Acknowledgements

Potts, Alex

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Acknowledgements

Alex Potts

The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist

Acknowledgements

Author

Alex Potts

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00156.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14730

Acknowledgements

The origins of this book are found in a period I spent teaching fine-art students at Camberwell School of Art in the 1980s. My early thinking on modern sculpture owes a lot to discussions with colleagues and students there, particularly Tony Carter, Wendy Smith and Conal Shields. This community was unfortunately dispersed when Camberwell fell victim to the wave of Thatcherite rationalisation of art-college education in London in the late 1980s.

I am grateful to Caroline Arscott and David Solkin for prompting me to focus in a concerted way on the viewing of sculpture by asking me to give a paper at the session they organised on ‘The Viewer in the Frame’ at the Association of Art Historians’ annual conference in 1991. An invitation the next year to deliver a series of research seminars at the Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, on ‘Male Phantasy and Modern Sculpture’ gave me an opportunity to lay the foundations of a book, helped by feedback from, among others, Michael Baxandall, Tim Clark and Anne Wagner. The project was consolidated by an invitation from Lisa Tickner and Jon Bird to contribute to a set of art-history publications they were editing. I wish to thank Lisa Tickner for her generous input into the book at that stage, even if its expanding scope and deferred deadlines meant that it had to find another home.

Numerous colleagues, students and friends have played a part in the genesis and working out of the ideas presented here, including Dawn Ades, Graham Andrews, Caroline Arscott, Stephen Bann, David Batchelor, Roger Cook, Tom Crow, Penelope Curtis, Whitney Davis, Martina Droth, Steve Edwards, Tamar Garb, Adrian Forty, Michael Fried, Christopher Green, Andrew Hemingway, Anthony Hughes, David Hulks, Lewis Johnson, Sharon Kivland, Eva Lajer-Burcharth, Simon Lee, Sue Malvern, Tim Martin, Stanley Mitchell, Mignon Nixon, Fred Orton, Brendan Prendeville, Adrian Rifkin, Alison Sleeman, Jon Thompson, Kim Tong and Anthony Vidler. I owe a particular debt to Anne Wagner, with whose work on sculpture I have had many productive encounters over the years, and to Malcolm Baker, whose generously shared and creative thinking about the viewing, making and display of sculptural objects has been a constant source of stimulus and encouragement. Last, but certainly not least, there has been Michael Podro’s increasingly timely insistence that looking closely and thinking carefully lie at the very core of any worthwhile engagement with works of art.

To Briony Fer I owe a lot for her valuable commentary on the final manuscript, as well as for the more intangible effects her own work has had on my analysis. I am also much indebted to Tim Clark for his full, carefully considered responses to the text which helped me to sharpen the formulation of a number of crucial passages. Finally, there is a very special debt I owe to Susan Siegfried. Discussions with her played a formative role throughout my working on this project, generating fresh ideas and greater clarity of critical perspective.

The British Academy and the Henry Moore Foundation generously agreed to fund part of the illustration costs: without their support it would not have been possible to offer anything like the same range and quality of plates. I should like to thank also Goldsmiths College and the University of Reading for granting me periods of study leave, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, for help when I was Visiting Scholar there. I am indebted to Clare Robertson at Reading for making it possible for me to complete the final editing of the book to schedule. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press. I am grateful for the care she took designing the book and seeing through its publication, and for her generous responses while I was in the final stages of working on the text.

Lastly I want to thank Rachel and Joanna for putting up with my absorption in this project over the past couple of years.

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