Matisse) in his creation of ‘pseudo-plinths’, fully integrated parts of his sculptures that largely dispensed with the practical aspects of the plinth, while retaining its symbolic function.

The example of Brâncuși allows Scott’s art and ideas to be distinguished from the US Minimalists, as well as the work of Scott’s teacher and friend Anthony Caro.

Sam Cornish is a writer and curator, with a particular interest in abstract painting and sculpture that developed in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. He is co-editor of the catalogue raisonné of John Hoyland’s paintings on canvas. His publications include Frank Bowling: Sculpture (Ridinghouse, 2022), John Hoyland: The Last Paintings (Ridinghouse, 2021), Mali Morris: Painting (Royal Academy, 2019), Stockwell Depot 1967-79 (Ridinghouse, 2015), John Panting: Sculpture (Sansom & Co, 2012), Robert Motherwell: Drawings (Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 2011). Amongst the exhibitions he has curated are Mali Morris: Calling (Ikon Gallery, 2023), Frank Bowling: Sculpture (University of Greenwich Galleries 2022), John Hoyland: The Last Paintings (Sheffield Museums, 2021), Kaleidoscope: Colour and Sequence in 1960s British Art (Arts Council touring exhibition, 2017-18), and John Panting: Spatial Constructions (Adam Art Gallery, University of Wellington, 2013).

Earlier this year he co-curated These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture (RWA, Bristol), and curated Garth Evans Sculpture: A Place In the World (CALOSA, Irapuato, Mexico). His exhibition Tim Scott: Freedom and Discipline runs at APT Gallery from 27 June to 21 July.

Chris Stephens has been Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath, since July 2017. Before that he worked at Tate in London for twenty-one years, for much of that time as Head of Displays at Tate Britain and Lead Curator of Modern British Art.

His numerous exhibitions include some of the Tate’s most successful shows, such as Barbara Hepworth: Centenary at Tate St Ives in 2003; and in London, Francis Bacon (2008), Henry Moore (2010), Picasso and British Art (2012) and David Hockney (2017). As a leading expert on modern British art, he has published extensively and his book, St Ives The Art and the Artists, was published in 2018.

On 13 December 1957, H.S. (‘Jim’) Ede received a telegram at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge from Perry Rathbone, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, stating ‘FISH WILL SWIM FOREVER WITH BOSTON COD FOR THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS HOPE EVERYBODY HAPPY’. The occasion was the sale of a work from Ede’s collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts: Constantin Brâncuşi’s Poisson d’or (bronze, 1924). Ede had sold the work to fund a series of scholarships that would enable those selected to tour collections of art and architecture in the United States, much as he had done himself two decades earlier.

Rosalind Krauss identifies in Brânçusi’s methods an ‘arduous and patient labour’, which is nevertheless undercut by what she finds to be the ‘deflection of an ideal geometry’. This is a ‘deformation’, she describes, “great enough to wrench the volume out of the absolute realm of pure geometry and install it within the variable and happenstance world of the contingent.”¹

In accounts of Ede’s daily maintenance of the house at Kettle’s Yard, and the presentation of his collection within, we find a comparably painstaking approach. Despite this seeming aspiration to an ideal, this paper argues that Ede undertook many actions of ‘deflection’ or ‘deformation’ throughout the time he lived at Kettle’s Yard. He produced casts of original sculpture by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in order to sell the originals to museums abroad (with the aim of funding a major extension to the original Kettle’s Yard house) and agreed with artists to swap older works from his collection with for newer works as they took his interest. In the final year of Ede’s residence at Kettle’s Yard (1973) James Griswold of the Museum of Fine Arts hand delivered a posthumous cast of Brânçusi’s Poisson d’or to Jim Ede to install in the recently completed house extension.

What do these opportunistic exchanges, pragmatic sales and curatorial substitutions tell us about where Ede located value in his work? Taking the example of the ‘Brânçusi scholarships’, what did he consider most important to pass on to others? This paper considers how such actions reveal a curatorial methodology quite different to that which is most often ascribed to Kettle’s Yard, usually overwhelmingly static. It finds that in these transitory acts, focus is shifted from specific objects or materialities toward a site-specific ecology, from which new and engaging strategies for conservation that retain a ‘lifely’ quality can be extrapolated.

Dr Inga Fraser is a curator and art historian with a special interest in the intersections of modern art with emerging media and the broader visual cultures of the twentieth century. She is currently Senior Curator, House and Collection at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Kettle’s Yard, she worked as a freelance Curator at Tate Britain on the current exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.

Her PhD (2016-23) was a collaborative doctoral partnership between Tate and the Royal College of Art that explored artists’ engagement with film in the first half of the twentieth century in London, focusing on intermedial practices and the developing discourse of artists’ moving image. Before beginning her PhD she was Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate (2013-17) where she co-curated exhibitions and displays including Paule Vézelay (2017), Paul Nash (2016) and Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (2015).

Fraser has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art and an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and has previously also held curatorial positions at the National Portrait Gallery (2011-13) and Central Saint Martins in London (2009-11). She has contributed essays to artist monographs and anthologies published by Courtisane, Lund Humphries, Koenig and Ashgate, and written for magazines and peer-reviewed journals including British Art Studies, Sculpture Journal, Costume, Document and Tate Etc.

¹ Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York, Viking Press, 1977) p86

With an invitation from Ben Nicholson, husband and wife, writer David Lewis and St Ives-based artist, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, visited Constantin Brâncuşi’s studio in January 1955. On discovering Lewis was a writer, the sculptor reportedly said to him ‘Promise not to write about me until I am dead’¹. Perhaps interpreted by Lewis as a challenge rather than a warning, shortly following the sculptor’s death (and despite his relatively short publication history) he publishes the first book on Brâncuşi in English in 1957. The importance of the visit for Barns-Graham can be seen in the vivid account she writes in her reminiscences forty years later.

Throughout their lives, both Lewis and Barns-Graham repeated the story of this seemingly significant visit to Brâncuşi’s studio, tinkering with (and at moments hotly debating) the details of the event, perhaps a reflection of its personal importance to both their individual careers. Using unpublished papers from the Wilhelmina Barns Graham Trust’s archive (and other sources), this paper examines Lewis and Barns-Graham’s individual interest in Brâncuşi, a wider perspective on Brâncuşi within the St Ives artist community, and Lewis’ efforts to publish writing on the sculptor.

Cassia Pennington is Collections Manager at the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust. She has worked for over a decade in museum registration and exhibitions management, delivering diverse projects from Beyond Caravaggio to Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland. Prior to working at the Trust, Pennington was National Programme Coordinator at National Museums Scotland, delivering the largest national museum programme in Scotland to date.

¹ David Lewis, Brancusi, Tiranti, London, 1957, p4

Alex Potts is author of Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale University Press, 1994 and 2000), The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (Yale University Press, 2000), and most recently Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (Yale University Press, 2013). He was co-editor of Modern Sculpture Reader (Getty Publications, 2007/2012).

Potts is currently writing a book on labour and the depiction of the social in later nineteenth century art. Previously he has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the History of Art.

Laura Barlow is Senior Curator of Collections and Research at the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens. Her curatorial research focuses on the intersection of international modern and contemporary sculpture, public art, and architecture.

Previously Barlow was Director and Senior Curator of Rubaiyat Qatar, a Quadrennial of contemporary art, and Curator of Public Art commissions at Qatar Museums with artists including Monira Al Qadiri, Shezad Dawood, and Suki Seokyeong Kang. As Curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, from 2014-19, Laura curated exhibitions with artists including Yto Barrada, Raqs Media Collective, Hassan Sharif, and Saloua Raouda Choucair. Barlow is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London.