Changing Conceptions of Western Sculpture from the Greeks to Antony Gormley

Throughout the history of Western sculpture there have been changes in the conception of sculpture as primarily appealing to a single position for the viewer or to every angle in the surrounding space. There have also been changes in whether sculptural materials should be carved directly or (particularly since the invention of ‘pointing machines’) whether they should be primarily shaped by designers’ preconceptions. 

Following on from Prof Read's previous (but not essential) lecture on the Parthenon, this talk discusses changes wrought in crucial works by the Greeks, Agostino di Duccio, Michelangelo, Bernini, Canova, Rodin, Duchamp, Brancusi, and Richard Serra. It concludes on two works in AGWA by the British contemporary sculptor Antony Gormley that prompt us to interrogate his claim that ‘‘either my work can be seen as really bad figurative sculpture, or as a provocation to a state of reflection.’

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He wrote the first book on the British psychoanalytic art critic Adrian Stokes and has published extensively on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century art, film, art theory and complex images in global contexts. His anthology of essays on Colonization, Wilderness and Other Spaces: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting, co-edited with Kenneth Haltman, was published in 2020 and The Heritage of Molyneux’s Question in Landscape Painting and Aesthetic Thought was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. In 2019 he had Visiting Fellowships at Yale Centre for British Art, The British School at Rome and NES Artists Residency at Skagaströnd, Iceland, while later this year he will be a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Cambrdige. He has also lectured extensively in Australia and internationally, particularly on his long-term book project, The Reversed Canvas in Western Culture.

Hosted by Tresillian Arts Centre. 

Image: Michelangelo, The Atlas (circa 1530-34)