Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe: Seventeenth Century to Contemporary 9781501341250, 9781501341281, 9781501341274

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Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object – its medium and physicality – are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called ‘Thing Theory’, and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments) and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of Missouri, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930 Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism, 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond Simon Bliss Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers Edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe: Seventeenth Century to Contemporary Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Georges Rouault and Material Imagining Jennifer Johnson The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Afterlives of the Domain (forthcoming) Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion (forthcoming) Freya Gowrley Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design 1850–1920 (forthcoming) Edited by Claire Moran

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Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Seventeenth Century to Contemporary Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Selection and editorial matter © Imogen Hart and Claire Jones, 2020 Individual chapters © their authors, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Thirty Pieces of Silver, Cornelia Parker (1988) (© Courtesy the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hart, Imogen, editor. | Jones, Claire (Claire Bethsedia), editor. Title: Sculpture and the decorative in Britain and Europe: seventeenth century to contemporary / edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Series: Material culture of art and design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020033597 (print) | LCCN 2020033598 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501341250 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501341267 (epub) | ISBN 9781501341274 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Sculpture, European. | Sculpture–Historiography. | Decorative arts–Europe. | Decorative arts–Historiography. Classification: LCC NB454 .S38 2020 (print) | LCC NB454 (ebook) | DDC 730.94–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033597 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033598  ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4125-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4127-4  eBook: 978-1-5013-4126-7 Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements

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1 Sculpture and the decorative: Towards a more integrated mode of art history writing  Imogen Hart and Claire Jones

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2 ‘Exulting and adorning it in exuberant strains’: Music, figuration and ornamentation in Abel Schrøder’s altarpiece (Skt Morten in Næstved, Denmark)  Margit Thøfner

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3 Galathea: Ships, sculpture and the state in Golden Age Denmark  Michael Hatt

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4 An allegory of civic virtue: Sculpture and ornament in St George’s Hall, Liverpool  Katie Faulkner

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5 Sculpture and the decorative in fin-de-siècle Brussels: Women as creators and consumers  Marjan Sterckx

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6 ‘Sacred stones guarded about with dragons’: Welsh national identity in William Goscombe John’s Corn Hirlas (1898)  Melanie Polledri

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7 Sculpture and the decorative at the Scottish National War Memorial  Imogen Hart

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8 Ornament and monument in German sculpture, 1910–30: Milly Steger and Renée Sintenis  Nina Lübbren

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9 Modernist sculpture and the decorative: Henri Laurens with Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier  Anna Ferrari

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10 The decorative arts as found object: Converging domains for contemporary sculpture  Lisa Wainwright

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11 Gross domestic product: Contemporary British ceramics and the subversion of the monument  Laura Gray

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12 Fabrication and failure: Hacking the decorative in contemporary British art  Bridget O’Gorman

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Index

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List of Figures 1.1 Harry Bates (1850–99), Pandora, exhibited 1891. Marble, ivory and bronze on marble base. 106 × 54 × 78.5 cm. © Tate, London 2019  3 1.2 Jean-Charles Develly (1783–1862), Service des Arts Industriels: les sculpteurs et les garnisseurs (1823–35). Detail. Sèvres, Cité de la céramique. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique) / Martine Beck-Coppola  8 2.1 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Photo: Margit Thøfner 20 2.2 Interior view of Skt Morten, Næstved. Photo: Margit Thøfner 21 2.3 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing grotesque beneath left niche of ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’. Photo: Margit Thøfner 21 2.4 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1661, Holmens Kirke, Copenhagen. Photo: Margit Thøfner 22 2.5 Hans Brüggemann, Altarpiece, 1514–21, St-Petri-Dom, Schleswig (originally carved for the Augustinian church at Bordesholm). Photo: Frank Vincentz; Creative Commons 28 2.6 Dieterich Buxtehude, Organ part, first page (‘An filius non est Dei . . .’, cantata, BuxVW6). University Library, Uppsala 31 2.7 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Diagrammatic view indicating narrative scenes and top figure. Photo: Margit Thøfner 34 2.8 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’, flanked by Saints Matthew and John. Photo: Margit Thøfner 35 2.9 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Last Supper’. Photo: Margit Thøfner 37 2.10 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Last Supper’ (below), ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’ (above). Photo: Margit Thøfner 38

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2.11 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing grotesque above the central niche of ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’. Photo: Margit Thøfner 3.1 J. D. Petersen, Drawing of figurehead for the corvette Galathea, 1832, pencil, 9.89 × 14.72 cm. M/S Museet for Søfart, Helsingør 3.2 Christen Christensen, The Thorvaldsen Medal, 1838, silver, D 6.1 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen 3.3 Nicobarese representation of the corvette Galathea, c. 1846, wood, L 170 cm. National Museum, Copenhagen 3.4 The Alexander Room, Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen. Photo: Mikkel Grønlund 3.5 Model of figurehead for the corvette Galathea, 1832, wax, 49 × 45 cm. Tøjhusmuseet, Copenhagen 3.6 J. D. Petersen, Drawing of ornamentation for corvette ‘Galathea’, 1832, 128.5 × 33 cm. Søetatens Tegningssamling G3022. Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen 3.7 C. W. Eckersberg (design), J. D. Petersen (sculptor), Figurehead for the corvette ‘Fortuna’, 1825, wood. Krigsmuseet, Copenhagen. Photo: Thomas Quine 3.8 Franz Heinrich, Sala del Thorvaldsen, Rome, 1845, pen and brown ink, watercolour and white gouache on paper, 27.5 × 33.5 cm. Thaw Collection, Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 3.9 Stato delle Casse spedite in Danimarca dal Sig. Commendator Thorvaldsen sulla Corvetta La Galatea di S. M. Danese (detail), 1833. Thorvaldsens Museum Archive, Copenhagen, m34, nr.41 3.10 Jørgen Sonne, Frieze on Thorvaldsens Museum, 1846–50. Detail showing the figurehead of the Rota. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen. Photo: Torben Retboll 3.11 Henta board from the Nicobar Islands, n.d., areca palm spathe, 92.2 × 95.7 × 3 cm. British Museum, London 4.1 Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, St George’s Hall, Lime Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, 1841–56. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London 4.2 Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, St George’s Hall, Liverpool: the Great Hall. Photo: Katie Faulkner 4.3 Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, Contract design for St George’s Hall and the Assize Courts, Lime Street, Liverpool: interior elevation, section

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and plan of an interior, 1840, black and white drawing. Courtesy of RIBA Collections 87 George Abel Blouet, Restauration des thermes d’Antonin Caracalla (Paris: F. Didot, 1828), Plate XV. Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham 88 Charles Robert Cockerell (drawn by G. E. Goodchild), Fantasy of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, under Construction, c. 1854. National Museums Liverpool 89 Charles Robert Cockerell, The Professor’s Dream, 1848, pencil, pen and grey ink, with scratched highlights, 112 × 171 cm. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd 90 Charles Robert Cockerell, Idea for the frontispiece of a public building in England, 1843, lithograph. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd 92 After Charles Robert Cockerell and attributed to Alfred Stevens, The Sculptured Pediment of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, c. 1850, lithograph. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd 93 Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, The Great Hall, St George’s Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside, 1841–56. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London 99 Charles Robert Cockerell (architect), J. E. Goodchild (sculptor), Fortitude, 1841–56, plaster. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London 103 Armand Rassenfosse, Poster for the Brussels branch of The Fine Art and General Insurance Company Ltd, c. 1896, lithograph, Impr. Auguste Bénard, Liège. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp 114 Théo Van Rysselberghe, Poster for Le quatrième Salon de La Libre Esthétique, 1897, lithograph, Impr. Monnom, Brussels. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp 116 Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster for the annual Exhibition of the Cercle artistique de Schaerbeek, 1897, lithograph in six colours, Impr. Trommer & Staeves, Brussels.

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Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp Charles Lefébure, Maria van de Velde-Sèthe in the dining room of Villa Bloemenwerf, Ukkel, holding George Minne’s Kleine Gekwetste II (bronze, 1898), 1898–1900, photograph. Brussels, Archives et Musée de la Littérature. © AML (Archives et Musée de la Littérature) © Sabam Belgium Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster Ville de Bruxelles. Fêtes Nationales et communales de 1899, 1898–9, lithograph, Impr. O. de Rycker, Brussels. Brussels, City Archive, ASB Affiches 2035. Photo: Archief van de Stad Brussel Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster Orfèvrerie d’art Miele & Co., Brussels, 1901–2, lithograph. Private collection, Brussels. Photo: Vincent Everarts, 2019 José Dierickx, Poster for the 8th Salon of Pour l’Art (8ème exposition annuelle de peintures, sculptures et art appliqué), 1900, lithograph, Impr. Vve Monnom, Brussels. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, La Sculpture, lithograph, 1900–1, lithograph, 50 x 31.9 cm. Private collection, Brussels. Photo: Vincent Everarts, 2019 Charlotte Besnard née Dubray, Ceres or Persephone, high relief polychrome glazed stoneware produced by Emile Muller, 1895. 74 x 64 x 40 cm. In memory of John F. Paramino, Boston Sculptor. Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 1998.401. Photo © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Sophie Bürger-Hartmann, Vide-poche, c. 1899, bronze and ivory. Private collection. (Auction Artcurial, Paris, 9 October 2018, lot 50). Photo: Artcurial William Goscombe John, Corn Hirlas, 1898, silver, horn, precious gemstones, approx. 60 × 40 × 60 cm. Henry Dixon & Son Photographers. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales William Grant Murray, Gorsedd in Singleton Park, Swansea, 1926, lithograph, 23.8 × 23.8 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of Peter Lord. While this image shows a later procession in Swansea, it gives the general idea of the procession in Cardiff

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6.3 T. H. Thomas, Arlunydd Pen-y-garn, The Herald Bard’s Order of the Gorsedd of the Bards’ Circle of Stones, 1901, pen and ink on paper, dimensions unspecified. Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales 6.4 Benjamin Stone, Welsh Eisteddfod Regalia & Officers, c. 1906, Corn Hirlas centre front, black and white photograph. © Historical Images Archive/Alamy Stock Photo 6.5 William Goscombe John, Medal for the National Eisteddfod Association (top and bottom centre), modelled 1898, medal material and dimensions unspecified, unknown photographer, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museums Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales 6.6 William Goscombe John, The Elf, 1898, photographed at the St Fagans National Museum of History c. 1950, black and white photograph, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museums Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales 6.7 Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, 1877, bronze, 176.4 × 98.4 × 109.9 cm, Tate London, presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1877. © Tate, London 2019 6.8 Henry Wilson, The Chamberlain Casket, 1903, silver with gold, moon stone, wood, rock crystal and enamel, 57.1 × 49.5 × 42.5 cm, Birmingham Museums Trust, 1957 M295. Birmingham Museums Trust 7.1 Phyllis Bone, Elephant, stone. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.2 Entrance to the Shrine showing stone sculptures by Charles Pilkington Jackson. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.3 Alice Meredith Williams, detail of first left-hand panel of bronze frieze. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.4 View of the Shrine showing bronze angels by Alice Meredith Williams around the casket and Williams’s bronze frieze in the background. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK

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7.5 Alice Meredith Williams, St Michael, wood with paint and gilding. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.6 Douglas Strachan, detail of seventh stained glass window, showing parents mourning dead child. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.7 Douglas Strachan, detail of second stained glass window, showing Adam and Eve mourning Abel. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.8 Douglas Strachan, detail of fourth stained glass window, showing a pair of soldiers. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.9 Douglas Strachan, detail of battle scene in sixth stained glass window, showing disembodied limbs and severed heads. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 7.10 Douglas Strachan, detail of battle scene in seventh stained glass window, showing severed heads. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK 8.1 Milly Steger, Four Female Nudes (Vier weibliche Akte), 1911, stone. Façade, Municipal Theatre, Hagen. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg; photographer: Andreas Lechtape 2013 8.2 Milly Steger, Dancer (Tanzende), 1918, bronze. Collection Karl H. Knauf, Berlin. Photograph: G. Ladwig 8.3 Renée Sintenis, Kneeling Deer (Kniendes Reh), c. 1913, bronze. Reproduced in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 38 (1916), between pages 191 and 194. © DACS 2019 8.4 Renée Sintenis, Foal, Looking Right (Rechtsblickendes Fohlen), 1917, bronze. Collection Karl H. Knauf, Berlin. Photograph: B. Sinterhauf. © DACS 2019 8.5 Apartment of Berlin art dealer Alfred Flechteim, Bleibtreustrasse 15, Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1929. Photograph: TopFoto / Ullstein Bild; photo: Zander & Labisch

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9.1 Henri Laurens, photograph, c. 1903. Photo and copyright: Archives Laurens 9.2 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Maquette for the Maison Cubiste’s façade exhibited at the Salon d’automne, photograph, 1912. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Fonds Famille Duchamp 9.3 Robert Mallet-Stevens, Maquette for Jacques Doucet’s villa showing the entrance by Henri Laurens, photograph, 1921. © Musées de la Ville de Boulogne-Billancourt 9.4 Henri Laurens, Portico for Jacques Doucet’s villa, 1921–4. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.5 Maquette for the entrance of Jacques Doucet’s villa, showing Henri Laurens’s portico and sculpture, 1921–4. Photo Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, collections Jacques Doucet, 268 U 1. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.6 Robert Mallet-Stevens and Paul Ruaud, Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club at the Salon d’automne, 1922, showing Henri Laurens’s sculpture fused with the watchtower. Photo Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, collections Jacques Doucet, 4 Per Res 47. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.7 Henri Laurens, Relief in the hall of the Villa Noailles, Hyères, photograph by Thérèse Bonney. © The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.8 Henri Laurens, Relief in Mallet-Stevens’s hall for an ambassador’s house at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, 1925. Paris, musée des Arts décoratifs © MAD, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.9 Henri Laurens, Suspended Figure for Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, 1937 (L2-13-118-001). © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 9.10 Le Corbusier, sketch relating to the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, December 1948 (5435). © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019 10.1 Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) © ARS, NY. Object, Paris, 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, Cup 4 3/8” (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8” (23.7 cm) in diameter; spoon 8” (20.2 cm)

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long, overall height 2 7/8” (7.3 cm). Purchase. The Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Union Porcelain Works (1836–c. 1922), Cup and Saucer, 1876, porcelain, 6 x 12.7 x 12.7 cm. Sugar Bowl and Cover, c. 1876, porcelain, height 11.4 cm. Cream Pitcher, 1876, porcelain, 9.8 x 8.9 cm. Cream Pitcher, 1876, porcelain, 9.8 x 8.9 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Franklin Chace, 1968, 68.87.29a-b, 68.87.30a-b, 68.87.31, 68.87.32a-b. Photo: Brooklyn Museum. © Brooklyn Museum 2018 Fred Wilson, Metalwork exhibit from ‘Mining the Museum’, 1992–3. Silver service: pitchers, steins and goblets, Baltimore repoussé style, c. 1830–80, Iron slave shackles, c. 1793–1872. © Maryland Historical Society 2008 Fred Wilson, Love and Loss in the Milky Way, 2005. One table with forty-seven milk-glass elements, one plaster bust, one plaster head, one standing woman statue and a ceramic cookie jar. 197.5 x 233.7 x 111.4 cm. Private collection. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Gallery Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1988. Tate, Purchased with assistance from Maggi and David Gordon, 1998. Photograph by Edward Woodman. © Tate, London 2018. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Still Life with Reflection, 2004. Eleven pairs of squashed and intact silverware, metal wire. Installation at St Barts Hospital, London. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, 2007. Photograph of 1,001-chair installation in Kassel, Germany/ documenta 12. Courtesy of the artist Danh Vo (b. 1975) © Copyright. 08:43, 26.05, 2009. Late nineteenth-century chandelier, Dimensions variable. Gift of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art and the Fund for the Twenty-First Century. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

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10.9  Chris Burden (1946–2015) © ARS, NY. Urban Light, 2008. (Two-hundred and two) restored cast iron antique street lamps. 320 1/2 x 686 1/2 x 704 1/2 in. (814.07 x 1743.71 x 1789.43 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Gordon Family Foundation’s gift to ‘Transformation: The LACMA Campaign’ (M.2007.147.1-.202). Digital Image © 2019, Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY 258 10.10  Nick Cave (b. 1959), Until, 2016. Mixed medium, dimensions variable. Photo by James Prinz Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 260 10.11  Anne Wilson (b. 1949), Dispersions no. 7, detail, 2013. Thread, hair, cloth, white frame, 64.1 x 64.1 x 3.8 cm overall. Collection of Gail and Tom Hodges. Courtesy of the artist and Gail and Tom Hodges. Photo: Adam Liam Rose 262 10.12   Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970), Maximum Sensation, 2010. Plastic, metal, textile, each skateboard 12.7 x 20.3 x 80.5 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia and John and Barbara Vogelstein, 2010.67 © Mounir Fatmi. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 263 11.1  Clare Twomey, ‘Scribe’, The House of Words, Dr Johnson’s House, London, 2006. Photography – Clare Twomey Studio 276 11.2  Paul Scott, Spode Works Closed Casserole No: 2, 2009–10. Porcelain, in-glaze decal, gilding, 39.3 × 29.3 × 7.3 cm. V&A Collection, C.93-2011. Photo: V&A 279 11.3  Neil Brownsword, Factory, 2017. Courtesy of Korea Ceramic Foundation281 11.4  Stephen Dixon, The Floralists (Jeanette), 2009. Photo: Gavin Parry and Dave Penny 283 12.1  Charlie Billingham, Delft Dancer, 2016; Untitled (Plant Pots), 2017; Untitled (Wall Print), Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2017. Photograph © RBGE/Tom Nolan. Courtesy: the artist and Supportico Lopez, Berlin 290 12.2  Emma Hart, Installation detail from Dirty Looks, 2013, Camden Arts Centre, London. Glazed ceramic, wood, photography, video. Photo: Andy Keate 293

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Emma Hart, Installation detail from Spread, 2015, Art Exchange, University of Essex. Glazed ceramic, fabric. Photo: Douglas Atfield 12.4 Emma Hart, Installation of Mamma Mia, 2017, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Glazed ceramic, lighting, mixed media. Whitechapel Gallery Archive 12.5 Installation view from Alice Channer: Out of Body at the South London Gallery, 2012. Photo: Andy Keate. Image courtesy the artist and the South London Gallery 12.6 Alice Channer, Breathing, 2012. Installation view from Alice Channer: Out of Body at the South London Gallery, 2012. Photo: Andy Keate. Image courtesy the artist and the South London Gallery 12.7 Installation view Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage, 2015, Jerwood Arts, London. Courtesy the artist and Jerwood Arts, London. Photo: Anna Arca 12.8 The Grantchester Pottery, A Coffee Service, 2011. Glazed stoneware, mahogany, painted floorcloth, electrical components and fixings. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire. Photo: N. Smallbone 12.9 Image from Lookbook A/W 2015, 2014. Courtesy Olivia Hegarty and The Grantchester Tailors Guild 12.10 The Grantchester Pottery, poster image for ACID TEST, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Camden Arts Centre, London. Photo: The Grantchester Photographic Society 12.3

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List of Contributors Katie Faulkner, Visiting Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art, UK Anna Ferrari, Curator of Exhibitions, Royal Academy London, UK Laura Gray, Freelance art historian, Gibraltar Imogen Hart, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA Michael Hatt, Professor, University of Warwick, UK Claire Jones, Lecturer, University of Birmingham, UK Nina Lübbren, Principal Lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Bridget O’Gorman, Artist and researcher, UK Melanie Polledri, Curator of Art Collections Management and Access, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, UK Marjan Sterckx, Associate Professor, Ghent University, Belgium Margit Thøfner, Independent scholar and Reviews Editor, Art History, UK Lisa Wainwright, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Acknowledgements This project was developed through two key events. The first was a panel we co-chaired at the Association for Art History’s annual conference in 2016 on the theme of ‘Sculpture and the Decorative’. We would like to thank the Henry Moore Foundation for generously supporting this session with a conference grant. We are grateful to Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Martina Droth, Anna Ferrari, Angela Hesson, Conor Lucey, Nina Lübbren, Amy Ogata and Margit Thøfner for preparing and presenting such stimulating papers, several of which have been developed into essays for this volume. In 2017, generous funding from the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, enabled us to host a publication workshop with a focus on ‘Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain’. We are grateful to all the staff at the Center for British Studies who made this event possible. We would like to thank Katie Faulkner, Laura Gray, Bridget O’Gorman, Melanie Polledri and Lisa Wainwright for contributing so generously and productively to the discussion, which was pivotal to the conception and development of this book. We are indebted to the staff at Bloomsbury Academic for their faith in this project, and for guiding it so efficiently through to publication. We thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive feedback. The book has been supported by a publication grant from the Henry Moore Foundation; we thank them for enabling such a richly illustrated volume. We also wish to thank the University of Birmingham’s Personal Research Allowance for funding additional publication costs, all copyright holders for permission to reproduce images and all those who generously waived or reduced their reproduction fees. This project would not have been possible without the love and support of partners, family and friends. Claire particularly extends her thanks to Micha and her parents. Imogen would especially like to thank Stephan, Xanthe, Celeste and her parents. Finally, we wish to thank our contributors: Katie Faulkner, Anna Ferrari, Laura Gray, Michael Hatt, Nina Lübbren, Bridget O’Gorman, Melanie Polledri, Marjan Sterckx, Margit Thøfner and Lisa Wainwright. There is perhaps something inherently collaborative about this endeavour. The entire project has

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been a joyful experience for us, and has reinforced the value of working within a broad community of researchers – including artists, academics, curators and independent scholars – to develop new ways of thinking about objects, and we are grateful to all those involved for their warmth, good humour and commitment. Imogen Hart and Claire Jones

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Sculpture and the decorative Towards a more integrated mode of art history writing Imogen Hart and Claire Jones

This collection asks us to consider what an art history that works across object categories and artistic disciplines might look like. It focuses on the intersection of sculpture and the decorative, but its argument is pertinent to art history more broadly. In providing an opportunity for two apparently separate areas of making – one ‘high’, one ‘low’ – to shed light on one another, and for their respective fields of scholarship to interweave, the volume will, we hope, offer a model for a more integrated mode of art history writing that embraces the complex multivalence of objects. Foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative not only demands a reassessment of the ways in which the two fields have been defined and separated but also expands the scope of art-historical practice to incorporate hitherto neglected objects deemed too decorative for the study of sculpture or too sculptural for the study of the decorative. Bringing to centre stage objects, makers and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse, the volume challenges the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative aims to make two distinct contributions to the scholarship. First, it considers sculpture and the decorative arts together, prioritizing neither, in contrast to the main literature on sculpture and on decorative art, each of which usually refers to the other only in passing or as a detour. And although sculpture appears first in our title, we are not only concerned with expanding approaches to sculpture through the lens of the decorative but also committed to exploring how the sculptural sheds light on the decorative. Claire Jones has argued elsewhere that ‘the history of sculpture

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must make room for the decorative arts’, and here we add the demand that the history of the decorative arts must make room for sculpture.1 Second, the volume analyses critically the theoretical issues at stake in examining the relationship between sculpture and the decorative, from both historic and present-day perspectives. Our contributors consider how the criticism and histories of sculpture and the decorative have been written. As Grace Lees-Maffei and Linda Sandino have stated elsewhere, to understand the relationship between the fine and decorative arts we need to consider not only ‘the artefacts themselves as hybrid practice’ but also ‘the reception of those artefacts’.2 Our contributors chart the ways in which the terminology and concepts associated with sculpture and the decorative have been employed and negotiated by practitioners, critics, audiences and historians in different contexts. Most importantly, they explore why these categories have been constructed, promoted, contested and dismantled, helping us to understand the various agendas that the shifting relationships between sculpture and the decorative expose and serve to support. ‘Decorative’ is not simply a descriptive term; it is an evaluative one, often with negative associations. As Julia Kelly puts it, ‘To be “decorative” is to be instantly marginalized as not serious: a luxury or indulgence rather than an integral part of society’s cultural, economic or political functions and processes.’3 This volume sets out to challenge such assumptions. *** The interrelationship of sculpture and the decorative is predicated on a hierarchical imbalance. In most art academies, sculpture is a member of the hallowed trinity designated the ‘fine arts’, alongside painting and architecture. The ‘decorative arts’ is a fourth, outsider category, encompassing all the arts that are not ‘fine’.4 As one of the ‘fine’ arts, therefore, sculpture’s artistic value is conventionally held to be higher than that of the decorative arts. Sculpture, in turn, has often been considered inferior to painting and architecture.5 As the late Benedict Read observed, ‘Histories of the Royal Academy [London], particularly the more recent, have been remarkably silent about the role of sculpture.’6 The need to assert sculpture’s fine art status, even within the academic triumvirate, may partly explain why sculptors and sculpture studies have downplayed sculpture’s relationship with the decorative.7 The term ‘sculpture’ is singular, implying a unifying essence that all objects deemed to be sculpture share, whereas the ‘decorative arts’ are multiple and diverse, while also retaining a somewhat

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undefined commonality. Sculpture is therefore a more selective category. Despite the fact that as a term it has proved itself extraordinarily flexible, spreading into an ‘expanded field’ in the late twentieth century, its structural integrity as an organizing concept and its perceived value as a label that tells us something about an object remain secure.8 ‘Is it sculpture?’ remains a valid question. An object’s questionable status as sculpture usually arises from its association with elements more commonly connected to the decorative.9 Such problematically decorative aspects of sculpture include polychromy (as opposed to white marble), the small scale of the statuette (as opposed to life-size or monumental figures) and the integration of multiple materials, as, for example, in the ivory and bronze casket Harry Bates crafted for his marble figure of Pandora (Figure 1.1).10 It is much more difficult to imagine an animated discussion over whether an object should be admitted to the category of the ‘decorative arts’, which is inherently more imprecise and inclusive. Historically, the decorative arts have been most frequently defined in opposition to the fine arts, as practices and

Figure 1.1  Harry Bates (1850–99), Pandora, exhibited 1891. Marble, ivory and bronze on marble base. 106 × 54 × 78.5 cm. © Tate, London 2019.

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objects that do not meet the latter’s elevated criteria, rather than as holding any specifically determined qualities.11 The decorative eludes definition, but the term is often used as though its meaning were self-evident. Its ambiguity is further intensified by the fact that the adjective ‘decorative’ can also be applied to a work of fine art – a ‘decorative sculpture’ or a ‘decorative painting’. The label ‘decorative’ is thus unstable. It is often employed when a sculpture or painting is designed for or placed in the context of another object, as in fine art sculpture reduced in scale to form part of a clock garniture or a history painting repainted on a commemorative vase. It can also refer to a work’s relationship with the built environment. As Alex Potts points out, sculpture has often been ‘installed more decoratively’ than painting, pointing to the potential of the context of display to frame an object or group of objects as decorative.12 Because sculpture and decorative art have such a strong conceptual and physical relationship with the spaces in which they are displayed, many of our contributors focus their attention on specific locations in which sculpture and the decorative have come together. While some of the objects discussed were made with an exhibition or museum context in mind, others were produced to fulfil the particular functional and symbolic requirements of their makers, patrons and viewers in a range of settings, from ships to spaces of civic ritual, worship and commemoration. Another common meaning of the term ‘decorative’ is the characteristic of being formally elaborate. These two meanings often coincide. Statuettes, as Martina Droth notes, ‘fall somewhere between the two’.13 Other more canonical objects share this condition of double decorativeness; for instance, most of the examples in Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany are both incorporated within architectural schemes and visually intricate.14 In addition, the term ‘decorative’ can refer to objects with a function, such as urns, some of which might be also described as sculpture, whether because they feature a sculpted figure, because the treatment of the material is strikingly sculptural, or because they are associated with a specific sculptor. An important element of the relationship between sculpture and the decorative is their often-shared three-dimensionality. Because of this, both sculpture and many of the objects grouped together under ‘the decorative arts’ resist being understood as an ‘image’ in the ways that painting has been, and both are as much bound up with material culture as with visual culture. Margit Thøfner engages with this issue in Chapter 2, arguing that ‘the category “visual culture” is simply not sufficient for understanding Lutheran sculpture. It must

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be expanded to encompass the spatial and the sonic.’ Her study of a seventeenthcentury Danish altarpiece reveals the interplay between sculpture and music and challenges the hierarchy of figuration and ornament. Thøfner draws a fascinating parallel between sculpted biblical narrative and musical melody, both of which are animated by an ‘exuberantly rich ornamental framework’ – the carved decoration of the altarpiece and the polyphonic setting. Thøfner shows how the decorative context – a liturgical, multisensory environment – invests the decorative forms of this sculpture – its ornamental passages – with rich meaning. Far from being merely superficial, the decorative is an integral part of the sculpture. Thøfner’s chapter exemplifies our contributors’ shared commitment to exploring the conceptual complexity of the decorative. Bearing the diverse meanings of ‘sculpture’ and the ‘decorative’ in mind, this book proposes that they be understood not as two distinct fields that have much in common but rather as two overlapping, malleable concepts.15 We are aware that this is a polemical position that some readers may object to – those, for example, who are invested in sculpture as a discrete realm of practice, or those for whom craft represents a position from which to critique the art world.16 We certainly do not advocate collapsing sculpture and the decorative together and acknowledge that there are situations (historical and current) when sculpture and the decorative might be productively understood as separate categories. Nevertheless, we persist in asserting that there is no rigid distinction between sculpture and the decorative. As we hope this book will demonstrate, both historically and in contemporary practice cross-fertilizations between sculpture and the decorative have played a vital role in processes of production and conditions of display, bringing sculptors into contact with diverse makers, materials, techniques, forms, colours, ornament, scales, styles, patrons, audiences and subject matter. *** Chronologically, the book begins in the mid-seventeenth century with Margit Thøfner’s chapter, continues with seven chapters on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with three chapters focused on contemporary practice. That is not to say that the eighteenth century is entirely absent. An important source of inspiration for the project was the exhibition Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Leeds and Los Angeles, 2008–9), curated by Martina Droth, which invited visitors to consider the sculptural qualities of

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French and English baroque and rococo furniture and related objects. Sculpture and the Decorative shares with Taking Shape the aim of recognizing when sculpture is ‘performing decoratively’ and decorative art’s potential to ‘assert sculptural presence’.17 As Lisa Wainwright demonstrates in Chapter 10, the types of decorative objects appropriated by contemporary sculptors as found objects often have strong associations with the rococo and the neoclassical. More importantly the foundations for the relationship between sculpture and the decorative in the modern period were laid in the eighteenth century. Take, for example, the Royal Academy London (RA), founded in 1768. The number of academicians working in each discipline was limited through predetermined quotas; even today there are more painters than sculptors, architects and printmakers combined. Furthermore, Alison Yarrington has argued that the ways in which sculpture was displayed at the RA reflected and shaped sculpture’s status as an artistic medium in Britain. This manifested itself particularly clearly at the RA’s annual Summer Exhibition, in which the galleries devoted to painting were large, elegant and well lit, while sculpture was relegated to a dark basement, viewed, if at all, by visitors and critics on their way out.18 Decorative art was firmly rejected by the RA, a situation that was particularly limiting for sculpture. The 1795 rules note that ‘No picture, model, or design, that has gained a premium, no needle-work, artificial flowers, cut paper, shellwork, models in coloured wax, or any such performances, shall be admitted in the Exhibition’.19 Previously, small waxes, medallions and intaglios had been permitted in the painting galleries (contemporary images show them hung around the fireplace) yet the new rules, by only permitting white wax, clearly restricted sculpture to classical white marble and its equivalents. Diverse sculptural media, as well as polychrome sculpture, were thus officially excluded and discouraged from the realm of British art.20 As Glenn Adamson notes, ‘One must understand how different forms of hierarchy have been erected, and how different types of interaction, hybridization, and mobility have developed in response.’21 Institutions influence the types of objects and makers included in the canon, which practices are developed through teaching curriculums, what determines ‘success’ and how it is rewarded. In Chapter 6 Melanie Polledri reveals that even at the turn of the twentieth century, critics at the RA were still hostile towards sculpture that appeared too decorative. Indeed, it was partly as a reaction against the RA’s restrictive policies that the Arts and Crafts movement developed in the late nineteenth century.22 Former president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society Walter Crane demanded

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in 1892 that the hierarchy between the ‘fine’ and ‘minor’ arts be dismantled altogether, observing that ‘in times past [sculpture] has been the noblest and most expressive of all the decorative arts’.23 The Arts and Crafts movement brought sculpture conceptually, materially and practically into close contact with the decorative through its focus on issues of craftsmanship, collaborative production processes and the status of the object as artwork, and many practitioners were actively involved in both fields of making.24 Britain is to some extent an anomaly, however. In Continental Europe and the United States, the status of the decorative arts has arguably always been higher. This is evident in the royal then state-funded French manufactories such as Sèvres (ceramics), for which the academic sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet was appointed director of the sculpture atelier in 1757, beginning a long line of sculptors’ collaborations and appointments with the factory, including Auguste Rodin’s (Figure 1.2).25 The transference of the royal collections to national museums, notably the Louvre, has also sustained a much more expansive understanding of the arts, in which sculpture is present throughout, from the building’s fabric to furniture mounts, imperial insignia and monumental vases. Such differences in national institutional approaches call for an art history that not only works across artistic categories but also crosses national boundaries, prompting questions regarding seemingly established, familiar practices.26 A significant setting in which the transnational histories of sculpture and the decorative converge is the international exhibition, the first of which took place in London in 1851, known as the Great Exhibition. Painting was excluded as a category, while sculpture was foregrounded as a valuable aid to manufacturers. Of the 100,000 objects displayed by over 15,000 contributors, sculpture was one of the exhibition’s most prominent features. It was presented throughout the building, as free-standing sculpture or integrated within myriad objects, from sideboards to coffee pots. Following the success of the Great Exhibition, sculpture and the decorative continued to be implicated in discourses surrounding craft and industry, as Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt demonstrated in their groundbreaking exhibition Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London, 2014–15), the first major exhibition survey of Victorian sculpture.27 This show, instead of presenting a procession of marble and bronze statues, returned marble and bronze to their historically accurate location alongside other sculptural media – ivory, silver, plaster, alabaster, Parian, wood, ceramic, glass, electrotype, iron, gold, paper, leather and shell. Such an inclusive definition emphasized sculpture’s malleability and ubiquity in

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Figure 1.2  Jean-Charles Develly (1783–1862), Service des Arts Industriels: les sculpteurs et les garnisseurs (1823–35). Detail. Sèvres, Cité de la céramique. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Sèvres, Cité de la céramique) / Martine Beck-Coppola.

the Victorian period, from royal monuments and glass busts to bronze medals, ceramic table centrepieces and cameo jewellery. By circumventing conventional art-historical boundaries, the curators made visible the historical and material importance of the decorative to sculptural experimentation.28 A 2-metre-tall ceramic elephant was the cover image of the Sculpture Victorious exhibition catalogue, produced in Minton’s majolica. Some of the

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most innovative artistic, curatorial and academic experiments in thinking across sculpture and the decorative have taken place in the field of ceramics.29 A recent exhibition on the Ginori (formerly Doccia) porcelain manufactory at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, for example, foregrounded the ways in which sculpture and ceramics intersect through the recreation of canonical marble sculptures. Examples include a 132-centimetre-high, glazed-porcelain Venus de Medici (c. 1747–8), in which the addition of arm bracelets, a neck band and drapery reveals the sectional nature of ceramic sculpture, which is so often erased in smaller Parian and porcelain figurines. The connecting parts seem only to enhance rather than to diminish the ambitions of the manufactory in pushing the boundaries and possibilities of ceramics through free-standing figurative sculpture. Here, ceramic might be read as a challenge to marble as the medium of sculpture, rather than its imitation. Indeed, ceramic manufactories of the eighteenth century onwards were not averse to improving on classical sculptures by injecting them with colour and new functions. Sculpture’s relationship with ceramics draws attention to the contested issue of colour in sculpture. The scholarship on polychromy has developed over recent years, most notably with the exhibition The Colour of Sculpture, 1840–1910, but it has tended to focus on nineteenth-century debates surrounding ancient Greek practice, on related challenges to ideal sculpture, and on questions of mimesis and realism.30 Much less attention has been given to the thousands of polychrome ceramic figurines made by the likes of Meissen and Staffordshire makers, which represent both new compositions and adaptations of classical and contemporary sculpture, or to the coloured and composite objects proliferating in religious spaces, from statues of biblical figures and saints to reliquaries and reredos.31 The many polychromatic objects and interiors discussed in this volume highlight one of the challenges that the decorative poses to traditional concepts of what sculpture is. For example, in Chapter 6 Melanie Polledri analyses the Corn Hirlas (1898), a ceremonial object composed of multiple materials including horn, silver and gemstones, while in Chapter 7 Imogen Hart considers the diverse forms of sculpturality in the Scottish National War Memorial (SNWM) (1927), from stone and bronze reliefs to a painted wooden sculpture and stained glass windows. It is hoped that this collection of essays will prompt questions as to what is usually included in – and excluded from – the canon, and invite further consideration of the ideologies and concepts that dominant narratives support. ***

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The volume’s focus, for the most part, on the nineteenth century onwards, coincides with the period in which, according to Potts, a ‘distinctly modern sculptural imaginary’ emerged from conditions including the development of ‘public exhibitions and . . . art galleries’, which ‘formed a context where works of art were presented to be viewed as relatively autonomous entities’.32 It was thus partly on account of the museum’s enshrining of a separate category called art that a definition of the decorative began to take shape. In addition, the decontextualization of objects by the museum, combined with the ways in which this supported an expectation of an art object’s autonomy, has had serious consequences for sculpture and for the decorative, whose interaction with an environment is so important. As Michael Hatt has observed elsewhere with reference to Leighton House, ‘rather than an environment that frames and clarifies the sculpture, allowing it to be seen pictorially, the Hall of Narcissus emphasizes the spatial immersion of object and viewer in a mass of visual effects.’33 Accustomed as we are in the twenty-first century to the ‘white cube’ approach to display in art museums and galleries, such a ‘mass of visual effects’ can be overwhelming. On the other hand, the decorative setting restores the collaborative, functional and contingent aspects of sculpture. Instead of seeing these characteristics as somehow threatening to sculpture’s art status, we can choose to embrace them as offering a context with a different kind of conceptual richness and visual complexity.34 In Chapter 4, Katie Faulkner’s close reading of the interior of St George’s Hall in Liverpool (1854) reveals a ‘carefully layered transhistorical construct of architecture, sculpture and decoration’. Layering is a useful concept for approaching such densely sculptural and decorative schemes, allowing for a consideration of all of the individual elements (irrespective of function, material, category or ‘status’) as well as their interrelationships. Taking seriously the decorative ensemble as a whole implicates the effect of display – as well as production – on its reception.35 According to one Victorian sculptor, ‘it requires even more attention to place a work of sculpture than it does to execute it, and certainly, as far as the effect goes, the position is at least as important as the execution.’36 The same argument can be made for decorative art. This book explores some of the legacies of the pre-twentieth century partnerships between sculpture and the decorative and the backlash that marked the production and criticism of subsequent decades. Modernism, with its binary and elitist approach to art and its histories, was instrumental in creating mainstream art-historical narratives which would suggest that sculpture and the decorative moved decisively away from one another.37 This is associated with

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the devaluation of the decorative by the likes of Adolf Loos, and the importance placed on architecture and the architect-controlled exterior and interior scheme. In Chapter 9 Anna Ferrari investigates how the Parisian sculptor Henri Laurens negotiated these Modernist debates surrounding the decorative, which acquired pejorative connotations between the 1890s and 1920s. She demonstrates how Laurens’s approach to sculpture shifted away from the decorative through the influence of contemporary critics, including Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. This process was reinforced by Laurens’s working relationships with the architects Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier, through which he reframed – or subsumed – sculpture further, as sculpture was ‘re-envisioned’ as ‘“architectural” rather than decorative’. High Modernism’s hostility to the decorative is highlighted by Rosalind Krauss’s assertion that ‘ceramics speaks for that branch of culture which is too homey, too functional, too archaic, for the name of “sculpture” to extend to it’.38 However, as recent scholars have pointed out, even within the discourses of Modernism, both the decorative and the domestic have sometimes been considered radical or avant-garde.39 Lisa Wainwright examines this history in Chapter 10, demonstrating how since the early twentieth century artists have appropriated the decorative into their art practice. Wainwright argues that with the advent of postmodern theory ‘a closer scrutiny of the range of objects and images that perform diverse cultural meanings in society was underway, and it was at this moment that certain decorative art objects became valuable allies in unpacking distinctive social and cultural beliefs’.40 Contemporary sculptors have thus exploited what Krauss termed the ‘homey’ and ‘functional’ aspects of the decorative, reframing decorative ‘found objects’ to reveal the power relations they symbolize, thereby making ideologies visible. As Wainwright explains, for artists including Fred Wilson and Ai Weiwei, ceramics, furniture and silverware are tools for ‘exposing cultural beliefs’. Wainwright cites the important scholarship of Adrienne L. Childs, whose work on ornamental blackness in early Meissen porcelain has revealed how ‘seemingly benign decorative objects . . . embody the complexities of race, slavery, and representation in European material culture of the eighteenth century’.41 ‘Function’ can be ideological as well as practical. Most of the book’s case studies are drawn from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and thus are overshadowed by the powerful narratives of (anti-domestic and anti-decorative) Modernism, which emerge clearly in Anna Ferrari’s chapter, but the longer history of art, represented here by Margit Thøfner’s chapter, is an important reminder of the ways in which attitudes

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to both the decorative and the interior, be it institutional or domestic, have shifted in meaning over time. After all, small bronzes were displayed in Italian Renaissance homes without encountering any loss of artistic status.42 Yet these debates serve as a reminder that as a context for artistic display, the domestic interior has been subject to many criticisms. We hope that by emphasizing the blurred boundaries between the so-called fine and decorative arts the volume will contribute to current scholarly debates about art history’s treatment of the domestic interior, the porosity between the public and private spheres, and particularly the gendering of both.43 In Chapters 5 and 8 Marjan Sterckx and Nina Lübbren discuss the complicated mixture of opportunity and limitation that the decorative represented for women sculptors. Lübbren’s chapter focuses on the gendering of scale through contrasting studies of monumental architectural figures for the exterior of a public theatre and animalier figurines for the domestic interior. Sterckx addresses the binary of amateur and professional for women sculptors, and the representation of women as subjects, consumers and makers of sculpture in Belgian poster designs of the fin de siècle. Indeed, it is partly the capacity of the decorative to move between spaces private and public, domestic and institutional, that makes it so politically effective. Through a study of a ship’s figurehead, a medal, a sculpted frieze and a model ship, Michael Hatt articulates in Chapter 3 how the decorative enables sculpture to enter different conceptual and physical spaces, in which ‘sculpture’s relationship to the decorative was fundamental to its ideological force’. Hatt explores the theme of ‘mobility’, a productive concept that encompasses multiple aspects of the relationship between sculpture and the decorative: reproduction or translation between media, the physical movement of objects around the globe and the adaptability of objects to different institutional contexts. Several of our contributors expose the political dimensions of sculpture through its association with the decorative in objects and spaces that represent the interests of a community, whether an empire (as in Golden Age Denmark in Michael Hatt’s chapter), a nation (Wales in Melanie Polledri’s chapter or Scotland in Imogen Hart’s) or a city (Liverpool in Katie Faulkner’s chapter or Hagen in Lübbren’s). In Chapter 11 Laura Gray addresses the commemorative history of sculpture from a different point of view in her analysis of the counter-monument in contemporary ceramic practice, exploring the domestic as a space of ‘defiance’ for artists working between sculpture and ceramics. Bridget O’Gorman discusses artists’ exploitation of the democratic and feminist implications of decorative objects and their association with domesticity in Chapter 12.

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This volume builds on recent groundbreaking scholarship in sculpture studies, decorative art and the relationship between the two. A resurgence of scholarly interest in the status of the decorative within art history is suggested by a number of articles dedicated to the decorative arts in art history journals.44 Recent publications in the field of sculpture studies also indicate a willingness to test the boundaries of sculpture.45 Encouraged by signs that the decorative is staging a comeback in artistic, academic and curatorial practice, we nevertheless remain aware that, as Christina Anderson and Catherine Futter observed in 2014, there is ‘still a hierarchy in place within the discipline [of art history] that disadvantage[s] the study of the decorative, as opposed to the fine, arts’.46 In the same year Glenn Adamson pointed out, ‘It is easy to assert egalitarianism among various artistic media; much more difficult to achieve equal access, due recognition, and adequate support within the creative industries or the academic sector.’47 We propose that in order to dismantle the hierarchy and pave the way for a more meaningful egalitarianism, art history must not simply embrace the decorative arts as an adjunct category but challenge the assumptions on which the boundaries between artistic categories are founded. Sculpture and the Decorative addresses affinities between sculpture and the decorative in a range of diverse contexts from 1667 to the present day and explores connections between the institutional, biographical, conceptual, visual, material and professional histories of the two fields. In the process, it engages with questions including artistic autonomy and creativity; the fragment and the composite work; figuration and relief; success and failure; the hierarchy of the arts; authorship, originality and reproduction; and the languages and histories of making and materials. As our title indicates, the volume addresses these questions through a focus on Europe, with a particular emphasis on Britain (including chapters on Wales and Scotland), although Lisa Wainwright’s chapter expands the discussion beyond Europe, discussing American, Moroccan and Chinese artists among others. We hope that this book will inspire future experiments in troubling the boundaries between sculpture and the decorative, and between other artistic categories, in the pursuit of a less hierarchical, and more open-minded, art history.

Notes 1 Claire Jones, ‘Introduction: The False Separation of Fine and Decorative Sculpture: Problems with the Rodin Scholarship for the Study of French Sculpture, 1848–1895’,

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2 3 4 5 6

7

8

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10 11 12 13 14 15

Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Sculpture and Design Reform in France 1848–1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1–15, 2. Grace Lees-Maffei and Linda Sandino, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between Design, Craft and Art’, Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 207–20, 209. Julia Kelly, ‘Introduction: Sculpture and the Sea’, Sculpture Journal 24, no. 2 (2015): 135–9, 135. See Lewis F. Day, Every-Day Art: Short Essays on the Arts Not Fine (London: B. T. Batsford, 1882). See Richard J. Williams, ‘Sculpture’s Anxieties’, Sculpture Journal 8 (2002): 4–11. Benedict Read, ‘Victorian and Modern Sculptors’, in Robin Simon and MaryAnne Stevens, eds, The Royal Academy of Arts, History and Collections (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 212–47, 212. See S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 147–8. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979), in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276–90. Krauss examines the intersection of sculpture, architecture and landscape art. Karina Turr, for example, describes Alfred Gilbert’s statuettes as ‘too subordinate to the decorative ornament . . . to be able to exist as free-standing sculptures in their own right’. Quoted in Martina Droth, ‘Small Sculpture c. 1900: The “New Statuette” in English Sculptural Aesthetics’, in David Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), 141–67, 151. See also Suzanne MacLeod, ‘Out of Time and Place’, in Christopher R. Marshall, ed., Sculpture and the Museum (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 153–76, 159. See David J. Getsy, ‘Privileging the Object of Sculpture: Actuality and Harry Bates’s Pandora of 1890’, Art History 28, no. 1 (February 2005): 74–95. See Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 2. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2. Droth, ‘Small Sculpture c. 1900’, 151. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). For recent art-historical discussions of the terms ‘decorative’ and ‘decorative arts’, see Glenn Adamson, ‘Introduction’, RIHA Journal 0083, special issue ‘When Art History Meets Design History’ (27 March 2014), 14; Christina M. Anderson and Catherine L. Futter, ‘The Decorative Arts Within Art Historical Discourse: Where

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is the Dialogue Now and Where is it Heading?’ Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014): 1–9, 1; and Deborah L. Krohn, ‘Beyond Terminology, or, the Limits of “Decorative Arts”’, Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014): 1–13, 5. 16 See Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), especially the introduction. 17 Martina Droth, ‘Introduction’, Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute and Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009), 4. 18 Alison Yarrington, ‘Art in the Dark: Viewing and Exhibiting Sculpture at Somerset House’, in David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1935 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 173–87. 19 Royal Academy. Laws and Regulations for the Students. Rules and Orders of the Schools and Library. And for the Exhibition (London: Royal Academy of Arts (1795)), 11. 20 There was also a rule that prohibited copies, which was particularly injurious to sculpture, since it overlooked the processes of translation and reproduction that are fundamental to the production of sculpture, and failed to take account of the variation between versions in different mediums, at different scales and for different purposes. 21 Glenn Adamson, Introduction, ‘When Art History Meets Design History’, 4. 22 Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects, chapter 4. 23 Walter Crane, The Claims of Decorative Art (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1892), 31. 24 See Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, 139–68; Martina Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851–1900’, Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 221–35; and Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt, eds, Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 25 On Rodin at Sèvres, see François Blanchetière and William Saade, eds, Rodin, les Arts décoratifs (Paris: Musée Rodin, 2009) and Jones, Sculpture and Design Reform in France, chapter 2. 26 Krohn, ‘Beyond Terminology’, 1. 27 See Droth et al., ‘Introduction’, Sculpture Victorious, especially 18 and 25. 28 Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, especially 18, 26 and 30. 29 See Laura Gray, Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture: Monuments, Multiples, Destruction and Display (London: Routledge, 2017); Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, chapter 2; and the interventions of Hew Locke and Matt Smith with Victorian sculpture: Hew Locke: Here’s the Thing, exh. cat.

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(Ikon, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Colby College Museum of Art, 2019–20) and Flux: Parian Unpacked, exh. cat. (The Fitzwilliam Museum, 2018). 30 Andreas Blühm et al., The Colour of Sculpture, 1840–1910, exh. cat. (Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh and Henry Moore Institute Leeds, 1996). Luke Syson, Sheena Wagstaff, Emerson Bowyer and Brinda Kumar, eds, Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018). 31 Xavier Bray, ed., The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700, exh. cat. (National Gallery, London, 2009, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2010). 32 Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 1. 33 Michael Hatt, ‘In Search of Lost Time: Greek Sculpture and Display in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Art History 36, no. 4 (September 2013): 768–83, 781. 34 See Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart, ‘The Victorian Interior: A Collaborative, Eclectic Introduction’, in Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart, eds, Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1–24. 35 See Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects. 36 E. Roscoe Mullins, ‘Sculpture as Applied to Internal Decoration’, Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, 1890, 51. 37 See Tag Gronberg, ‘Décoration: Modernism’s “Other”’, Art History 15, no. 4 (December 1992): 547–52 and Elissa Auther, ‘The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg’, Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 339–64. 38 Rosalind Krauss, John Mason: Installations from the Hudson River Series: An Exhibition (Yonkers, NY: The Museum, 1978), 13, quoted in Adamson, Thinking through Craft, 47. 39 See, for example, Robert Burstow, ‘“Sculpture in the Home”: Selling Modernism to Post-War British Homemakers’, Sculpture Journal 17, no. 2 (2008): 37–50. 40 The advent of material cultural studies in general also played a role in the return of the decorative arts as an area of study. See Krohn, ‘Beyond Terminology’. 41 Adrienne L. Childs, ‘Sugar Boxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain’, in Alden Cavanagh and Michael E. Yonan, eds, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (London and New York: Routledge, 2016; 2010), 159–77, 159. 42 Dora Thornton, ‘The Status and Display of Small Bronzes in the Italian Renaissance Interior’, Sculpture Journal 5 (2001): 33–41. 43 See Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Hilde Heynen and

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44

45

46 47

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Gülsüm Baydar, eds, Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Sandra Anfoldy and Janice Helland, eds, Craft, Space and Interior Design, 1855–2005 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008); and Edwards and Hart, eds, Rethinking the Interior. ‘When Art History Meets Design History’; Lees-Maffei and Sandino, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between Design, Craft and Art’. See also a group of articles in the Journal of Art Historiography, introduced in Anderson and Futter, ‘The Decorative Arts within Art Historical Discourse’. Katie Faulkner and Ayla Lepine, eds, special issue on sculpture and architecture, Sculpture Journal 25, no. 3 (2016); Jon Wood, ed., special issue on sculpture and craft, Journal of Modern Craft 3, no. 3 (2010). Anderson and Futter, ‘The Decorative Arts within Art Historical Discourse’, 1. Adamson, ‘When Art History Meets Design History’, 5.

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‘Exulting and adorning it in exuberant strains’ Music, figuration and ornamentation in Abel Schrøder’s altarpiece (Skt Morten in Næstved, Denmark) Margit Thøfner

Abel Schrøder was unusual, perhaps even unique, in serving in two distinct capacities within an early modern Lutheran parish church. At Skt Morten (or St Martin’s) in Næstved, a market town and minor port in eastern Denmark, he was both the organist and the sculptor of the main altarpiece (Figure 2.1). Born around 1602, Schrøder headed a large and active woodcarving workshop for nearly all his adult life and, from 1634 until his death in 1676, he also gave regular musical support to worship at Skt Morten.1 The altarpiece for Skt Morten has always been in bare oak, unpainted.2 It is around 7 metres tall and 4 metres wide, a looming presence in the church, a brown mass against tall gothic windows, its sheer solidity one reason for its monumental effect (Figure 2.2). But there is also the ornamental framework, an astonishing flow of architectural, organic and even whimsical detail (see, for example, Figure 2.3). This framework forms a substantial part of the work, roughly one half of the whole, while the other half comprises eleven narrative scenes and fifteen individual figures of varying sizes, the largest about halflength and the smallest around a quarter. This altarpiece, then, is an open challenge to anyone interested in how ornamentation and figuration, decoration and narrative, might all work together in one sculpture. How have the various parts been integrated physically and conceptually into a greater whole? Before beginning to answer this, a few preliminary points should be made. Schrøder was a prolific woodcarver and, on a general level, his numerous altarpieces and other ecclesiastical works fit within a much broader early

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Figure 2.1 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

modern tradition of elaborate Lutheran sculpture.3 But, at least in Denmark, the vast majority of these works were polychromed; there was an enduring predilection for colour inherited from the medieval period, which in turn fed into a more general Lutheran taste for richly decorated church furnishings.4 Indeed, Schrøder seems to have left only two altarpieces wholly in bare oak, one in Skt Morten (Figure 2.1) and the other slightly earlier work in Holmens Kirke

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Figure 2.2  Interior view of Skt Morten, Næstved. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

Figure 2.3 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing grotesque beneath left niche of ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

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Figure 2.4 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1661, Holmens Kirke, Copenhagen. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

in Copenhagen (Figure 2.4).5 That this was intentional becomes evident if one compares their fine detailing with the much rougher finish in works by Schrøder that have later been stripped of their original polychromy (these less finished pieces were probably faster and hence cheaper to produce).6 So Schrøder’s two unpainted works were clearly meant to stand out, emphatically to be carvings, not supports or frames for painting. As this essay proposes, in many ways they are sculptures about sculpting. It is important to note here that the study of early modern Lutheran artworks is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the Anglophone world. Until quite recently, there was a stubborn if erroneous assumption that all forms of early modern Protestantism were religions of the ‘Word’ and thus iconoclastic or at least antithetical to imagery.7 Fortunately, several recent scholarly volumes have demonstrated that this was not so.8 Early modern Lutherans across Germany and Scandinavia positively embraced art, both in their homes and their parish churches. Yet, with some honourable exceptions, these works still tend to be

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studied as if they are historical documents, to be decoded for what they divulge about Lutheran habits, attitudes and identities.9 This kind of analysis remains focused primarily on narrative content and iconography, rather than on visual or sculptural forms. If addressed at all, ornamentation like that on the Skt Morten altarpiece tends to be dismissed with a style-label like ‘auricular baroque’, or explained away as merely subordinate to function, or else as a fashionable Italian import and, by extension, a marker of status.10 All of this may be broadly true yet it does not adequately account for complex and richly ornamental Lutheran sculptures like the Skt Morten altarpiece. Part of the problem is that such sculptures tend to be treated as if they are pictures, not three-dimensional objects, and certainly not as sculptures about sculpting.11 As a consequence, the role of the often considerable ornamental framework remains firmly subordinate to the narrative or other imagery that they surround. This is problematic given that, in most Lutheran parish churches, the majority of early modern artworks are richly sculptural.12 As this essay shows, they are as much spatial as they are visual, and, as such, appeal to the whole body, not just to the eyes. This is a quality that they share with music, which in live performance is a great deal more than an appeal to the ears. More broadly, then, my point is that the category ‘visual culture’ is simply not sufficient for understanding Lutheran sculpture. It must be expanded to encompass the spatial and the sonic.13 From this follows a third preliminary point: as a church organist, Schrøder was part of a well-established tradition of performing and listening to music in church, a set of habits also inherited from the Middle Ages.14 Music of some complexity was a general feature of early modern Lutheran worship, even in medium-sized urban churches like Skt Morten in Næstved. Like many such towns, Næstved had a Latin school for boys.15 Both before and after the Reformation, the standard curriculum for this type of school involved polyphonic singing – defined at its most basic as two or more distinct melodies performed simultaneously to form a harmonic whole – so that the boys could perform in worship and, it was hoped, as they reached adulthood.16 The rich Lutheran musical tradition that grew from this is perhaps best known through its late flowering in the works of Johan Sebastian Bach, but it dates back to the earliest Lutheran churches and includes composers like Johann Walter, Heinrich Schütz, Michael Praetorius and Dieterich Buxtehude, as well as Georg Philipp Telemann and Georg Friedrich Händel. As a professional church musician, Schrøder was one modest voice within a grander chorus. The present essay seeks to honour this, using the Lutheran tradition of church music to explore the

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relationships between figuration and ornamentation in the remarkable sculpture that he carved for his parish church.

Carver and musician First and foremost, Schrøder was a woodworker. He was born into the trade, the youngest child of a well-established Næstved master-carver, Abel Schrøder senior, and his wife Maren Abels. In 1602 Schrøder senior died in a plague epidemic together with his main journeyman. Accordingly, Schrøder junior was trained by his older brother Eiler under the supervision of his mother, who now ran the workshop. In the two years after her husband’s death, when she was also dealing with her new baby Abel, she oversaw the completion and delivery of a royal commission worth an incredible 500 daler (for some comparative sums see the next page).17 By 1628, Maren’s youngest had clearly become a fully fledged master-carver for in that year he formally took over the family business. He ran it for nearly five decades with considerable success, as is evident from his substantial oeuvre and from a number of textual sources held in the Næstved town archives. One of these is in Schrøder’s own hand, a lengthy legal deposition dated 25 July 1659, written to deny an accusation from one Rasmus Kremmer that he could afford to pay higher taxes.18 Obviously Schrøder was literate, if only in the vernacular. Moreover, he had the trust of his fellow Næstved woodworkers, serving already in 1638 as dean of their guild (defined, like most early modern guilds, by materials and tools and thus including joiners and carpenters as well as sculptors). His reputation for trustworthiness went beyond the guild: the town court frequently called him as a witness. Equally, he was considered a man of financial acumen, entrusted by the municipality to value houses and farms, and he was a property owner himself. Nevertheless, his reputation for probity was not impeccable. As the deposition from 1659 shows, he sought to minimize his taxes. Besides, in January 1652, he and one of his journeymen were accused of working during the Sunday service, in breach of town law – clearly urgent business took priority over religious duties. Schrøder was also jealous of his personal and professional reputation, lodging several accusations of slander in the Næstved town court. All of this is quite typical of a successful early modern master craftsman in northern Europe, from growing up in the family workshop to tax evasion, a jealously guarded reputation and illegal Sunday work.19 But Schrøder had two unusual qualities.

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One was his enduring engagement with music. While competent amateur music-making was far more widespread in early modern Europe than it is now, for the simple reason that this was the only way ordinary folk might hear music outside of church, not many sculptors of this period also worked as professional musicians.20 Admittedly, being an organist was Schrøder’s secondary employment, even if he did play in church for over forty years. His annual wage for this was only 36 daler.21 This may not seem much if compared with the 200 daler with an additional residence allowance of 40 daler granted annually to the young Buxtehude, who in 1660 was appointed at Skt Mariae in Helsingør (Elsinore), also in eastern Denmark.22 But Buxtehude’s job was clearly full time and at a more prestigious church. In fact, Schrøder’s wages, some 14 per cent of Buxtehude’s, tally well with working on Sundays only, which comprise 14 per cent of a year. Very likely, there were additional duties during the main festivals of Easter, Whitsun and Christmas, which, by a royal decree of 4 August 1565, were to be celebrated in Danish town churches with some musical elaboration.23 This may explain why Schrøder felt entitled to work illegally one Sunday in January 1652, perhaps to cope with a backlog of carving accumulated while playing in church during the Christmas season. That Schrøder worked as a musician by choice is further evident from his legal deposition of 1659. First, he assures the authorities that he does not earn a great deal from his ‘honest craft’ of sculpting, even if he has always been able to afford ‘my poor children’s keep and schooling’. Then he sarcastically invites his accuser to take over his other job as organist at Skt Morten, taunting him that he ‘neither can nor will do it’. Schrøder underscores that he himself ‘does not despise the low wages set by the authorities according to ecclesiastical means’. The deposition then closes with the wish ‘That this my declaration against his pointless accusation may be read and endorsed and recorded, if it is put to the court’ and it is signed ‘Abbell Bildsnider [literally: “Image-carver”], in his own hand’.24 Clearly Schrøder was conversant with the elaborate language of early modern legality but, beneath the stock phrases, there remains a quiet pride in his craft, his musical skills and his willingness to support parish worship. The organ that Schrøder played at Skt Morten is unfortunately no longer extant, but it is possible to reconstruct something of its nature. It was made in 1587 by Hans Brebus, organ builder royal to King Frederick II of Denmark– Norway, and, fortunately, was described in some detail by the parish pastor in 1759 and then again in 1832.25 These two sources portray a fine if small and now sadly worn instrument of the swallow’s nest type, meaning that it was set on a

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cantilevered platform above the heads of the congregation and, on that platform, there was probably only space for the organist.26 The organ came with the monograms of King Frederick and his queen, Sophia of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, and with a donor inscription naming Eskild Gøye of Skjøringe (who had actually died in 1573), his widow Sybille Gyldenstierne and their sons Mogens and Harald Gøye, together with their unmarried relative Hilleborg Gyldenstierne, all members of the Danish high nobility.27 And the panels constituting the balustrade around the organ bore further names and coats of arms of prominent donors including Arild Hvidtfeldt, also of the high nobility and at that point lord chancellor of Denmark. Although elite patronage was common in early modern Lutheran churches, Brebus’s organ at Skt Morten would still have demonstrated that the parish was exceptionally well connected, able to elicit both royal and noble support.28 In keeping with this, Brebus’s organ was carefully decorated: On the inside of the lower shutters was the Annunciation, on the upper shutters the Adoration of the Shepherds, on the outside the lower [shutters] had [the royal] monograms and the upper Moses and the Brazen Serpent. On the narrow sides of the organ case: [St] Martin dividing his Cloak, Orpheus amongst the Animals, on the balustrade Temperance, Prudence, Innocence, Charity, Faith . . . [and] female figures making music. . . . The paintings on the outer shutters are in grisaille.29

From all this it may be inferred that, despite the organ’s small size, it was a prestigious, well-made and richly decorated instrument. In many ways, it was a sculpture in its own right. The scenes on the inside of the shutters were singled out by being in colour. They are from the first two chapters of St Luke’s gospel, and form part of the same narrative, the conception and birth of Christ. Moreover, each alludes to joyous musical worship, to the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s exultant song of praise after conceiving, and to the angelic chorus singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo for the shepherds before they go to adore the newborn Christ. In a church like Skt Morten, in the early modern period the Gloria was sung during every Sunday service while the Magnificat was a Lutheran staple of Saturday and Sunday vespers.30 In keeping with post-Reformation practice, both the Gloria and the Magnificat were usually sung in the vernacular or, on the chief holidays, in Latin, in support of the local Latin school, from whence usually came a substantial part of the performing choir. Both these biblical songs must have been familiar to organist Schrøder; comforting assurances that, even if not terribly well paid, music-making to praise God came with full biblical sanction exemplified in the

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songs of Mary and the angels. Of this he was reminded every time he opened up his instrument to play in church. The original swallow’s nest organ hung on the north side of the chancel arch, opposite the pulpit on the south side (see Figure 2.2) – a pulpit most likely supplied by Schrøder senior just before his untimely death. That the two functioned as a pair is evident from the pastor’s (in fact erroneous) claim from 1759: ‘Since one finds the same coats of arms and names on the pulpit, it may be deduced that they were built at the same time.’31 This pairing must have been even more evident when the pulpit still had its extensive early modern colouring, matching that of the elaborately painted and decorated Brebus organ. Now, as is well known, preaching, the lengthy expounding of God’s Word, was one of the defining features of the early modern Lutheran liturgy. Accordingly, a Lutheran pulpit served a crucial role: in churches like Skt Morten it was the spatial, visual and conceptual hinge between nave and choir, between laity and clergy (see Figure 2.2).32 So, when pulpit and organ were paired, as they originally were at Skt Morten, this implied a certain equivalence between preacher and organist. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, in the early modern period, music was as important as preaching to Lutheran worship. Thus, by the eighteenth century, Lutheranism came with the fully fledged notion that music was the ‘viva voce evangelii’ (the living voice of the gospel).33 At Skt Morten, this idea was implied already in 1602 by the organ’s alignment with the pulpit and also by the two paintings inside its shutters. Moreover, both objects were originally integrated into a larger sculptural ensemble amassed at the east end. They stood on either side of – and were thus visually and spatially connected by – a substantial chancel screen, probably also by Schrøder senior. It seems that this, too, was unpainted although it was surmounted by a large polychromed crucifix from c. 1520 (this now hangs in the easternmost vault of the nave; see Figure 2.2), originally with two angels suspended by chains from the lateral beam.34 And, from 1667 onwards, behind the screen and this crucifix stood Schrøder junior’s altarpiece, a looming presence only properly visible to those assembling in the choir during communion. Thus the entire east end of Skt Morten, the liturgical heart of the Lutheran parish church, was given over to elaborate woodwork, much of it supplied by the Schrøder dynasty: it was a heart of oak. Schrøder junior had another unusual quality. He seems to have been artistically ambitious despite declaring himself an ‘honest craftsman’ for tax purposes. This point may be pursued by returning, once more, to the wholly bare

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wood of two of his altarpieces, made for Holmens Kirke in Copenhagen (Figure 2.4) and for Skt Morten in his home town (Figure 2.1). The carefully detailed oak carving, never intended to be painted, inserts these two works into a specific early modern sculpting tradition, that of visibly artful woodwork, as identified by Michael Baxandall in his now classic The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany.35 Only, in northern Germany and Scandinavia this tradition did not work through lime but through oak (for a good example, see Figure 2.5). This seems to have been a matter of deliberate choice; other hardwoods like beech were available as were softwoods such as pine, birch and lime.36 Oak, however, is the most durable because it is the most densely grained European hardwood, and, therefore, in many ways a more taxing medium than lime. Oak can only be partially carved while green, that is, fresh and therefore soft, and a carving roughed out in this way must be dried with great care to prevent splitting.37 So the difference between oak and limewood is not unlike that between granite and

Figure 2.5 Hans Brüggemann, Altarpiece, 1514–21, St-Petri-Dom, Schleswig (originally carved for the Augustinian church at Bordesholm). Photo: Frank Vincentz; Creative Commons.

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alabaster. Fine detailing is hard won (see, for example, Figure 2.3) and hence all the more impressive. Nevertheless, one of Baxandall’s key points remains relevant: works like these were evidently made as much for aesthetic enjoyment as for religious edification. It is because of their virtuoso carving that Schrøder’s two extant unpainted altarpieces may be understood as sculptures of ambition. In the case of the first, that is hardly surprising (Figure 2.4). The piece for Holmens Kirke was a royal commission for an important church in the middle of Copenhagen, frequented by the shipwrights and other workers at the royal arsenal, professional connoisseurs of fine oak and precise woodwork.38 This was an audience likely to delight in Schrøder’s finely honed carving skills. Accordingly, he did his utmost, likely driven by a combination of business acumen and artistic aspiration. Six years later, he would install a similar work in Skt Morten, where the congregation encompassed high-ranking nobles, local burgomasters, town scribes and wellto-do merchants, and also craftsmen like goldsmiths and bakers.39 As a whole, they were not as professionally homogenous as the parishioners of Holmen. Yet Schrøder could safely assume that a few of them had an eye for fine woodwork because, by 1667, he had supplied ornately carved epitaphs for at least three members of the parish.40 Moreover, at least the merchants in the congregation must have had some knowledge of decent woodwork, profoundly dependent, as they were, on shipping. Finally, there is one piece of later evidence to show that Schrøder’s altarpiece for Skt Morten was appreciated locally. In 1753 one citizen of Næstved, the pastor of the other parish in the town, described it as ‘a superlative piece carved of pure oak with the most artful sculptor’s work and it remains, as is well, without a stroke of colour’.41

Musical knowledge Although Schrøder’s two professions were distinct, they were related in at least three ways. First, both entailed great manual dexterity combined with strength – for that is what it takes to carve oak as well as to play an organ, especially an early modern one, where the action is often heavy.42 And both involved working with an instrument, whether a keyboard or hammer and chisel, to produce a final result, music or sculpture. That there was an overlap between these two skill sets is further evinced by the fact that larger Lutheran churches in Germany and Scandinavia expected, as a matter of course, that organists kept their instruments

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in good tune and repair; in some cases organists were even expected to finish off incomplete instruments.43 Besides this, both of Schrøder’s employments involved a certain spatial acuity: whether to music unfolding acoustically (of which more presently) or to the physical environments of the many churches for which he sculpted.44 For him, these two forms of spatial acuity must have seemed to converge at Skt Morten with peculiar intensity; it was the church where he played the organ, where his father had likely carved the pulpit and the now-lost chancel screen, and where he, in turn, would supply the altarpiece. Third, Schrøder the organist and sculptor had a rich and refined sense of how ornamentation and figuration can work together within a greater whole – it is no coincidence that the terms ornamentation and figuration have currency within both music and art, even if they have distinct valences. To explore how music helps one to develop such a refined sense it is useful to consider the duties of an early modern Lutheran church organist. Unfortunately, it is not possible to be precise about the level and complexity of musical performance expected of Schrøder. But his many years of performative experience imply a certain steady competence, as does the fact that he was salaried, and not merely a well-meaning amateur. In addition, Skt Morten’s first documented organ dates to as early as 1587 and was built with royal and noble support, which suggests that it was a parish of some musical aspiration. But it must be noted that Lutheran organists were not expected to lead congregational singing.45 Until the early eighteenth century that was usually the cantor’s duty. Instead, organists supported the choir, improvized fugues and preludes on the tunes of well-known hymns and supplied incidental music ‘according to the mood of the liturgical season’.46 In larger churches, this sometimes meant including and supervising string ensembles and town musicians like drummers and buglers.47 As this suggests, Lutheran musical tastes tended towards the elaborate, towards richly textured rhythms and sounds. Consequently, one of the absolutely core skills of an early modern Lutheran church organist was the ability to supply a basso continuo, a particular kind of bassline. A basso continuo is a partially improvized set of chords played to accompany and supply harmonic structure to choral or solo song or to instrumental performance. In 1673 one Lutheran organist, Johann Jacob Hamischer of Danzig, ranked the ability to do this as being ‘of equal importance’ to the entirety of skills recounted in the previous paragraph.48 On keyboard instruments a basso continuo can be performed with the left or both hands and it can be simple or of considerable complexity according to skill and

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Figure 2.6  Dieterich Buxtehude, Organ part, first page (‘An filius non est Dei .  .  .’, cantata, BuxVW6). University Library, Uppsala.

circumstance (see Figure 2.6).49 The example given here is an early modern copy of the first page of the organ part for a short cantata by Buxtehude composed around 1685.50 As it shows, a competent organist was expected to develop the basso continuo through structured improvization. The only fully scored part is the basic tonal framework of all the lowest notes, that is, the bassline proper. However, this is supplemented by notation above each stave to become a kind of crib for improvizing a fuller harmony, with the various numbers standing for specific tonal intervals. In relation to such notation, it is hard to be precise about original performance practices. But it seems that early modern organists were free to supplement the various given harmonies of a basso continuo with whatever rhythmical texture and tonal ornamentation they deemed appropriate, albeit always keeping in mind that they were accompanying, not competing with, the other voices or instruments.51 So, to supply a basso continuo on the organ is, on the one hand, a subordinate because accompanying role, playing to subtend a greater musical whole. Yet,

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on the other hand, it is also crucial, essential in constituting this musical whole by bringing to it volume, structure, texture and harmonic depth; it is like an architectural framework. For example, Michael Praetorius, a prominent Lutheran composer and music theorist, noted in 1619 that the ‘best and most effective use’ of the basso continuo is to serve as ‘an artful compendium’ of the whole composition.52 Hence it is not coincidental that early modern choirs and ensembles were often conducted from the keyboard.53 In other words, to supply a basso continuo entailed being exquisitely attuned to part–whole relationships. If, as is likely, organist Schrøder had to perform in this way to support a choir, however small, he would also have had to engage with polyphonic song, to which early modern Lutherans were exceedingly partial. Within the Lutheran repertoire of this period there are simple hymn settings for two, three or four voices, comfortably within the reach of competent amateurs, as well as more demanding works combining many voices, instruments and soloists. And the standard Latin term for polyphony, whether simple or elaborate, was musica figurata (figured, shaped or even sculpted music).54 Here the term ‘figure’ does not mean a human or animal form, as it might in an art-historical context, but rather something like ‘ornament’, ‘secondary melody’ or even ‘orchestration’. So it is at least in part a spatial concept, a careful layering of sounds and rhythmical textures as they unfold across time, a point more readily grasped in musical performance than when reduced to language (consider, for example, the cantata given in note 49).55 Musica figurata was an indispensable aspect of the Lutheran musical tradition in part because Martin Luther himself had insisted that, after theology, polyphony was one of the most important means of grasping something of the divine: It is possible to taste with wonder (yet not to comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music. Here it is most remarkable that one single voice continues to sing the tenor [the melody or cantus firmus], while at the same time many other voices play around it, exulting and adorning it in exuberant strains and, as it were, leading it forth in a divine dance, so that those who are the least bit moved know nothing more amazing in this world.56

Luther understood polyphonic music to have a distinct structure. There is one chief voice, the main melody, often conveying a sacred narrative. In Lutheran music, this can either be gospel truth sung liturgically or the melodies of hymns and other devotional poems.

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Luther’s distinction between the ‘tenor’ and the other voices fits with the standard rhetorical hierarchy between ergon (work) and parergon (by-work) – a term which may be translated as ornament or framing.57 A less sophisticated thinker might have argued that the subordinate voices within polyphonic song are merely additional and thus contingent, even dispensable. Yet for Luther that is not the case. Instead he describes the other voices as leading the tenor into a dance (‘chorea’), into disciplined yet exuberant movement.58 They bring liveliness to the melody and, crucially, structure and sustain the harmony – the kind of task that is also fulfilled by a basso continuo, especially when in support of a solo voice or instrument. In this manner hierarchy becomes joyful collaboration, the making of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts: the living voice of the gospel. Musica figurata is not merely a spatial concept; it is an animating principle. Without it, the melody cannot dance; it becomes pedestrian, earthbound. Or, put differently, ornament is absolutely intrinsic to any given composition, essential if one is to taste the divine through musical harmony. While Schrøder the organist may not have conceptualized all this in as sophisticated a fashion as Luther, a professor of theology as well as a keen amateur singer and musician, he would still have known much of it practically and experientially, from his years of performative experience, from working with and supporting polyphonic song.59 For example, he would have known that polyphonic song is profoundly embodied, a laryngeal, respiratory, oral, aural, visual, spatial and temporal practice. Just to keep good timing, from his swallow’s nest organ he had to be able to see the various members of the choir as well as any other participating musicians, and they had to be able to see him.60

Resonant tendrils and imperfect consonances How, then, does Lutheran musical culture help us to understand Schrøder’s ambitious Skt Morten altarpiece (Figure 2.1)? The sculpture, of course, had one clear purpose: a backdrop to and framing for the Eucharist. In the early modern Lutheran church this core liturgical event was still considered a sacrament and was taken in both kinds: first bread and then wine.61 Moreover, Lutheran communion was an aural as well as a visual, tactile, olfactory and gustatory experience. For example, according to the ritual specified in the standard Danish hymn book of the period, the required gospel passages, including the words of

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consecration, were to be sung ‘in a loud voice’.62 And there was a pervasive sense that the Eucharist was simply not complete without musical accompaniment, whether choral or instrumental, one reason why it is appropriate to use early modern Lutheran musical traditions to interrogate an early modern Lutheran altarpiece like that at Skt Morten.63 In this altarpiece, one may detect a ‘tenor’ or main melody: the central biblical narrative, the eminently recognizable unfolding of the Passion in a number of scenes distributed across space (Figure 2.7). But that is less than half of the work. Around the narrative scenes there is also a type of musica figurata: a carefully wrought and exuberantly rich ornamental framework of multiple voices supported by a basso continuo, all composed to structure and animate the main melody. To show that this is a productive way of addressing the Skt Morten altarpiece, the rest of this essay mainly focuses on certain, particularly telling sculptural qualities and passages. First, there is the intricate surface of the sculpture, veined and textured by the tree-rings of the once living oak, its brownish-grey colour subtly changing with the light (compare, for example,

Figure 2.7  Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Diagrammatic view indicating narrative scenes and top figure. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

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Figure 2.3 and Figure 2.11). This surface – with its overall tripartite vertical framework, further partitioned into six horizontal subdivisions – works like a basso continuo, a subordinate part which nevertheless structures and offers an ‘artful compendium’ of the whole. At the same time, the vertical framework gives urgency and direction to the main flow of figural scenes, from the ‘Last Supper’ in the predella and upwards through the ‘Passion’ and ‘Burial of Christ’ to the ‘Resurrection’ and the topmost figure of ‘Christ Pantocrator’ (Figure 2.7). The directional thrust of the ‘tenor’, the gospel narrative, is thus structured by the underlying framework, in particular by the vertical division articulated by means of Solomonic columns. This overarching logic is neatly exemplified in one particular passage. The tripartite structure of the whole altarpiece is reprised in miniature in the threefold division of the scene of ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’ (Figure 2.8). It is worth examining this passage in some detail since it encapsulates how, in the Skt Morten altarpiece, pictorial narrative and decorative framework may be understood as relating to one another polyphonically.

Figure 2.8 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’, flanked by Saints Matthew and John. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

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In ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’, the central narrative scene is framed on the left and right by two larger figures, the Evangelists Matthew and John. This already gives polyphonic nuance to the ‘tenor’ or main voice, a reminder that the gospels, in fact, are comprised of four male voices. John looks raptly inwards, witnessing his own involvement in the gospel story as the beardless youth with ewer and basin behind the kneeling Christ. This framing figure, then, is also a kind of consonance, all the more so because the direction of John’s gaze is the same as that of the four apostles in the niche on the right. Resolute attentiveness is first modelled inside the gospel narrative and then both reiterated and expounded in its setting (and, of course, with a further resonance in the gospel passages that were regularly chanted before the altarpiece, including the opening of John’s gospel as part of the communion ritual).64 John’s hand is poised above his book, as if about to write what he sees. In many ways, he is an outward bridge towards the viewer, a classic sprecher figure, for it is through John’s evangelical writings that we too may witness Christ. At the same time, John’s focused gaze is a model for ours, encouraging concentration on the narrative. In a nicely judged contrast, on the left Matthew looks away, towards his attribute, the angel, source of divine inspiration, the guarantee of his gospel’s authenticity. Again, Matthew’s gaze reprises a detail in the central gospel narrative of the washing of feet, where one apostle in the left niche looks away from Christ. These twin acts of looking in and away may be taken as a reminder that polyphonic music has spatial and visual dimensions; it involves a reciprocity of gazes. In a way, these gazes serve as a sophisticated yet appropriate ornamental framework for the ‘tenor’ voice, the central narrative, a point also evident in the scene below, the ‘Last Supper’ (Figure 2.9). Seated on the left, Judas’s outward gaze follows that of St Matthew above (Figure 2.10). Judas, however, contemplates a very different reality: the money bag proffered by the imp at his feet (Figure 2.9). And Judas’s gaze is reiterated by the apostle seated diagonally behind him to the right. Meanwhile, on the far right, two apostles face each other, echoing the poses of John and Matthew above (Figure 2.10). This scene, then, holds the saintly and the sinful in tension, as if to challenge the viewer’s own conscience. Besides the framing Evangelists, there are further supporting voices of considerable complexity. The first is the flowing ornamentation, which encourages the viewer to link up the two distinct scenes of the ‘Last Supper’ and the ‘Washing of Feet’ imaginatively and, in the process, to recognize much more

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Figure 2.9 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Last Supper’. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

than the well-worn gospel stories. For example, the oval basin in which Christ is washing feet, the narrative heart of the upper scene, is set atop a sort of cartouche which both repeats and elaborates its shape (Figure 2.10). Below, this cartouche morphs into the crowning feature of the canopy above Christ’s head and this deft sculptural segue is but one of many to be found across the altarpiece. In musical terms, these may be understood as interludes, connecting devices between two discrete passages. By such means, narrative and ornament, sculptural figuration and decoration, flow into one another and, as in polyphonic music, the framing is simultaneously playful, enlivening and explicatory. This point may be further expounded by attending to the quasi-organic ornamental detail: Matthew and John perch on seats growing out of forwardarching fronds tied into those that encircle the ‘Last Supper’ below (Figure 2.8). And, from behind the two Evangelists, similar fronds sprout upward. These then grow into the three canopies above the ‘Washing of Feet’, where they connect this scene with the ‘Crucifixion’ above. As one traces this flow – a set of legato but lively interludes bridging the discrete passages of the Passion narrative – a new voice emerges.

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Figure 2.10 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing ‘Last Supper’ (below), ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’ (above). Photo: Margit Thøfner.

The central canopy rewards attentive viewing with a surprise, a cheerful but strangely horned and bearded grotesque face looking back (Figure 2.11). This face is one of several hiding in the ornament across the altarpiece (see also Figure 2.3). They may stand for what Schrøder would have known as imperfect consonances, that is, tonal intervals such as minor and major thirds, which bring tension and texture to a polyphonic arrangement. Or they may even imply full dissonances, intervals such as seconds and sevenths, which were increasingly used for dramatic effect in polyphonic music from the sixteenth century onwards.65 Definitely, the faces come with a certain tension; some seem to laugh (Figure 2.11) but others could be construed either as singing or screaming (Figure 2.3). One possible reason for this conundrum, at least from an early modern Lutheran point of view, is the anxiety attendant on approaching the Eucharist. One was meant to do so in the right frame of mind, in a shriven state, with a humble faith in and desire for salvation. That, of course, would be grounds for joyous singing, for exulting with the angels in the Gloria. But what if the right frame of mind was not forthcoming

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Figure 2.11 Abel Schrøder junior, Altarpiece, 1667, Skt Morten, Næstved. Detail showing grotesque above the central niche of ‘Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet’. Photo: Margit Thøfner.

or could not be maintained? Then, as many orthodox Lutherans worried, one risked eating and drinking one’s way to perdition.66 At the same time, the grotesque above the ‘Washing of Feet’ (Figure 2.11), with its half-ornamental, half-architectural form, draws attention to the equally complex but less unsettling herms below (or are they terms, as their busts are really scrolls?) (Figure 2.8). Their faces are at least recognizably human, but their headdresses mimic Ionic volutes, with which they support the three canopies. The ornamental and the figural flow into one another; it is barely possible to prise them apart. As in musica figurata, the polyphonic framing is carefully constructed to work with and set off the main scenes. As should be clear by now, an energetic yet disciplined play between overall structure, narrative and ornament – as if between a ‘tenor’, its polyphonic framing and a supportive and simultaneously structuring basso continuo – may be observed across the altarpiece. One important facet of this is the creative tension between the monochrome wood and its richly wrought carving. The flowing ornament is amazingly exuberant but never quite undisciplined, and always subject to oaken solidity; the medium itself may be understood as the anchoring bass beneath the highly textured polyphonic composition. At

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the same time, especially in the Solomonic columns, there is a sense that the felled oak has come back to life, resurrected by accomplished human artifice into the form of a fruiting vine (Figure 2.1). Master Schrøder’s signature hides in among these vines. That, in turn, may be taken as an artistic metaphor for Christ’s salvific labour as ‘the true vine’ – the fount of sacramental grace as it flows during Lutheran communion.67 With a nicely judged admixture of pride and humility, the sculptor-musician has added his own quiet voice, presenting his work as a lesser version of God’s.68 It is in the nature of this kind of sculpture to generate a certain tension. Like a piece of well-orchestrated polyphony, it entails unceasing care for the overall effect as well as meticulous attention to detail: to ornamentation, to discrete passages, and to their sequencing and linkage by appropriate interludes. As in the Buxtehude cantata referred to above (Figure 2.6), in Schrøder’s altarpiece there is much to attend to. One might decide to focus on one or two distinct voices, or on the repeat of particular details, or on the elegant bridging of discrete passages, or on how the textual narrative is both dramatized and enriched by its setting. But, also as in the Buxtehude cantata, this does not mean losing sight of the greater whole even as one attends to abundant detail. In the altarpiece, this sense of a well-integrated whole even if constituted by many parts comes from its oaken solidity as well as from the clearly articulated tripartite vertical framework and its horizontal subdivisions, which structure both narrative and ornamental flow. In short, by means of its ornamentation, the Skt Morten altarpiece encourages one to link up creatively various parts of the salvific narrative, and, in the process, to reflect on one’s own place within it. Nevertheless, tension remains. This is largely because, both in polyphony and in art, ornamentation refuses to be contained semantically. It cannot be reduced to any fixed or straightforward verbal or textual meaning; it is overwhelmingly polyvalent. Thus the decorative detailing on Schrøder’s altarpiece both complements and destabilizes the Passion narrative. Much like the experience of listening to polyphony, the ornamentation and broader framework invite interrogation rather than mere recognition, and this means that the sculpture is not straightforwardly didactic or slavishly subordinate to its function as an altarpiece. Instead it both solicits and rewards enthusiastic aesthetic engagement which may, or may not, trigger deep reflection. That is the final point. Music is about experience as much as it is about thought or meaning. Accordingly, my analysis has been about structures, shapes and resonances as much as about figures and narratives. It has been about how Master Schrøder, the sculptor-

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cum-organist, might have thought about his own work and, by extension, about some of the feelings, questions and anxieties that his fellow early modern communicants in Skt Morten – nobles, burgomasters, merchants, goldsmiths, bakers – might have brought to bear on their richly ornamental altarpiece. As a whole, then, the Skt Morten altarpiece is not reducible to its function; indeed it could not be. It is simultaneously a piece of liturgical furniture and a musically structured sculpture that is nevertheless profoundly about sculpting – a virtuoso performance. Yet it remains eminently fit for its larger purpose. For it is a maxim of Lutheran theology that none of the senses and none of the faculties of mind can fully grasp God’s presence in the Eucharist.69 Luther’s lyrical passage on polyphony is phrased accordingly: ‘It is possible to taste with wonder (yet not to comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music.’70 This is the kind of sensory role that Schrøder’s altarpiece proclaims for itself.

Acknowledgements This essay was kindly read in draft form by Anne Haour, Samuel Bibby and Simon Dell and in a more developed version by Cathryn Dew and the two editors of the present volume. It is much, much better for everyone’s thoughtful and helpful suggestions. Any remaining misunderstandings or misconceptions are of course my own.

Notes 1 Mogens von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 1602–1676 (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1995), 8, 45. This small volume, by an enthusiastic and well-informed press photographer, is the only dedicated work on Abel Schrøder available to date, although the sculptor’s use of printed material is discussed in some detail in Hanne Jønsson, Grafiske forlægs betydning for konstitueringen af dansk bruskbaroks ikonografiske og ornamentale formsprog (University of Copenhagen: Magisterkonferensafhandling, 1978), 3 vols. 2 The evidence for this is cited in ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, Danmarks Kirker (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1933–5), vol. VI, part 1, 160, note 15. 3 A good sense of the broader Lutheran tradition may be gained from Andrew Spicer, ed., Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), and the situation in Saxony and Brandenburg is discussed in detail in Bridget

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4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12

13

Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Heal, A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The most recent and best overview of the changes wrought by the Reformation in Danish churches is Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Ritual and Art Across the Danish Reformation: Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450–1600 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). There may originally have been a few more. For example, the altarpiece in Borre church in Norway of c. 1666 has been attributed to Abel Schrøder junior and it was only polychromed in 1741. http:​/​/www​​.norg​​eskir​​ker​.n​​o​/wik​​i​/Bor​​​re​_ki​​rke (accessed 18 January 2019). But it is not possible to establish whether this was the sculptor’s intention or whether it was merely due to a lack of funding. Even if there were originally more, bare oak still remains the exception rather than the rule in Schrøder’s oeuvre. See, for example, the two photographs juxtaposed in von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 26. See, for example, Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Although this volume was, in many ways, pioneering, it remains wedded to the idea that ‘the Word’ reigned supreme in Lutheran art, perhaps because this category is understood reductively, mainly as comprising Lutheran prints and paintings. See, for example, Spicer, Lutheran Churches and, most recently, Heal, A Magnificent Faith. This, unfortunately, remains a flaw in the otherwise substantial contribution of ibid. To cite but a few examples: Jønsson, Grafiske forlægs betydning is bound by the conventions of stylistic analysis; a subordination to the maxims of Lutheran theology bedevils Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Confessional Portraits: Representation as Redundancy’, in Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand, eds, Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 125– 39. Heal, A Magnificent Faith posits the coming of Lutheran baroque as rooted in patronal desires for new visual idioms imported from Italy, 270–1. See also Bridget Heal, ‘Lutheran Baroque: The Afterlife of a Reformation Altarpiece’, Art History 40, no. 2 (2017): 358–78, where style is again explained as an Italian import mediated by the Dresden court. That is the case for the majority of studies cited in notes 3, 7 and 10 above. This is evident, for example, if one browses through the magnificent recording project Danmarks Kirker, now available online at: http://danmarkskirker​.natmus​ .dk/ (accessed 18 January 2019). This follows a pioneering article, where a Roman Catholic piece of music is brought to bear on a German sculpture even if the work of art is only analysed as the inspiration for a musical composition: Alexander J. Fisher, ‘A Musical Dialogue in

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Bronze: Gregor Aichinger’s Lacrumae (1604) and Hans Reichle’s Crucifixion Group for the Basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg’, in Jeffrey Chips Smith, ed., Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 119–41. 14 On the medieval antecedents for Lutheran church music, see Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation and Three Centuries of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23–8. On the broader theological basis for Lutheran church music, see Joyce L. Irwin, Neither Voice Nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in the Age of the Baroque (New York: P. Lang, 1993). 15 On Latin schools in Denmark in the early modern period, see Kristian Jensen, Latinskolens dannelse. Latinundervisningens indhold og formål fra reformationen til enevælden (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1982). 16 Herl, Worship Wars, 43–4. For a more extensive definition and discussion of polyphony, see the section entitled ‘Musical Knowledge’ below. 17 Von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 23–7, from whence come all the biographical details in this section. 18 The whole document is transcribed in ibid., 42–3. 19 A good sense of how such guilds worked may be gained from Maarten Prak, Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen and Hugo Soly, eds, Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 20 For an insightful discussion of early modern musical habits and their role in the Lutheran Reformation, see Rebecca W. Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), especially 25–69 and 89–136. 21 Von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 42. 22 On this, see Kerala J. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 2nd ed., 31–3. 23 For the text of this decree, see Niels Jesperssøn, Gradual: En Almindelig Sangbog (Copenhagen: Laurentz Benedicht, 1573 (facsimile edition: Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz Forlag, 1935)), unpaginated prefatory matter. For the required musical sequences for these three holidays, see ibid., 36–71, 187–215, 244–68. On the value of Jesperssøn’s Gradual as a source for liturgical practice, see Erik Abrahamsen’s unpaginated introduction to this facsimile edition. 24 The full document is transcribed in von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 42–3. Generally, in the seventeenth century, ‘image-carvers’ sculpted, whether figuratively or ornamentally, in contrast to joiners, who built furniture, even if both belonged to the same guild. 25 The relevant passages are reproduced in ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 150–1. On Hans Brebus, see Douglas E. Bush and Richard Kassel, eds, The Organ: An Encyclopaedia (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 81. 26 On this type of organ and its history, see ibid., 546–7.

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27 For the Gyldenstierne and Gøye families, see the relevant entries in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon: http:​/​/den​​store​​dansk​​e​.dk/​​Dansk​​_Biog​​rafis​​k​_Lek​​sikon​​/Samf​​ und,_​​jura_​​​og​_po​​litik​​/Slæg​ter/G​ylden​stier​ne (accessed 19 January 2019) and http:​/​/den​​store​​dansk​​e​.dk/​​Dansk​​_Biog​​rafis​​k​_Lek​​sikon​​/Samf​​und,_​​jura_​​​og​_po​​ litik​​/Slæg​ter/G​øye (accessed 18 January 2019). Sybille Gyldenstierne seems to have felt particularly attached to Skt Morten, perhaps because she owned a prestigious property in Næstved. In 1598, personalized pews were constructed in the church with her own and her dead husband’s coats of arms and, in 1602, their names were inscribed on the newly installed pulpit. ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 148–9. 28 See, for example, Heal, A Magnificent Faith, 53, 61, 72, 83, 85–6, 142–3, 151, 161, 166–87. 29 ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 150–1 (italics and ellipses mine). 30 The Gloria is given in vernacular and Latin versions in Jesperssøn, Gradual, 7–8 and 41–2. On the role of the Magnificat in Lutheran vespers, see Herl, Worship Wars, 63–4. 31 ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 150. 32 On the role of the pulpit in the Lutheran church as one of three crucial ritual loci, see Margit Thøfner, ‘Framing the Sacred: Lutheran Church Furnishings in the Holy Roman Empire’, in Spicer, ed., Lutheran Churches, 97–131, especially 119–22. 33 On this concept, see Robin Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdman, 2007), 277–81. 34 ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 145–6. On the central importance of imagery of the Crucifixion within early modern Lutheranism, see Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 171–90 and Heal, A Magnificent Faith, 125–45. 35 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980). 36 An excellent sense of the history of woodlands and of natural resource management in early modern Denmark may be gained from Thorkild Kjærgaard, The Danish Revolution, 1500–1800: An Ecohistorical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 37 For a good overview of the many skills involved in working oak, see Esmond Harris, Jeanette Harris and N. D. G. James, Oak: A British History (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2003), 77–98. 38 ‘Holmens Kirke’, Danmarks Kirker (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1960–65), vol. I, part 2, 72–9. 39 This list has been constructed on the basis of early modern epitaphs and gravestones still extant in the church. See ‘Næstved S. Mortens kirke’, 156–9. 40 Ibid., 152–5. 41 Ibid., 160, note 15.

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42 Kimberly Marshall, ‘A Survey of Historical Performance Practices’, in Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber, eds, The Cambridge Companion to the Organ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 113–29. 43 Herl, Worship Wars, 131; Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, 13; ‘S. Marie kirke Helsingør’, Danmarks Kirker (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1964), vol. II, part 1, 421. 44 Note the different proportions of the altarpieces for Holmens Kirke (Figure 2.4) and Skt Morten (Figure 2.1). Each fits with the distinctly different proportions of the choirs in these two churches. 45 Admittedly, there were great variations in this. Herl, Worship Wars, 131–8. 46 Ibid., 131. 47 See, for example, the use of additional instruments in the Marienkirche in Lübeck under Buxtehude’s direction. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, 377–80. 48 Herl, Worship Wars, 131. 49 https://youtu​.be​/bxLpbQDr5TU (accessed 18 January 2019). The organ is the basso continuo in this case, discreetly audible beneath and behind the strings and voices. On Buxtehude’s use of basso continuo, see Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, 380–5. 50 The cantata drew on poetry by the medieval writer Arnulf of Louvain but translated into German and then back into Latin in the seventeenth century. Ibid., 140. 51 For a much fuller discussion of the basso continuo tradition, see the relevant entry in the Grove/Oxford Music On-Line: http://www​.oxfordmusiconline​.com. 52 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum III, transl. and ed. Jeffery T. Kite-Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 134. 53 José Antonio Bowen, ‘The Rise of Conducting’, in José Antonio Bowen, The Cambridge Companion to Conducting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 91–113. 54 Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 98. 55 For a more detailed definition, see the relevant entry in Grove/Oxford Music On-Line: http://www​.oxfordmusiconline​.com. 56 Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 47–8. 57 For a discussion of various early modern usages and translations of parergon, see Margit Thøfner, ‘Amico Intimo, ingenio & arte pingendi Celeberrimo: Erycius Puteanus and Theodor van Loon’, Humanistica Lovaniensia. The Journal of NeoLatin Studies 49 (2000): 359–76. 58 For the full Latin text of this passage, see Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 323–4. 59 Ibid., 21–64. 60 Bowen, ‘The Rise of Conducting’, 94–5. 61 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 114–22.

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62 Hans Thomissøn, Den danske Psalmebog met mange Christelige Psalmer (Copenhagen: Laurentz Benedichts, 1590), unpaginated liturgical rubric, beginning on f.372r. The whole sequence contains clear musical notation to guide chanting across the entire service. 63 See, for example, Herl, Worship Wars, 61–2, 73 and 75. 64 Jesperssøn, Gradual, 69. 65 The classic and most accessible account of these attitudes and developments remains Knud Jeppesen, Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Style of the Sixteenth Century, transl. Glen Haydon (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), see especially 10–17 and 97–103. 66 Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 94–99 and 117–19; Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 157–9. 67 John 15.1. 68 On Schrøder’s sparse but interesting use of signatures, see von Haven, Bogen om Abel Schrøder, 35–7. 69 For a helpful summary, see Amy Nelson Burnett, ‘Luther and the Eucharistic Controversy’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 56, no. 2 (2017): 145–50. 70 Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 47.

3

Galathea Ships, sculpture and the state in Golden Age Denmark Michael Hatt

A ship’s figurehead representing a sea nymph (Figure 3.1), a medal commemorating Europe’s greatest sculptor (Figure 3.2) and a carving of a foreign boat in the Indian Ocean (Figure 3.3): three very different objects which are intimately connected. Together, they reveal connections between institutions in absolutist Denmark in the 1830s and 1840s, connections that also link Denmark with the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this chapter, I shall explore the ways in which decorative sculpture emblematized these connections and, in particular, how sculpture’s relationship to the decorative was fundamental to its ideological force. This is not simply a question of the object and its symbolism. It is also about the mobility of objects, and in a number of ways: mobility as thematized or represented, the formal mobility of sculpture from object to object, the institutional mobility of objects and the literal mobility of sculpture as it moves from one part of the world to another.1 To begin, the central notion of the decorative requires a brief word of explanation. The theoretical starting point is to recognize what Claire Jones has called ‘the false separation of fine and decorative sculpture’.2 This is to understand that Modernist distinctions between the decorative and the autonomous were not recognized through most of the nineteenth century. Of course, artists and audiences acknowledged hierarchies of production, the different status of artist and artisan, and the differences between, say, free-standing marble figures and metal or ceramic reductions of those figures. Nevertheless, what was crucial for nineteenth-century sculpture, in terms of aesthetics and economy, was that sculpture continually crossed and recrossed the boundaries between kinds of object. Sculpture was a reproductive art, and was intended to exploit

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Figure 3.1 J. D. Petersen, Drawing of figurehead for the corvette Galathea, 1832, pencil, 9.89 × 14.72 cm. M/S Museet for Søfart, Helsingør.

the transferability between forms (free-standing statue, medal, statuette) and between media (plaster, marble, metal), and hence between image and object. Thus, the decorative is, in part, a condition or quality of certain sculptures, a capacity for repetition that precedes its making. This repetition, evident in the different versions of any sculpture, is very much considered a positive characteristic in the nineteenth century. Decorative sculpture thrives because of

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Figure 3.2 Christen Christensen, The Thorvaldsen Medal, 1838, silver, D 6.1 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen.

its adaptability rather than inviolability: for instance, Bertel Thorvaldsen’s frieze The Triumph of Alexander is reshaped for each iteration, each room or surface it occupies (Figure 3.4). The decorative sculptural object is not necessarily a single thing but may be a set of things, defined as much by their itineraries and multiple locations in time and space as by singular form. The decorative is also inseparable from adornment. Sculpture was used in the decoration of ships

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Figure 3.3  Nicobarese representation of the corvette Galathea, c. 1846, wood, L 170 cm. National Museum, Copenhagen.

Figure 3.4  The Alexander Room, Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen. Photo: Mikkel Grønlund.

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and buildings to provide symbolic meaning; this was certainly true of a ship’s figurehead. Thus, the ornament that was added to the vehicle or space was not secondary or peripheral but central; it was an adornment that came to define the setting to which it had been added. Its materiality could give abstract ideas a physical presence or force and not only carried meaning from elsewhere, from earlier contexts, but could change or enhance that meaning. Again, The Triumph of Alexander offers a clear example; as we shall see, its celebration of Napoleonic victory in Rome became the vehicle for an allegory of Danish absolutism in Copenhagen. What we see here are interconnected itineraries: the movement of sculptural forms from place to place, from institution to institution and from object to object. This adaptability, so important for the political force of sculpture, is underpinned by the nature of the decorative: the possibility of repetition, connecting many spaces at the same time, establishing or revising ideological norms. The decorative is not a minor aspect of plastic art, a meaningless and empty accompaniment to statuary, but precisely what enables sculpture to function politically. The three objects considered here offer a case study of this political adaptability. I begin with the corvette Galathea, the vessel at the heart of this history.

The Galathea and its figurehead The Galathea was launched in October 1831 and went on to become the most famous ship in the Danish fleet.3 Ships formed one of the most important public spectacles in Golden Age Copenhagen. Launchings, homecomings and naval pageantry attracted huge crowds, and the harbour was not only the heart of the city’s topography but also of its public culture. However, the launch of a new vessel had a particular importance in Denmark in the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1807, at the Battle of Copenhagen, the entire naval fleet had been seized by the British, to prevent its falling into Napoleon’s hands. To be a maritime nation without a fleet was both an economic and practical shock, and profoundly demoralizing. In 1815, plans were made to rebuild the fleet and reorganize the navy over the next twenty-five years. Frederik VI instructed his admiralty not only in the size of the navy but also in its purpose: the need to ensure that all ships would be able both to serve in the defence of the state and to fulfil colonial and other business in the West and East Indies, Greenland and

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Iceland, the Barbary States and elsewhere. As we shall see, the Galathea would also, like many other ships, be involved in the business of sculpture, which rather than a distinct supplement to other duties was inextricable from them. In order to enable the renewal of Danish maritime power, a shipbuilding school was established in 1817, which, in 1827, was reorganized and placed under the command of the construction office on Gammelholm, in the centre of Copenhagen.4 In 1820, as part of the strategy for rebuilding the fleet, the king insisted that designs for ornamenting naval vessels were to be approved by the Academy of Fine Arts. Figureheads and ships’ decoration were to involve both the naval architecture school at Gammelholm and the Royal Academy of Art in Charlottenborg, which was next door to the naval yard at the top of Nyhavn. The proximity of the Royal Naval Dockyard and the Royal Academy serves as a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the two institutions. Moreover, the king was involved in the day-to-day activities of both institutions – a reminder that Denmark was still an absolutist monarchy and that ships’ decoration was implicitly a sign of his sovereignty. The significance of the figurehead may appear self-evident, but one must be careful not to overlook how, in emblematizing the relationship between Royal Academy and Royal Navy, art and state power, it also condensed Danish history. This emerges most clearly in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Holger Danske’ of 1845, a short story about the medieval Danish hero sleeping below Kronborg Castle, ready to awaken and fight should Denmark face a threat.5 The narrator of the tale is an old ship’s carver, who is speaking to his grandson while carving a figurehead of Holger. The statue of Holger becomes a portal to Danish history, allowing the old carver to reflect on other kings, other heroic moral figures, and historical events from King Canute through the colonization of Greenland by Hans Egede to the Battle of Copenhagen against the English fleet in 1807. That a ship’s figurehead should embody the nation’s values is not coincidental. Andersen reminds his readers that Denmark is a maritime nation – a nation that occupies the sea as well as the land. The figurehead embodies and even enacts the history that unfolds across time and space. Thus, ship decoration was the product of a collaborative institutional relationship. Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, as Professor of Painting – and, of course, Denmark’s leading artist – undertook in 1820 to examine designs sent by the Naval Drawing Office. He also offered to design ship ornaments himself, and became the dominant figure in the field for the next fifteen years.6 While drawings and maquettes for figureheads were frequently produced by leading painters or

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sculptors, the figureheads themselves were carved in the naval shipyard. This, of course, resembles the process of the sculptor’s studio, with carving done by skilled artisans, although in this case the studio is spread across two institutions. The figurehead is not only what Michael Baxandall so memorably called ‘the deposit of a social relationship’ but the deposit of an institutional relationship under the absolutist monarchy.7 Such a collaborative process had long characterized the decoration of ships. This collaboration brought the aesthetic of the studio into the naval yard and the needs of the state into the Royal Academy. This connection was an important aspect of the way in which Danish sculpture was practised and valued. Both Thorvaldsen and Johannes Wiedewelt, Denmark’s two greatest sculptors of the age, famously had fathers who carved figureheads, and the most important ship’s carvers had studied in the studios of sculptors; F. C. Willerup, for instance, had been a pupil of Wiedewelt. Under Frederik VI’s plan for naval reorganization, a number of places on Eckersberg’s course in perspective were reserved for naval architects each year, perspective being a topic, conceptually and practically, that united picture-making and navigation. Eckersberg taught, among others, pupils of Willerup, and so the to-ing and fro-ing between naval yard and academy continued.8 The Galathea’s figurehead was designed by Herman Wilhelm Bissen, Thorvaldsen’s most important Danish pupil. From Rome, where he was working in Thorvaldsen’s studio, Bissen sent a drawing, dated 29 January 1832, depicting the sea nymph, after whom the ship had been named, fleeing from the Cyclops Typhon. On receipt of the drawing, J. D. Petersen, who had studied at the Royal Academy and took charge of ships’ ornamentation in 1827, made a copy drawing, which clarified the form of the original, for royal approval (Figure 3.1).9 Bissen’s design conformed to the kind of object produced in Thorvaldsen’s studio, something that would be modelled in clay, before being cast in plaster and then put into marble, with a highly finished and polished surface. There is more than a hint of Canova’s Hebe in Bissen’s design, using drapery and pose in a similar way to indicate grace, lightness and motion, drawn from his practical knowledge of how stone can be seen to defy gravity. Once the king had approved the design, work began on a wax model of the figurehead, 49 centimetres high (Figure 3.5).10 The figurehead also featured on the construction design (Figure 3.6), in a very different form of drawing, which was more about outline, although adding more shading and shadow to enhance the sense of three-dimensionality and the figurehead’s relationship to the spatial organization of the ship. A small version of the sculpture would

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Figure 3.5  Model of figurehead for the corvette Galathea, 1832, wax, 49 × 45 cm. Tøjhusmuseet, Copenhagen.

Figure 3.6  J. D. Petersen, Drawing of ornamentation for corvette ‘Galathea’, 1832, 128.5 × 33 cm. Søetatens Tegningssamling G3022. Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen.

also have been included in the three-dimensional construction model. Already Galathea is moving from space to space: from the conceptual sculpture, with which Bissen started, to a two-dimensional sketch, a small wax maquette and an outline figure or decorative feature embedded in the ship’s architecture. The wax model offers a cruder representation of the sculpture than the drawings. The drapery is much heavier, and is less nuanced, particularly where it crosses over the left shoulder. There is a less acute angle in the forward motion of the figure, although this would be mitigated by the placing of the figurehead on the ship itself; the figurehead would be at an angle and therefore would need to have a straighter profile in line with the naval architecture itself (a reminder that the figurehead is also a form of architectural sculpture, both in its relationship to the ship and in the way it emerges from the architecture). Indeed, the wax

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model adds a base with a wave pattern on it, which both provides structural support and enhances the iconography. In this process from sketch to construction drawing, the figure changed. Indeed, the figure became a figurehead; that is, a free-standing sculpture designed for decoration became a particular kind of decorative sculpture, no longer a figure to be appended to another object, but an integral part of the ship. Instead of fleeing danger, Galathea now pushed forward in space at the tip of the vessel, her movement representing positive action rather than negative reaction. The pose of the figure, one foot ahead, leaning forward, with her drapery billowing in the wind, became a more determined sign of direction and speed. Moreover, the relationship of the figurehead to the architecture of the ship suggested upward as well as forward motion, animating the figure. Unlike Hebe, who is coming in to land, Galathea would appear to move upwards as she crosses the seas. It is no surprise that most figureheads, whether representing characters from classical antiquity, Nordic mythology or natural history, were generally shaped to emphasize determined motion in this way.11 The Galathea’s figurehead, probably carved under Petersen’s supervision by H. J. Møen, no longer exists, but we can glean something of its appearance from the figurehead for the corvette Fortuna, launched in 1825 (Figure 3.7).12 Designed by Eckersberg and carved by Petersen, the figurehead of Fortuna is similar to Galathea in its pose and style. Here the changes effected by translation from the notional ideal statue to the figurehead become most evident, not least because of the use of wood. Wood is, of course, the necessary material here. Marble would be inappropriate, being too heavy and a less robust material, particularly in a maritime environment. However, wood cannot mimic the surface detail of marble. Folds are less softly delineated, and the cornucopia, while a skilful piece of carving, is constituted by generalized forms rather than the kind of intense naturalistic detail that one would see in work by Canova or Thorvaldsen. Nevertheless, such detail would be pointless here, since it would never be visible once in place; these figureheads were to be viewed from dockside, and so not particularly close, or, more often, at a distance, frequently through a telescope. Rather than viewing the figurehead as a debased form of marble statuary, one has to recognize the skills of the ship’s carver in understanding how to work the wood itself, how to make the figure legible and, more importantly still, how to retain structural integrity. Cracks in the figurehead, and the visible joints between the different sections, show that physical construction methods, quite different from marble carving, have been developed in order to exploit the

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Figure 3.7  C. W. Eckersberg (design), J. D. Petersen (sculptor), Figurehead for the corvette ‘Fortuna’, 1825, wood. Krigsmuseet, Copenhagen. Photo: Thomas Quine.

material to the full and to enable the imitation of the marble ideal in wood. The figureheads were often painted white both to emulate marble and to ensure their visibility against the black of the ships’ hulls.13 Thus, while the ideal did not lend itself to wood as it did to marble, the values of ideal sculpture as the basis for ships’ decoration remained. This emulation was designed to bring the moral value of sculpture to the ship, as well as the aesthetic qualities, such as grace, balance or beauty, which might serve as allegories of the ship itself. However, aesthetic concerns about material and quality were less important than the fact of reproduction itself: that the ideal could be transformed into decorative sculpture and that it could move from the studio to the naval yard. It is telling that from the 1840s J. D. Petersen signed himself as Billedhugger or sculptor.14 He clearly understood his work as aligned with that of sculptors a short walk away in the Royal Academy. These wooden sculptures form part of a longer continuum of ideal figures in relief, ceramic, metal, statuette, cameo, jewellery and so on. This mobility across forms and materials is one of the itineraries by which

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the sculpted figure accrues its meaning and a means by which its significance can be dispersed across multiple spatial and temporal locations.

The return of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures to Denmark For the first decade of its career, the Galathea was best known as the vessel that returned works by Thorvaldsen to Denmark from Italy. This was one in a series of transportations moving the sculptor’s works from Rome to home, a task nearly always undertaken by a vessel from the naval fleet.15 The return of the sculptures to Copenhagen by the Galathea was a long and logistically complicated process. The ship left Copenhagen on 1 May 1833, sailing first to North Africa on business in Tunis and Morocco.16 Following a series of peace treaties signed between 1746 and 1753, Denmark paid an annual tribute to the Barbary States (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) in exchange for protection from privateers in the Mediterranean and free passage for trading ships (as did many other nations). A ‘gift ship’ sailed each year with a cargo of tributes, principally weapons, and money.17 As the ship made its voyage to North Africa and thence up Italy’s west coast to Livorno, plans were finalized for the sculptural cargo. Thorvaldsen sent a list of works to be conveyed to Denmark to Constantin Hansen in mid-May. The list included plaster models for the Royal Academy and various marble works for major Danish institutions, as the king had demanded (the figure of Christ and the Kneeling Angel for Vor Frue Krike and the Alexander Frieze for the Christiansborg Palace), but also included royal busts and a baptismal font for Iceland.18 The works had to be moved from Rome and Carrara to Livorno, where the ship would receive them. The Galathea arrived in Livorno on 4 August 1833. After two days of quarantine, the ship entered the harbour where it was greeted by a salute, and, on 7 August, the loading of the crates began. The corvette arrived home in Copenhagen on 20 September. Crates holding the marbles were transported to Vor Frue Kirke and Christiansborg Palace, and those with the plasters to the academy, where H. E. Freund, another of Thorvaldsen’s most important students, supervised the unpacking.19 The arrival of the works was reported in the newspapers, not only in Denmark but also in Sweden and Germany.20 The font to be sent on to Iceland is a telling inclusion. This font, a version of the one installed in Brahetrolleborg Church in 1817, was intended for Myklabye as a tribute to Thorvaldsen’s Icelandic roots; Myklabye was the birthplace of

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the sculptor’s father, who was himself a carver of figureheads. The font waited in Copenhagen for six years after being delivered by the Galathea, and did not reach Iceland until 1839, when it was installed in Reykjavik Cathedral.21 What is nonetheless significant is that this was a colonial object; Iceland was a Danish colony. The Danish colonies have been rather overlooked by art historians. While there is a rich and detailed literature on the connection between Italy and Denmark – and particularly between Rome and Copenhagen – such European connections are framed by other places, other political and cultural links.22 Moreover, where the colonies have been discussed, analysis has tended to focus on single colonies rather than the empire as an extended network, a process Lars Jensen has termed ‘compartmentalization’.23 Turning our attention to the ship rather than the harbour, the voyage rather than any single landing and the extension of the Galathea’s business from the Barbary States in the south to Iceland at the Arctic Circle, the interconnectedness of Denmark with a wider world comes into focus. The route of the ship, its passages through many seas and oceans, is indicative of Denmark’s position in the world, and how that position was to change. Such routes also alert us to the voyage itself; we should not simply think about the relationship of Denmark to, say, Iceland or the West Indies or North Africa but the movement between them. Thus, the Galathea not only returned Thorvaldsen’s works to the fatherland but also participated in their dispersal across the colonies, to Iceland in this case. Similarly, one might cite the voyage of the brig the St Croix, which transported some plasters from Thorvaldsen’s studio to Copenhagen in 1825, as it returned from the Danish West Indies.24 Sculptures may have moved from Rome to Copenhagen, but they were inseparable from wider global journeys. Sculpture moved not only in cases and cargo but also in the form of the figurehead, as the decorative symbol of this mobility. The figurehead may seem to be a supplementary form of sculpture, merely decorating the ship, unlike the great works in the cargo, destined to be admired as the epitome of art. But it is the figurehead that most forcefully exemplifies the ideological usefulness of sculpture at this historical moment, as it moves through the world, weaving its web of connections, the hinge that unites navy and art, home and away.

The Thorvaldsen Medal If the carved figure of Galathea led the plasters and marbles back to Copenhagen, their return was commemorated by another decorative sculptural object: the

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Thorvaldsen Medal, designed and modelled by Christen Christensen. The medal was commissioned by Prince Christian Frederik (who became King Christian VIII in 1839). The prince was a keen numismatist and had an extensive collection of antique coins and medals.25 By his death in 1848, he had amassed over 6,000 ancient coins, of which about 4,000 were Greek, in line with his more general collecting interests. Many of these had been acquired by Christian Tuxen Falbe, the Danish consul in Tunis from 1820 to 1833, who went on to become curator of Christian’s collections of antiquities. Like the Galathea, Falbe moved between North Africa and Denmark, and his consulship in Tunis enabled him to buy many Greek and Roman coins from North African provinces.26 Once again, the relationship between Danish culture and international connections is evident. The treaties signed with the Barbary States enabled shipping and trade in North Africa. This, in turn, required the creation of a consulate, and it was Falbe’s position as consul which enabled the study and collection of antique coins from the region: coins either bought for the royal collection or which were acquired by Christian when Falbe sold his own collection in 1837. Falbe also served as a consultant on the cataloguing of Thorvaldsen’s coin collection. Thorvaldsen too was a great collector of antique coins, with around 2,500 Greek coins and 700 from Rome and Byzantium. Thus, this was a moment of particular numismatic activity in Denmark, in terms of collecting, scholarship and public display.27 As one might expect, this activity extended to medals. There had been increasing use of medals to commemorate borgerlige service in the changing political and institutional contexts of the later eighteenth century. Prince Christian was a keen collector of modern medals before and after his accession, and was eager to develop this branch of relief sculpture in Denmark. He provided support for the young Christensen, first giving him funds to travel to Paris to study. Many of the modern medals in the royal collection were French and the king was eager that developments in Paris might be mimicked in Copenhagen. Christian followed this educational opportunity by giving Christensen the commission for the C. F. Hansen medal in 1830, named for the great architect who rebuilt so much of Copenhagen in the Golden Age. Christensen was subsequently awarded the commission for the Thorvaldsen Medal. He exhibited a model of the work at the Royal Academy exhibition at Charlottenborg in 1837, and two years later presented the medal itself, which served as his Medlemsarbejde – the equivalent of a Diploma work for an Associateship in London’s Royal Academy. Christiansen knew Thorvaldsen well,

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having been part of the circle of Danish artists around the sculptor in Rome. He went on to copy many of Thorvaldsen’s works for ceramic reproductions manufactured by Bing & Grøndahl, and reproduced other Thorvaldsen sculptures on further medals.28 Thorvaldsen’s work, like so much sculpture, was exploited by many a medallist.29 This was, after all, one of the most common forms of sculptural mobility: the translation of free-standing or relief sculpture, marble or plaster, into the metal relief of the medal, or, in the art-tourist environment of Rome, gesso impressions and cameos.30 This is a clear symptom of the way in which sculpture was conceived as a reproductive art, characterized by such formal and material mobility. While busts and statues by Thorvaldsen were reproduced on medals commemorating other figures, such as Gaspare Galeazzi’s Byron Medal (1835), which replicates Thorvaldsen’s relief of the Genius of Poetry, the sculptor and his work featured most commonly on medals that commemorated and celebrated the sculptor himself. Many of these were produced. The public auction of works by the sculptor and objects from his collections that was held in Thorvaldsens Museum in October 1849 included no fewer than twenty-two such medals, all with copies of works which thematized sculpture itself.31 Christensen’s medal is very much in line with this tradition of medals for sculptors, but he represents not just the work but also its transportation and return to the fatherland; he thematizes not only sculpture but its very mobility and the relationship between the international art world of Rome and the national roots of sculpture’s triumph in Denmark. The obverse of the Thorvaldsen Medal (Figure 3.2) has the sculptor in the position of emperor or monarch, in profile facing left. This relief is a translation of Bissen’s bust of Thorvaldsen, shown at the Charlottenborg exhibition in 1833. The bust had already generated much interest, and its transportation from Rome to Copenhagen was the lead item on the front page of the Kjøbenhavnsposten on 1 November 1832; the newspaper declared the bust to be ‘of such a noble, powerful character, and made with such taste and delicacy, that it is, without doubt, the most excellent work yet seen by this young sculptor’.32 The style of Bissen’s bust, clearly imitative of Thorvaldsen’s, was perfect for translation into a numismatic version. The broad treatment of the face, with its smooth expanse of forehead and cheeks, and the sparsely modelled surface with its clear but deep divisions offered a stable and hieratic image. Indeed, the rigour and clarity of Bissen’s bust, upholding the primacy of ideal sculpture, is ideal for its reworking in the small decorative object. More generally, we witness the way in which

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sculpture can make and repeat an image, reproducing that image in different forms, materials and sizes, circulating it across numerous spaces and places, in order to turn the person into an icon.33 Around the head of Thorvaldsen is a transcription of the Alexander Frieze. This is a particularly important work, aesthetically and politically, and one with both national and international significance. It was first made for Napoleon, and was one of four triumphal friezes installed in the Quirinal Palace, which had been chosen as the imperial residence in Rome (although Napoleon never actually took up residence there). Thorvaldsen was commissioned to depict Alexander’s entry into Babylon as an allegory of Napoleon’s conquest of Europe and triumphal visit to Rome.34 The frieze is 35 metres in length and was completed in 1812, an important part of the imperial interior, as a watercolour by Franz Heinrich from 1848 shows (Figure 3.8). A version of the frieze was commissioned by Frederik VI in 1818, for installation in the Christiansborg

Figure 3.8  Franz Heinrich, Sala del Thorvaldsen, Rome, 1845, pen and brown ink, watercolour and white gouache on paper, 27.5 × 33.5 cm. Thaw Collection, CooperHewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

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Palace, which Hansen had recently rebuilt following the disastrous fire of 1794. The connection with Napoleon was of no interest to Christian, nor that the work represented military victory.35 More important was the fact that it had been made by Thorvaldsen. Peter Malling, who was the stadsbygmester or city architect, had visited Thorvaldsen’s Rome studio in 1812, while the sculptor was modelling the frieze, and immediately alerted Prince Christian not only to the beauty of the frieze, which ‘calls the Golden Age of Greece back to the present’, but to the importance of ensuring that this masterwork could be enjoyed by Thorvaldsen’s compatriots and not only by Napoleon.36 As a result, Christian’s father, Frederik VI, commissioned the frieze from Thorvaldsen. The triumph of Napoleon was transmuted into the triumph of the Danish absolutist monarchy. Thorvaldsen’s friend and patron Herman Schubart sent a letter to Christian Frederik on behalf of the sculptor in 1818 to clarify that the frieze would present an allegory of Frederik VI’s rule: ‘The entry of Alexander into Babylon, and the grateful people who come to meet the Prince to offer him their gifts, will be an allegory of the Danish people paying homage to their sovereign.’37 Schubart also reassured Christian that the frieze would be an original work; that is, it would be adapted for Christiansborg, rather than simply being a straightforward copy of either the version in the Quirinal or that in the Villa Sommariva. Concern about the status of the frieze as a copy was less a matter of the work of art itself, and more of ownership. Christian knew that Count Giovanni Battista Sommariva had a version of the Quirinal frieze and made it clear that it would be inappropriate for the Danish king to purchase a replica of something already owned by ‘a private man’.38 There was no need for an original, in the sense of a unique object, unlike any other; but Frederik VI required a version that was more than a copy, in the sense of a mechanical imitation, in order that his own status remain unsullied. The consequence of this is that we are not dealing with the moving of a single object, such as the passage of the Apollo Belvedere from Rome to Paris, but with an object expanding, occupying different spaces concurrently. If the Galathea’s figurehead, once completed, has a more straightforward itinerary, moving through the world along clearly defined routes, here we see an alternative kind of object itinerary: the conceptual object that takes many different material forms, and thus spreads out across space and time. Six full-size versions of the frieze were produced, and as it came to decorate more than one palace, the frieze accrued in meaning, each iteration and relocation establishing and reinforcing historical and geographical connections. This is emphasized by the decorative quality: that this is part of an

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interior, embedded in imperial or royal culture, or some other format, such as the medal. One might say that the aura of the work is not a consequence of its uniqueness but of this very ability to connect through repetition. Christensen cleverly adapted the horizontal frieze to the circular format of the medal: a testament not only to his prowess as a medailleur but also to the adaptability of decorative sculpture or sculpture’s decorative potential. Here too is a repetition that is not a copy. He manipulated the spaces between the groups in order to adapt them to the circular form of the medal, and so ensured that the arrangement of the frieze around the medal worked in a similar way to its installation in the Quirinal Palace. The focal point is Alexander himself, in the room over the fireplace, on the medal at the top. Opposite Alexander both in the room and on the medal is the allegorical figure of the Tigris, from whence two processions proceed in opposite directions: the Babylonians bearing gifts for the emperor moving clockwise, and Alexander’s troops following the emperor and moving anticlockwise. Christensen inevitably had to select particular sections of the frieze, since the size and form of the medal did not allow a complete transcription. Again, there is a similarity with full-size versions in that the frieze was sometimes shortened or lengthened to fit the room for which it was made; here again the decorative quality of sculpture is evident in its adaptability. On the right-hand side of the medal, Christensen selected the first group behind Alexander, his horse Bucephalus and then groups of troops; on the left-hand side, Mazeus, the Persian general behind the figure of Victory, urging his children to meet the new emperor, followed by Bagophanes leading a tribute of gifts for Alexander, including an altar, frankincense, musicians and horses. This section shows very clearly how Christensen edited the frieze in order to adapt it as a medal: he includes only one warrior behind Mazeus rather than the group of three, removes some of the musicians, and includes only the group of horses at the end of the procession. In reducing the composition, Christensen eschewed some of the more pictorial elements such as the shepherd and sheep, the fisherman catching a fish and the elephant loaded with the spoils of war. This may have been, in part, a practical decision, in terms of what would be legible when reduced to very small size on the medal. It also emphasizes the key characteristics of the frieze: the triumphant Greeks and the conquered Persians, and the bearing of gifts. These are the parts of the frieze that explicitly emulate the Parthenon frieze, and, thus, the sculptural heritage of the medal is writ large in small scale. While Thorvaldsen’s work uses ostentatiously high relief, Christensen’s medal inevitably returned to the lower relief of the Parthenon.

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Here is a further sense of mobility, a move away from and back into the surface in the process of translation. The reverse of the medal has an allegory at the centre: Galathea, the sea nymph, hands Thorvaldsen’s Cupid with the Lyre to Dania, a female figure representing Denmark. Galathea sits on a dolphin while Dania occupies a throne, next to which is a shield marked with three Danish lions. With a stylized wave design beneath them, the relationship symbolizes both the reaching of land by the Galathea and Denmark as a maritime nation. The Cupid, the artistic offspring of the nation, is returned to its adoring mother. The figure of Galathea is, of course, a reference to the royal naval corvette. The ship was named in all reports of the return of the sculptures, both in anticipation at its arrival and in subsequent writing; rather than a generic voyage, Galathea was insistently identified as the agent, and this agency is endorsed in the medal’s allegory.39 Around the allegory are sixteen of Thorvaldsen’s works returned to Denmark. At the apex is Christ, which occupies the equivalent place of Alexander on the obverse. This replicates its importance as the figure at the altar of Vor Frue Kirke, and insists on the Protestant, and specifically Lutheran, status of sculptor and nation. At the very bottom are The Three Graces. The Christian and the antique are aligned; Thorvaldsen is both the great ideal sculptor, imitating the antique, and the great sculptor of the Christian age. Between these Christensen has arranged many of the most famous works, often placed opposite each other in pairs; for example, Night and Day are one-third of the way round on right and left respectively, while the seated male nudes of the Shepherd Boy and Mercury flank the Three Graces. The medal condenses relationships between sculpture and the decorative. There are sculptures that become part of the decorative schema of the medal, moving from free-standing marble figure to stamped relief, and there are relief sculptures that had a decorative function, such as Night, Day and the Alexander Frieze, which are then given a further decorative function by the medallist. In addition to the formal exchanges between forms of decorative sculpture, Christensen treated the literal mobility of sculpture, in the meta-representational allegory of Galathea handing Dania the sculpture. The long, complex narrative is reduced to a single instant in which the nymph passes the object to the nation. Transportation through Italy, packing, loading, passage through water, quarantine, unloading, all marked by bureaucratic detail, accident and breakage, disappear from view, in the direct relationship between nymph and nation, the simple act of passing an object from one hand to another. Compare this with the stato delle casse, the list of works for transportation, complete with the

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Figure 3.9  Stato delle Casse spedite in Danimarca dal Sig. Commendator Thorvaldsen sulla Corvetta La Galatea di S. M. Danese (detail), 1833. Thorvaldsens Museum Archive, Copenhagen, m34, nr.41.

dimensions of works and crates, and freight charges (Figure 3.9). The listing is characterized by an organized grid, with figures added at the bottom of each column to identify the space needed, the number of things to be loaded and, on the final page, the charges to be made. This is a more-or-less standardized format, as is evident from similar documents pertaining both to this particular transport and to others. Of course, one would expect nothing else. The moving of the works requires logistical and bureaucratic planning, while the allegorical representation is designed to simplify, to show the essential fact of transportation in its equally standardized and conventional form, albeit a higher visual language which evades the stresses and strains of everyday practice. In both, design structures the particular conception of sculptural mobility. Nevertheless, it is striking that the decorative serves as an erasure of the statistical, and the allegory disavows  the bureaucracy it serves. As is generally the case, the languages of sculpture and decoration offer what one might call a magical image of state power; that is, an image that suspends time and hides the necessary workings of that power. In 1836, an item in Dansk Kunstblad about the model for the medal, mentions ‘a ship bobbing on the waves’ behind Dania and Galathea.40

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While Christensen may have removed this, in part, to clarify the composition in the small space of the medal’s surface, the absence of the ship also works to show mobility to be as uncomplicated, natural and instantaneous as Galathea appearing before Dania after a short enchanted ride on dolphin back. These two visual languages present two aspects of statehood; the document pictures the practical work of the modern state and its bureaucratic structures while the antique provides an ideological image of the nation in its associations with an almost timeless and idealized conception of royal power. There is not only a revealing difference between the medal and the documentation, but one might also note a further difference between the Alexander Frieze and the frieze painted on the exterior of Thorvaldsens Museum in the late 1840s. The latter frieze, painted by Jørgen Sonne, shows Thorvaldsen’s own homecoming in 1838, this time on the frigate Rota, and the unloading of works. As one follows the frieze around the building from the welcome scene opposite Slotsholmen Canal, one sees workmen carrying crates and objects into the museum, watched by different members of the public from barefooted children to well-dressed members of the bourgeoisie. Here the literal process of movement is depicted. Bindesbøll, the architect of the museum, said that he wanted the frieze to serve like the signage of a menagerie, letting the public know exactly what they would see inside the building, and to encourage them to follow the path of the workers through the doors.41 In part, this is testament to Bindesbøll’s extraordinary imagination, evident also in the design of the museum itself, and to Sonne’s ability in fresco to conceive a modern version of the frieze for a new kind of museum; Thorvaldsens was the first ever museum designed to represent a single artist.42 However, this frieze also signalled a political shift. In 1848 absolutism was abolished, and Thorvaldsens Museum, opening that year, became a symbol of the new political order and of a new national public culture. The museum included both a reduced marble version of the Alexander Frieze (carved by Pietro Galli in 1828), and, in the Great Hall, greeting the visitors as they arrived, a full-size plaster running around the space.43 Here the frieze acquired a meaning very different from the version in the Christiansborg Palace. It now figured as the triumph of Thorvaldsen, and, in the wake of 1848, of a national Danishness that was distinct from the imperial and absolutist. This shift is explicitly represented in Sonne’s frieze. Rather than an allegory or symbol of the public, actual members of the public are shown: middle-class couples, working-class boys, the workmen who carry the sculptures into the

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museum and, not least, the crowd greeting the great man as he steps onto Danish soil after being away for so many years. The magical exchange between Galathea and Denmark is replaced with the arrival of the ship in the harbour, and the subsequent strain and heft of lifting and carrying crates – crates that could be checked off against the freight schedule. The frieze on the museum also includes a ship’s figurehead (Figure 3.10). On the back wall, the figure of Rota, the Valkyrie for whom the ship was named, stands out at the centre of the panel. Sonne has reduced the ship itself to a linear design, the planks of the body and the ropes of the rigging forming a pattern across the flatness of the wall, ensuring that the figure of Rota stands out, becoming a metonym for the ship she leads and, perhaps, for naval activity and its cultural significance more generally. This figurehead had also been designed by Eckersberg.44 Unlike the idealized Fortuna, the figure of Rota is coloured, a symptom of the shift in taste from classicizing figures emulating ideal sculpture, of which Galathea was one of the last, to national and contemporary figures, which were polychromed. This shift is more than a mere change of taste. It is also symptomatic of the move to constitutional monarchy and the new state. The use of red and white reinforced the Danish origins and national significance of the figure, as if she were draped an embodiment of the Dannebrog. This is now a changed Denmark, and Sonne and Bindesbøll make this explicit. The

Figure 3.10  Jørgen Sonne, Frieze on Thorvaldsens Museum, 1846–50. Detail showing the figurehead of the Rota. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen. Photo: Torben Retboll.

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figurehead is positioned directly beneath the inscription that lays out the date of the museum’s opening and the fact that it was supported by the king, the Commune of Copenhagen and – crucially – ‘citizens of all standing’. As such, the figurehead begins to represent the new conception of the state, as Galathea perhaps represented the old. The inclusion of ‘citizens of all standing’ and the city commune in the inscription above the figurehead of Rota has greater import than the royal names for the meaning of the sculpture being unloaded and heroically hefted into the museum by the workmen, and examined by citizens of all standing. The medal, the stato delle casse and the Sonne frieze represent different visual languages for representing and actually conceptualizing the mobility of sculpture, with particular formal, decorative or pictorial conventions. Indeed, we might describe these as architectures of representation: the forms through which the state is characterized, not in terms of imagery but in the symbolic spatial organization and decorative structures. Thus, we see the space of administrative order; the space of unfolding pictorialism, opening up historical and political transformations to the present; and the space of allegory, representing permanence and the collapsing of history into an ahistorical present. Each of these launches the meaning of decorative sculpture and its movement in relation to changing conceptions of the state.

Galathea in the Nicobar Islands The Galathea remained a well-known ship in Copenhagen, often featuring in royal rituals.45 The fame of the Galathea was most securely cemented, however, by its circumnavigation of the globe in 1845–7. In a voyage ordered by Christian VIII, the ship sailed from Copenhagen on 24 June 1845, captained by Steen Bille.46 The circumnavigation had two principal objectives. One was scientific: to collect natural history specimens and samples of water, to take soundings of the oceans and to gather meteorological data. Some of these instructions were quite specific. For example, the king and his ministers were insistent that samples should be taken from Tierra del Fuego, in order to enhance understanding of marine life in Greenland.47 These instructions point to the other principal purpose of the voyage: colonial and diplomatic business. Bille’s tasks included the relinquishment of Tranquebar, the Danish colony on the East Indian coast, to the British East India Company, and negotiating trade with South American

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nations. The Galathea was the agent of Denmark and its international reach, as well as a symbol of Danish influence from Copenhagen to Kolkata and Tierra del Fuego to Greenland. One of the most important of the colonial ventures was to investigate the possibility of recolonizing the Nicobar Islands, located southeast of India and about 150 kilometres north of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. While the Nicobars had no value in terms of resources – earlier colonial ventures had been far from lucrative – the islands did serve a strategic purpose as a stopping point for sea voyages.48 Denmark already had a long and complicated history in the Nicobars. While the Danes had considered colonization as early as the 1720s, it was in 1756 that the islands first became a possession of the Danish Asiatic Company, and later the same year a colony of the Danish crown. This venture failed, not least because of widespread illness. A second attempt to colonize in 1768 had similar results, as did the subsequent bid by David Rosen in the early 1830s.49 After a series of plans to recolonize were made in the late 1830s, all of which were dismissed by the state, a proposal by J. Mackey & Co. was accepted. Mackey & Co. was a British company based in Kolkata, but one that had very strong connections with the Danish colony of Frederiksnagore (Serampore); indeed, Donald Campbell Mackey became the Danish consul in Kolkata in 1845.50 Mackey & Co. needed a refuelling station for steamships travelling between India and China, and offered to put up half the money if Denmark would contribute the rest.51 Christian VIII agreed, on condition that the Danish flag would fly over the islands. While this was first and foremost a trade agreement, which would enable Denmark to generate trade outside the increasing dominance of the British East India Company and, therefore, free of British customs, the king and his advisers also hoped that it would lead to a settler colony, with potential benefits from fishing, forestry and mining minerals. The presence of the Dannebrog over the Nicobars, however, signalled a symbolic function: to mark a Danish presence in the Indian Ocean and continued colonial activity, in spite of the failure of Tranquebar and Frederiksnagore.52 Thus, after sailing first to Madeira, from there to Tranquebar, and having disposed of that colony, the Galathea proceeded to Kolkata, where Bille acquired a further vessel for the investigation and potential recolonization of the Nicobars: the Ganges, a steamship that had belonged to the British East India Company.53 He also recruited a crew of Indian and Chinese men. Just as the figure of Mackey does, the crew reveals the internationalism and cosmopolitanism of colonial ventures by this point in the nineteenth century.54

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Once landed at Nancowry harbour, the decorative, including sculpture, again became the currency of colonial exchange. Nicobarese chiefs, appointed to serve as agents of the crown, were presented with Danish uniforms: ‘a white shirt, a pair of white trousers, and a hat bearing the name of the Galathea’ as well as a red sash.55 The chiefs had also been given silver batons marked with insignia of Christian VIII.56 Their new identity as colonial subjects was figured as a gift, as status bestowed by the Danish king, appropriately in red and white, like the Dannebrog, and bearing the royal cipher.57 The Nicobarese, meanwhile, gave Bille an object representing the Galathea and her crew, with some Nicobarese figures aboard, recognizable from their distinctive hairstyles tied in topknots, and a couple of seabirds (see Figure 3.3). The ship was originally placed on a bed of seaweed, which represented the waves.58 The work is typical of the Nicobars, demonstrating a flatness of carving, and a marked linearity. Moreover, the image of the European ship was by no means unusual in Nicobarese material culture. Because the islands had such a long history of colonial, missionary and trading contacts with Asia and Europe, the Nicobarese were well acquainted with a wide range of vessels. Other artefacts, such as henta boards, routinely depict rows of different ships; an example in the British Museum includes a French warship, a Chinese junk and what may be a two-master Indonesian pinisi alongside a Nicobarese sailing vessel (Figure 3.11). Just as the islanders used English and Portuguese in their encounters with Bille, so they understood the different languages of naval architecture.59 On its return to Copenhagen, the image of the Galathea entered the collection of the recently opened ethnographic museum, the world’s first such institution. While the ethnographic collection had been accessible to the public since 1824, when the collections from the Royal Kunstkammer were reorganized and re-installed as Kunstmuseet, it was in 1841 that C. J. Thomsen brought together ethnographic objects from the Royal Kunstkammer as, first, the Ethnographical Department, and then, eight years later, as the Royal Ethnographic Museum. At the heart of the collection were objects from Danish colonies.60 In 1839 Thomsen had written to Frederik VI asserting that ‘as a maritime nation and colonial power, Denmark must have a colonial and maritime museum’.61 Rather than mere glimpses of Denmark’s connections to the Indian Ocean, Greenland, the West Indies, the Barbary Coast and elsewhere, Thomsen wanted the ethnographic museum to make Denmark’s place in the global network fully visible. As such, he sought assistance and material from colonial administrators, merchants, consuls and naval personnel, of whom Steen Bille was an important instance.62

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Figure 3.11  Henta board from the Nicobar Islands, n.d., areca palm spathe, 92.2 × 95.7 × 3 cm. British Museum, London.

The Nicobarese objects brought back from the Galathea’s trip are listed in the short guide to the collection published in 1859 by C. L. Steinhauer, Thomsen’s right-hand man at the new museum. The museum context for the individual exhibits was laid out in a foreword (dated 1852) and introduction by Thomsen. He explained that the collection was shaped first by the sense of Denmark as a colonial power, and the need to record the contribution of ‘our colonies’ to the collection and its understanding.63 He realized, however, the need to develop a general ethnographic museum, one including, insofar as would be possible, all nations outside European culture, and to identify the particularity of these cultures before they were displaced by the impact of European global ventures. The development of the broader ethnographic museum was also a comparative exercise, and one that would present a totalized vision of humanity. Thomsen divided the collection into three sections: first, nations which ‘do not themselves work metals and consequently may be seen as standing on the lowest step of civilisation’; second, nations which work metals well, but which have not

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developed a literate culture; and finally nations that have both these conditions for culture.64 The Nicobarese objects were in the first of these three sections. Steinhauer noted that the Danes had made various attempts to colonize the islands but had failed because of the unhealthy climate and the natives’ disinclination to work. The list of exhibits includes the carving of the Galathea given to Bille. The original protocol, listing the accessions to the ethnographic collection, described it as an image of a European sailing ship from the Nicobars. It is a profile imitation made out of wood. The ship has two masts and figures partly in European suits have been placed on it. Seaweed has been tied to the ship, probably to resemble water. On one of the sails birds have been placed. The ship has been donated by Mr. Bille who received it during his time on the Galathea.65

Steinhauer’s guidebook gives a briefer account, describing the object as ‘[a] representation of a Danish warship, the crude form of which shows the Nicobarese very imperfect ability to represent’. However, Steinhauer does point to one particular detail, adding ‘it is interesting to note that by depicting the compass, they must have understood its importance for shipping’.66 The guidebook also mentions the inclusion of ships in the brief description of a ‘billig Tavle’, or what we now know to be a henta board. Such a ‘bright altarpiece’ was indeed of spiritual significance for the Nicobarese, used to ward off evil, illness and misfortune. Steinhauer describes the iconography as a representation of the Nicobarese conception of the universe, comprising sun, moon and rainbows in the sky; fishes in the harbour; birds in the air and ‘as a symbol of the highest level of human perfection – a European ship’.67 The ship is read both as a sign of the civilization of which the Nicobarese are on only the bottom step and the agent of an awakening consciousness of technology, evident in the inclusion of the compass in the carving. However, the way in which power is conceived and represented by the Nicobarese was more complex than Steinhauer knew. The claim that the European ship on the henta board and, by extension, in the carving of the Galathea itself was a symbol of a human hierarchy was rather overstated. The presence of ships, along with objects such as umbrellas, chronometers, ships’ compasses, tools and Western dress, on Nicobarese objects was not simply an articulation of Nicobarese failings and European perfection but, as Claire Wintle points out, a means of ‘mark[ing] and contextualis[ing] contact with other nations’.68 In other words, these objects represent a negotiation of power

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or a relationship between locals and Europeans rather than a straightforward hierarchy. Moreover, while Steinhauer was correct to interpret the henta board as representing Nicobarese cosmology, he wilfully misunderstood the particular chain of being represented. The European ship is far from ‘the highest level’ but merely takes its place alongside everyday items, huts and people, between the sun and the anthropomorphic God, Deuse, at the top, and the mermaids, fish and crocodiles at the bottom.69 Thus, the ships feature as part of a system that is very different from the theoretical hierarchy of European ethnography. It is also telling that henta boards and other things were often made for sale to Europeans, and, indeed, Steinhauer notes this in relation to the boards in the ethnographic museum in Copenhagen.70 The Nicobarese artists were clearly aware of their objects as agents of cultural exchange, as part of a broader system of trade in which they and their islands were implicated. This contextualization is more pronounced in the carving of the Galathea. Here, Danes and Nicobarese are represented side by side, the colonial encounter itself. This does not suggest the fixity of an absolute hierarchy; this too is about mobility and change. In the course of the voyage home, then, the meaning of the Nicobarese object changed. The lines traced by the ship’s course through the Indian and Atlantic oceans overlaid the lines of the carving. From a society marked by cultural exchange and hybridity in the context of an extraordinarily diverse ethnic environment, the Nicobarese object moved to the Danish museum, where it became an emblem of the relationship between what were seen as the lowest and highest stages of civilization. An object that represented complexity and Bille’s often warm and respectful relationship with the Nicobarese became evidence for an absolutist world vision. This final episode, and its associated objects, endorses the ways in which decorative sculpture could articulate and cement the relationships between institutions in absolutist Denmark; that is, how sculpture not only represented the nation but also embodied the ways in which absolutism operated through the matrix of navy, academy, science and museum. More than any other form, it is perhaps decorative sculpture that exemplifies this mobility from object to object, from institution to institution, from place to place, through connections both literal (such as navy and art academy) and symbolic. These international exchanges were often in the form of gifts or tributes: from the Galathea to the Barbary States, from Galathea to Dania, from Denmark to Iceland, and later to the Nicobarese, and thence from the Nicobars to Denmark, and we might add from Babylon to Alexander, or even

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the Thorvaldsen Medal to its recipient. These exchanges, involving or marked by decorative sculpture as a symbol of donors and recipients, both represent and embody Denmark’s international and colonial status. Second, in both representation and in practice, these objects pass from hand to hand, gestures which conceal the bureaucratic and logistical freight. Decorative sculpture occludes the complex structures of state, colony and global relationships. This is why it serves ideology so well. In each case, whether Galathea be the apotropaic figurehead, the mythical nymph riding her dolphin or the colonial object displayed in the ethnographic collection, the gift and its associated ritual generate fantasies of exchange, which can mask the concrete conditions of power. This sequence of international exchanges reveals something else. The 1830s and 1840s are often discussed, quite rightly, as a period in which nationalism and nationalist culture emerged very strongly in Denmark as new political factions mobilized for a shift away from absolutism towards constitutional monarchy. This new nationalism has been understood as the impetus for trends in the visual arts, trends that turned inwards to find the nation and its history within its own borders.71 The Galathea and its objects remind us, however, that this is only part of the story. We need to remember that the maritime nation finds its own image elsewhere, out in the world, even the maritime nation that is reforming its constitution and living with greatly reduced colonial possessions. Decorative sculpture is of particular importance as the vehicle that carries this image. From the ship itself, with its figurehead symbolizing a multinational colonial power, to the medal’s iconography marking Denmark as a nation on land and sea, to the ethnographic collection where the colonies and the wider world reside in Copenhagen: all these return Denmark to itself.

Acknowledgements I would like to extend my profound thanks to Ernst Jonas Bencard and his colleagues at Thorvaldsens Museum Archive. Without this exemplary and extraordinary resource, it would not have been possible to write this chapter. My thanks also go to Amel Rahbe and Bente Wolff at the National Museum, Copenhagen, for their very generous and invaluable help and to Imogen Hart, Eleanor Hughes and Claire Jones.

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Notes 1 For examples of scholarship which concentrate on sculpture and the question of mobility, see: Sarah Ayres and Elettra Carbone, eds, Sculpture and the Nordic Region (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Martina Droth and Michael Hatt, eds, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave: A Transatlantic Object, special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016): http:​/​/www​​.19th​​c​-art​​world​​wide.​​org​/s​​​ ummer​​16/. My thinking about mobility has also been shaped by discussions of the ‘object itinerary’, for example: Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, eds, Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015), 3–20; Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, ‘Introduction: Biographies, Travels and Itineraries of Things’, in Hahn and Weiss, eds, Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things (Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2013), 1–14. For a differently theorized, and brilliant, account, see Richard Drayton, ‘Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge’, in David Cannadine, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 72–82. 2 Claire Jones, Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848 to 1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1. 3 For a detailed account of the ship’s expeditions, see J. H. Schulz and K. E. Ackermann, Den Danske Marine, 1814–1848: Orlogsfarten (København: S. L. Møllers Bogtrykkeri, 1957), particularly 210–17 and 270–3. 4 Hans Christian Bjerg, A History of the Royal Danish Navy, 1510–2010 (København: Statens Forsvarshistoriske Museum, 2010), 135. 5 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Holger Danske’, in H. C. Andersens Samlede Skrifter, Bd. 13 (København: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1879), 328–33. 6 Hans Christian Bjerg og John Erichsen, Danske Orlogsskibe 1690–1860: Konstruktion og dekoration (København: Lademann, 1980), 203; Hanne Poulsen, Gallionsfigurer og ornamenter på danske skibe og i danske samlinger (København: Rhodos, 1976), 49–57; Frank Allen Rasmussen, ‘Virtue and Maternal Love’, in Mogens Bencard, ed., Intersections: Art and Science in the Golden Age (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000), 160–7. 7 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1. 8 Poulsen, Gallionsfigurer og ornamenter, 23–9, 50–2. 9 Bjerg og Erichsen, Danske Orlogsskibe, 157. 10 Michael Stammers has suggested that the use of the wax model was a specifically Danish practice: Michael Stammers, Figureheads and Ship Carving (London: Chatham Publishing, 2005), 91.

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11 Hanne Poulsen, ‘Gallionsfigurer og anden dansk skibsornamentik indtil 1850’, Søfartsmuseet Årbog, 1974, 106. 12 Hanne Poulsen, ‘Danske Gallionsfigurer efter 1850. Gallionsbilledhuggerne H. J. og W. E. Møen’, Søfartsmuseet Årbog, 1975, 49. 13 Jens Riise Kristensen, Flådens Ansigt: Galionsfigurer fra Den Danske Marine (Stenstrup: Skib Forlag, 2001), 14. 14 Poulsen, ‘Danske Gallionsfigurer efter 1850’, 55. 15 The one exception was in 1828, when a private merchant ship, the Therese, was used: http:​/​/ark​​ivet.​​thorv​​aldse​​nsmus​​eum​.d​​k​/art​​icles​​/tran​​sport​​ation​​-of​-t​​horva​​ldsen​​ s​-art​​works​​-​to​-c​​openh​​agen-​​1828.​ 16 C. F. Wansel, Danmark og Barbareskerne, 1746–1845 (København: Jacob Lund, 1919), 148. 17 Wansel, Danmark og Barbareskerne, 10–11. Accounts more frequently refer to the tributes as protection against pirates, but as Erik Gøbel has pointed out, the threat came from privateers, empowered by the Barbary States to seize European vessels and take their crews as slaves: Erik Gøbel, ‘The Danish Algerian Sea Passes, 1747– 1838: An Example of Extraterritorial Production of Human Security’, Historical Social Research, 35 no. 4 (2010): 167–9. 18 Letter from Thorvaldsen to C. F. Hansen, 16 May 1833: Thorvaldsens Museum Archive (hereafter TMA), m18 1833 nr.50. 19 Letter from C. W. Eckersberg and Just Mathias Thiele to Thorvaldsen, 8 October 1833: TMA, m18 1833 nr. 98. 20 For example, Kjøbenshavnsposten, Syvende Aargang, no. 190, 17 September 1833, 759; Dagen, no. 234, 1 October 1833, 1; Aftonbladet, 8 October 1833. 21 See Kira Kofoed, ‘Døbefonten til Brahetrolleborg Kirke’, http:​/​/ark​​ivet.​​thorv​​aldse​​ nsmus​​eum​.d​​k​/art​​ikler​​/doeb​​efont​​en​-ti​​l​-bra​​hetr​o​​llebo​​rg​-ki​​rke. 22 See, for example: Emma Salling, ‘Kunstakademiet i København og dets Elever i Rom 1830–1850’, in Hannemarie Ragn Jensen, Solfried Söderlind and EvaLena Benetsson, Inspirationens Skatkammer: Rom og skandinaviske Kunstnere i 1800-tallet (København: Museum Tusculanum Forlag, 2003), 71–91; Bjarne Jørnæs, Torben Melander, and Stig Miss, eds, Kunst og Liv i Thorvaldsens Rom (København: Thorvaldsens Museum, 1992); Gerhard Spielmann und Heinz Bott, hrsg., Kunstlerleben in Rom. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844). Der dänische Bildhauer und seine deutschen Freunde (Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1991). 23 Lars Jensen, ‘Denmark and Its Colonies: Introduction’, in Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen, eds, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and Its Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 60. 24 Klaus Dahl, Det Vestindiske Møblement: en dansk kolonihistorie i 107 kasser (København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 2016), 80. The triangular relationship of

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Copenhagen, the Roman art world and the Danish colonies in the West Indies is also interestingly revealed by a letter from Johan Frederik Bardenfleth, the previous governor of the Danish West Indies, to Thorvaldsen, sent with the brig St Croix as it travelled from the Caribbean to collect sculptures in Italy: letter from Bardenfleth to Thorvaldsen, 13 April 1825: TMA, m.10 1825 nr. 44. Jørgen Steen Jensen, ‘Christian VIII as Numismatist: His Collection of Coins and Medals’, in Bodil Bundgaard Rasmussen, Jørgen Steen Jensen and John Lund, eds, Christian VII and the National Museum: Antiquities, Coins, Medals (Copenhagen: National Museum, 2000), 45–73. Otto Mørkholm, ‘The Danish Contribution to the Study of Ancient Numismatics, 1780–1901’, in Otto Mørkholm, ed., Den Kongelige Mønt- og Medaillesamling, 1781–1901 (København: Nationalmuseet, 1981), 144–5. Falbe was also one of the world’s major scholars of antique coins from North Africa: Christian Tuxen Falbe, Numismatique de l’ancienne Afrique, ouvrage préparé et commencé par C. T. Flabe et J. Chr. Lindberg, refait, achevé et publié par L. Müller (København: Imprimerie de Bianco Luno, 1860–1862). Of particular significance is the development of the Royal Cabinet of Coins and Medals, after P. O. Brøndsted was appointed Keeper in 1832: see Jørgen Steen Jensen, ‘P. O. Brøndsted as Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Coins and Medals’, in Bodil Bundgaard Rasmussen, Jørgen Steen Jensen, John Lund and Michael Märcher, eds, Peter Oluf Brøndsted (1780–1842): A Danish Classicist in His European Context (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2008), 249–63. Bredo Grandjean, Biscuit efter Thorvaldsen (København: Thorvaldsens Museum, 1978); Kirsten Bendixen, Thorvaldsen og Medaljekunsten (København: Thorvaldsens Museum, 1980), 40. For an overview, see Bendixen, Thorvaldsen og Medaljekunsten. Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt, eds, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 213–19. The auction included two copies of Goetze’s medal, as well as four copies of the same medal with a frontal rather than profile portrait of Thorvaldsen; four copies of Brandt’s medal; three copies of Voigt’s; plus four of Gazpare Galeazzi’s Thorvaldsen medal, representing Prometheus and Minerva, and three of Anton Friedrich König’s which had The Three Graces and Amor on the reverse: Fortegnelse over endeel af Thorvaldsens Værker i Marmor og Gips af Thorvaldsens Efterladenskaber (København: Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 1849), 27–31. ‘. . . i en saa ædel, kraftig Characteer og med saa megen Smag og Delicatesse, at den udentvivl er det fortrinligste Værk, man endnu her har seet af den unge Skulptor’:

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Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Kjøbenhavnsposten, Sjette Aargang, no. 175, 1832: TMA, Thorvaldsens Museum Småtryk-Samling 1832, Kjøbenhavns-Posten 1.11. Author’s translation. ‘Sculpture and Ceremonial’, in Droth, Edwards and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 102–43. Bjarne Jørnæs, ‘Thorvaldsen’s “Triumph of Alexander” in the Palazzo del Quirinale’, in Patrick Kragelund and Mogens Nykjær, eds, Thorvaldsen. L’ambiente, l’influsso, il mito (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1991), 35–41; Stefano Grandesso, Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) (Milan: Silvano, 2015), 102–19; Adriana Capriotti, ‘The Palazzo del Quirinale from Napoleon to the Republic’, in Franco Borsi, ed., The Palazzo del Quirinale (Milan: Electa, 1994), 201–43; and, for an account of the role of the Orientalist scholar J. D. Åkenblad as adviser to Thorvaldsen, see: Frederik Thomasson, The Life of J. D. Åkenblad: Egyptian Decipherment and Orientalism in Revolutionary Times (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 366–71. Jens Engberg, Magten og Kulturen: Dansk Kulturpolitik 1750–1900 (København: Gads Forlag, 2005), Bd. 2, 31. ‘. . . at . . . kalde Grækernes gyldne Periode tilbage i den nærværende Tidsalder’ Letter from Peter Malling to Prince Christian Frederik, Rome, 20 March 1812, in Kong Christian VIIIs Breve, 1796–1813, udgivet af Det Konglige Danske Selskab for Fædrelandets Historie ved Axel Linvald, under medvirken af Albert Fabritius (København: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1965), Bd. 2, 91–2. Author’s translation. ‘. . . l’entrée d’Alexandre a Babylonie, et le peuple reconnaisant qui vient à la rencontre de ce Prince pour lui offrir des dons, soit la pensée allegorique du Peuple Danois qui offre à Son Souverain l’homage de son plus bel ouvrage’: Letter from Herman Schubart to Prince Christian Frederik, 9 May 1818, Rigsarkivet, København; available at the TMA at: https​:/​/ar​​kivet​​.thor​​valds​​ensmu​​seum.​​dk​/do​​ kumen​​te​r​/e​​a1316​. Author’s translation. Thorvaldsen also sent a letter, transcribed by Schubart, to the prince on the same date confirming that the frieze would be ‘an original, and not a copy’: letter from Thorvaldsen to Prince Christian Frederik, 9 May 1818, TMA, m35 I, nr. 3. J. M. Thiele, Thorvaldsen i Rom. Efter den afdøde Kunstners Brevvexlinger, egenhændige Optegnelser og andre efterladte Papirer (København: C. A Reitzel, 1854), vol. 1, 371. ‘Plastik und Bildhauer’, Kunst-Blatt gebildete Stände, no. 103, 1833, 412; Frederik Barfod, Thorvaldsensk Album (København, 1844), 119; Prof. N. Høyen, ‘Om Thorvaldsen og hans Museum’, Fædrelandet, 18 March 1837, 693. ‘I Baggrunden gynger et Skib paa Bølgerne’: Dansk Kunstblad, Bd. 1, Nr. 18, 15 December 1836, 150. Author’s translation. Bente Lange, Thorvaldsen’s Museum: Architecture – Colour – Light (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2002), 130.

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42 Peter Thule Kristensen, Gottlieb Bindesbøll: Denmark’s First Modern Architect (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2013), 108–11; Lange, Thorvaldsen’s Museum, 125–46; Hannemarie Ragn Jensen, ‘Jørgen Sonnes frise’, Meddelelser fra Thorvaldsens Museum (1998): 157–68. 43 Tabea Schindler, ‘“The Box Built in Nordic-Arabian-Egyptian Style”: Geographical Mobility and Cultural Translation in Thorvaldsens Museum’, in Ayres and Carbone, Sculpture and the Nordic Region, 78. 44 Erik Fischer, ‘“Thorvaldsen’s Arrival in Copenhagen on September 17, 1838”: Two Paintings by Eckersberg’, in Kragelund and Nykjær, Thorvaldsen, 211; Poulsen, ‘Gallionsfigurer og anden dansk skibsornamentik indtil 1850’, 104; Bjerg og Erichsen, Danske Orlogsskibe 1690–1860, 140. 45 See, for example, Eckersberg’s account in his diary of the role of the Galathea in the celebrations for the visit of Frederik Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia, in June 1845: Villads Villadsen, C. W. Eckersbergs Dagbøger 1810–1853 (København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 2009), vol. 2, 1045–6. 46 Steen Bille, Bericht über die Reise der Corvette Galathea um die Welt in den Jahren 1845, 46 und 47 (Kopenhagen: C. A. Reitzel and Leipzig: G. B. Lorck, 1852). See also: Esther Fihl, ‘A Journey through Civilisation and Primitiveness’, Tranquebar Initiativets Skrifteserie, no. 10 (Copenhagen: National Museum, 2011). 47 Torben Wolff, ‘The Circumnavigation of the Globe by the Corvette “Galathea”: An Expedition with Political, Economic and Scientific Goals’, in Bente Scavenius, ed., The Golden Age in Denmark: Art and Culture 1800–1850 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), 157. 48 The best overview of Danish colonial activity in the Nicobars is Simon Rastèn, ‘Den umulige kolonisering: Nicobarerne 1755–1868’, in Niels Brimnes, ed., Indien: Tranquebar, Serampore og Nicobarerne (København: Gads Forlag, 2017), 336–57. Other useful sources include Stephan Diller, Die Dänen in Indien, Südostasien und China (1620–1845) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999), 240–4; Hans-Jørgen Wallin Weihe, Historical Encounters in the Nicobar Islands: Trade, Mission, Visitors and Colonists (Lillehammer: Permafrost Press, 2006), 112–26; S. Ram, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Past and Present (New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2001), 11–30. 49 Simon Rastèn, ‘Encountering the Nicobar Islands: Danish Strategies of Colonisation, 1755–1848’, in Esther Fihl and A. R. Venkatachalapathy, eds, Beyond Tranquebar: Grappling Across Borders in South India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), 579–606. 50 ‘Foreign and Colonial’, The Economist, 29 November 1845, 1197. Mackey is listed as Vice-Consul in the Kongelig Dansk Hof- og Stats-Calender fuer das Jahr 1846 (Altona, 1846), 209. He also became consul for Belgium, Sweden and Norway in

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1846: Allen’s Indian Mail, and Register of Intelligence for British & Foreign India, China, and All Parts of the East, no. 60, 8 September 1846, 558. 51 Wallin Weihe, Historical Encounters, 112–13. 52 Bille, Bericht, 199. 53 Bille, Bericht, 105. 54 Rastèn points out that labourers from Penang were hired to build the colony, given that it was widely believed that Europeans were unable to do physical labour in the tropics. He also explains that while the Chinese labourers were free in principle, their position in reality was not so different from slavery, as Bille himself admitted: Rastèn, ‘Den umulige kolonisering’, 356. 55 Bille, Bericht, 211. 56 Wolff, ‘Circumnavigation’, 159. 57 The Valkyrie was sent to the Nicobars two years later in order to retrieve the batons and flags that had asserted Danish colonial rule: C. Boden Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars: The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner ‘Terrapin’ with Notices of the Islands, Their Fauna, Ethnology, etc. (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1994 (1903)), 214. 58 Torben Wolff, Danish Expeditions on the Seven Seas (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1967), 83. 59 See, for example, Bille, Bericht, 193, 207. Richard Carnac Temple, Andaman and Nicobar Islands: Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1994), 34. 60 Bente Dam-Mikkelsen and Torben Lundbæk, Etnografiske genstande i det kongelige danske Kunstkamme 1650–1800 (København: Nationalmuseet, 1980); Johannes Nicolaisen, ‘Scandinavia; All Approaches Are Fruitful’, in Stanley Diamond, ed., Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs (The Hague, Paris and New York: Mouton, 1980), 261–2; Ole Høiris, Antropologien i Danmark: Museal etnografi og etnologi, 1860– 1960 (København: Nationalmuseets Forlag, 1986), 11–17. 61 ‘Som søfartsnation og kolonimagt må Danmark have et koloni- og søfartsmuseum’: Quoted in Torben Lundbæk, ‘Chr. Jörgensen Thomsen Og Det Etnografiske Museum’, in Christian Jörgensen Thomsen, 1788 – 29 december – 1988 (Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie, København: Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskriftselskab, 1988), 170. Author’s translation. 62 Lundbæk ‘Chr. Jörgensen Thomsen’, 172. 63 C. Thomsen, ‘Forerindring’, in C. L. Steinhauer, Kort Veiledning i det Ethnographiske Museum (København: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri, 1859), n.p. 64 C. Thomsen, ‘Forerindring’, n.p. The tripartite structure is resonant of the Hegelianism that had such an impact on Danish culture in the so-called Golden Age but even more a reminder of Thomsen’s pioneering division of late prehistory

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into the three ages of stone, bronze and iron: Bo Gräslund, ‘The Background to C. J. Thomsen’s Three Age System’, in Glyn Daniel, ed., Towards a History of Archaeology (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981), 45–50; Peter Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and Its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), particularly 37–81. 65 I am very grateful to Amel Rahba and Bente Wolff of the National Museum, Copenhagen, for providing me with a transcript of the original protocol and this translation of it. 66 ‘en Fremstilling af et dansk Krigsskib, der ved sin raa Form vel vidner om Nikobarernes höiest ufuldkomme Fremstillingsevne . . . men interessant er det dog at bemærke, at de ved af afbilde Compasset maae have opfattet settes Betydning for Skibsfarten’: Steinhauer, Kort Veiledning, 23. Author’s translation. 67 ‘som Symbol paa den höieste Grad af menneskelig Fuldkommenhed – et europæisk Skib’: Steinhauer, Kort Veiledning, 23. Author’s translation. 68 Claire Wintle, Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 40. 69 Ram, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 122–3. 70 Wintle, Colonial Collecting, 43; Steinhauer, Kort Veiledning, 23. 71 N. L. Høyen, ‘Om Betingelserne for en skandinavisk Nationalkonsts Udvikling’, in J. L. Ussing, ed., Niel Laurits Høyens Skrifter, vol. 1 (København: Den Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1874), 351–68.

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An allegory of civic virtue Sculpture and ornament in St George’s Hall, Liverpool Katie Faulkner

St George’s Hall forms part of Liverpool’s main complex of civic and cultural buildings, including the Liverpool Museum, the main library and the Walker Art Gallery (Figure 4.1).1 Within this setting, St George’s Hall has been characterized as ‘the ultimate symbol of the power and influence’ of Liverpool in the nineteenth century.2 Much of the scholarship on the building has focused on the work of Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863), the architect who oversaw the completion of the Hall following the death of its original architect Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814–47). The symbolic, historic and social meanings of the sculpture and decoration in St George’s Hall, however, have received less attention. Elements of its ornament can be positioned on a spectrum between sculpture and the decorative. The exterior sculpture is firmly sculptural, most notably the South Pediment (now destroyed). The interior sculpture includes the free-standing portrait statues in the Great Hall, which are distinct in their three-dimensionality from the plasterwork reliefs of the cardinal virtues, the decorative fittings and features, such as the plaster ceiling, ironwork lamps and doors, and the Minton’s mosaic floor (Figure 4.2). Cockerell orchestrated these sculptural and ornamental components, with input from Alfred Stevens (1817– 75), an artist adept at moving between fine art sculpture and the decorative arts and design. As I will go on to explain, the sculpture and the decoration in St George’s Hall relates to contemporary debates around the status of sculpture and the decorative object, while simultaneously representing Elmes’s and Cockerell’s aspirations for the building, which were deeply connected to the past. Roman, neoclassical, medieval and Renaissance prototypes were brought together in

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Figure 4.1  Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, St George’s Hall, Lime Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, 1841–56. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Figure 4.2  Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, St George’s Hall, Liverpool: the Great Hall. Photo: Katie Faulkner.

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Cockerell’s scheme, in accordance with his very particular transhistorical mode of interpreting and reinventing ancient art and architecture. This chapter focuses on the exterior South Pediment and on the completed interior of the Great Hall, and will trace and bring together these transhistoric allusions, reading between Elmes’s and Cockerell’s designs. The sculptural scheme also relates to the building’s multiple functions. When St George’s Hall opened in 1854, the Great Hall became a key focal point for celebrating contemporary Liverpudlians, civic society and the economic success of the city. This is embodied in the nineteenthcentury figures represented in the statuary placed in niches around the Hall, surrounded by historically sourced ornamental forms.

Sculpture, architecture and the decorative Sculpture was a contested artistic category in the mid-nineteenth century. According to critics such as Charles Baudelaire, sculpture was at odds with contemporary sensibilities. In his review of the 1846 Paris Salon, Baudelaire argued that because sculpture shares literal space with the spectator, looking at it requires less sophistication than reading a painting. Furthermore, while painting offers a private and imaginative interaction and does not invite touch, viewing sculpture is a more public and embodied experience.3 Sculpture also loses its ‘ritual significance’ when displayed in a secular rather than a religious context. Finally, Baudelaire notes that sculptural forms are easily reproduced, and as a result are no more alluring than any other modern manufactured product.4 Although these issues emerge from the context of fine art and the Paris Salon, they are also evident in the reception of St George’s Hall. Once St George’s Hall opened the reporting focused on the cost of its sculpture and the luxurious materials adorning the exterior and interior – bearing out Baudelaire’s critique that sculpture’s value was being reduced to a commodity. Baudelaire’s argument, coming out of discourses around ‘high’ or ‘academic’ art, also runs counter to more flexible definitions of sculpture in Britain in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Generally, the hierarchical divisions between ‘high art’ (painting, sculpture and architecture) and ‘decorative art’ (metalwork, ceramics, textiles and glass) were maintained in British art schools and exhibitions, although artists and theorists were questioning these categories and campaigning for their equal status.5 Scholars such as Caroline Arscott, Imogen Hart, Claire Jones and, most recently, Martina Droth, Jason Edwards

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and Michael Hatt in the Sculpture Victorious exhibition and catalogue of 2014 have investigated these debates.6 The overlapping of art, craft and industry are key strands in this scholarship. According to these more expansive definitions of sculpture, the ornamentation of St George’s Hall can be understood as both sculptural and decorative.7 The decoration of the Hall, in fact, demonstrates this broadness of sculpture as a category. It includes free-standing statuary, reliefs, independent art objects and decorative and functional objects, such as the bronze doors and brass lamps shaped like antique ships. These items were produced through partnerships between artists and commercial manufacturers; the mosaic floor, for example, was a collaboration between Cockerell, the sculptor Alfred Stevens and ceramic manufacturers Minton’s. St George’s Hall was an ideal civic and commercial showcase for architects, artists and manufacturers wanting to appeal to prosperous and cosmopolitan audiences. St George’s Hall was built as a venue for the Liverpool triennial Musical Festival.8 In 1836, the mayor of Liverpool held a meeting to discuss building a concert hall, large enough for a choir, a grand organ and a sizeable audience. By January 1837, £25,350 had been raised through public subscription and a site previously occupied by the Old Infirmary was allocated.9 The competition to find an architect was launched in 1839 and was won by Harvey Londsdale Elmes. Elmes’s grand design, based upon the Roman Baths of Caracalla, may have appealed to the committee based on its similarity to Birmingham Town Hall, which was completed in 1834 (extended 1837). Like St George’s Hall, Birmingham Town Hall was a symphony hall and was based on Roman precedent – the temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome – and erected in the Corinthian style.10 For St George’s Hall, Elmes also incorporated Roman architectural and ornamental forms, rather than adopting the ancient Greek prototypes then dominant in Liverpool’s neoclassical buildings. This can be seen in his competition designs, submitted in 1840 and now in the RIBA library, where columns with Corinthian capitals are used to unify each of the exterior faces of the building.11 Public buildings such as these were competitive vehicles, asserting the civic virtues of a city and its people. These projects were often clustered around royal celebrations, demonstrating patriotic loyalty to the monarchy.12 The foundation stone of St George’s Hall, for example, was laid on the day of Queen Victoria’s coronation, 28 June 1838. Elmes died in 1847 while recuperating from tuberculosis in Jamaica. St George’s Hall was half completed and work continued under the supervision of the engineer Robert Rawlinson and the surveyor John Weightman. When Cockerell was appointed to complete the building and interior scheme in 1851, work had

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just begun on the Hall’s interior. Cockerell had previously been involved in the project since 1843 when Elmes had invited him to execute the South Pediment of the building. Including sculpture in the exterior and interior schemes had always been Elmes’s intention, but the complex layering of sculpture and ornament, particularly in the Great Hall, was introduced under Cockerell’s direction. Both Elmes and Cockerell drew upon fragments of classical ornament in their designs for St George’s Hall. As architectural critics noted at the time, Elmes reinterpreted the ‘Grande Salle’ of the bathing block at Caracalla as the main reference point for the Great Hall.13 Elmes referred closely to George Abel Blouet’s illustrated account of the Baths of Caracalla of 1828.14 Blouet’s illustrations, or ‘restorations’, reconstructed the ruined building back to its imagined original state. Blouet synthesized a variety of sources, including written accounts, fragments found onsite and his knowledge of other comparable buildings.15 Blouet reconstructed the decoration of the baths including its mosaic and marble floors and columns, veneered marble walls, gilded stucco and glass mosaic vaults, as well as numerous statues – including the Farnese Hercules – and marble columns. The similarities between Elmes’s contracted design (Figure 4.3) for the Great Hall and Blouet’s restoration drawing Vue de

Figure 4.3  Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, Contract design for St George’s Hall and the Assize Courts, Lime Street, Liverpool: interior elevation, section and plan of an interior, 1840, black and white drawing. Courtesy of RIBA Collections.

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la Grande Salle (Figure 4.4) are immediately apparent, such as the highly ornate vaulted, coffered ceilings and the Corinthian capitals on the columns in Blouet’s restorations and in the pilasters in Elmes’s design. Cockerell developed the polychromatic interior of the Great Hall by working between the existing shell of the building, the drawings Elmes left behind, and the decorative details of the Baths of Caracalla documented by Blouet.16 Cockerell’s drawing, Fantasy of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, under Construction, executed by John Goodchild in around 1854, highlights Cockerell’s interventions in the scheme (Figure 4.5). It shows the Great Hall in cross section. Cockerell’s Fantasy imaginatively breaks with conventional understandings of the actual duration of a building project. Much of the ornament, such as the plaster ceiling and mosaic floor, is shown in place, although construction was not yet complete. The Fantasy shows a first-floor gallery, niches for free-standing sculpture, and the mosaic floor. Well-dressed people gather in the centre of the room or inspect details

Figure 4.4  George Abel Blouet, Restauration des thermes d’Antonin Caracalla (Paris: F. Didot, 1828), Plate XV. Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham.

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Figure 4.5 Charles Robert Cockerell (drawn by G. E. Goodchild), Fantasy of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, under Construction, c. 1854. National Museums Liverpool.

of the construction. The richness of Cockerell’s vision for the completed Great Hall contrasts with the skeletal scaffolding and the brutal edges of the moulded cornicing and vaulted ceiling. Cockerell provides the viewer with a cross section through time as well as through the building. The inclusion of historically inspired contemporary ornamentation and sculpture, in combination with the Victorian bodies populating the space, pushes the Great Hall forward in time, as it becomes a complete, living structure. The layers of ornament visible in the shell of St George’s Hall convey Cockerell’s aspirations to provide Liverpool with an ideal civic space and a rich historically inspired interior. The Professor’s Dream (Figure 4.6), another of Cockerell’s drawings, demonstrates Cockerell’s deep interest in incorporating architectural history into projects such as St George’s Hall. The Professor’s Dream exemplifies Cockerell’s fundamental approach to architectural history. The drawing presents a fantastic cityscape, bringing together canonical buildings and monuments from the ancient world, medieval and Renaissance Europe, with eighteenth and nineteenth-century structures. Anne Bordeleau places The Professor’s Dream

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Figure 4.6  Charles Robert Cockerell, The Professor’s Dream, 1848, pencil, pen and grey ink, with scratched highlights, 112 × 171 cm. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd.

within the larger tradition of architectural museums.17 Collecting architectural fragments, models and casts had become common practice since the eighteenth century, especially for young men on the Grand Tour of Europe. In 1834, Sir John Soane’s gift of his house and collection to the nation established the first public architectural museum in Britain. The museum functioned as a visual history of architecture, alongside Soane’s lectures at the Royal Academy, in which he discussed topics such as the appropriate meanings of ornament and the persistence of classical forms in the modern age. Cockerell and Soane were close friends, and were significant influences on Elmes during his training and architectural career.18 This commitment to synthesizing a fresh classical language from antique fragments is evident in Elmes’s and Cockerell’s designs for St George’s Hall, and highlights the importance of Soane’s legacy to their approach and to the project. In the early nineteenth century, architects and architectural theorists were keen to place their discipline within a historical framework that challenged the orthodoxy of the academic classical position in favour of a more pluralist stylistic approach.19 Cockerell was a devoted neoclassicist, but he did not treat the classical as a universal, unchanging ideal. This can be seen in the way he combined Greek architecture with Roman and Renaissance forms, developing

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his signature Graeco-Roman style. The Professor’s Dream is the work of an architect and historian, bringing together buildings from different times and places, as seen in St George’s Hall. Many of the periods of architecture included in Cockerell’s The Professor’s Dream – Greek, Roman, medieval and High Renaissance – are alluded to in the architecture, sculpture and ornament of St George’s Hall. The drawing was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, when Cockerell was working on the pediment of St George’s Hall; he was officially appointed chief architect on the project two years later. Cockerell and Elmes shared the same views on new approaches to classicism, but their opinions on sculpture and its value to architecture were not in such close agreement. Elmes had clear plans for an external and internal sculptural programme for St George’s Hall, which were never completed. Writing to Robert Rawlinson, the engineer overseeing the construction, in 1844, Elmes clearly states that, in his opinion, sculpture is auxiliary to architecture: Consider . . . the effect produced by painting and sculpture as auxiliaries – the latter (i.e. sculpture) devoid of colour, yet pre-eminent in form, the material harmonizing with the architecture in massive durability, while the gracefully flowing draped expressive countenance, and the apparent capability of motion, all contrast with the greater severity of the architectural framework. Were this feeling general, – alas! For gilt frames and watch-box recesses for statues.20

On the one hand, Elmes’s characterization of sculpture in an architectural context aligns with Cockerell’s aims for the figurative architectural sculpture in the interior of the Great Hall. As seen in The Fantasy Cockerell used sculptural elements to animate the Great Hall – a concept that chimes with the expressiveness and movement Elmes attributes to sculpture.21 On the other hand, Cockerel diverges from Elmes’s emphasis on the harmonious merging of architecture and sculpture and his disapproval of excessive ornament and colour. Elmes saw sculpture and painting as secondary to architecture, whereas for Cockerell, all three art forms held equal status, and he combined them using a wide variety of colours, materials and ornamental forms.

The South Pediment The South Pediment, the only sculpture that Elmes and Cockerell collaborated on, is the most straightforwardly ‘classical’ element of St George’s Hall’s

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three-dimensional ornament. Symbolizing Liverpool’s standing as the chief English port of the British Empire, the South Pediment shows Britannia enthroned, presenting the olive branch of peace to Mercury and the four continents, as Neptune reclines at her feet. Although the pediment frieze was completed after Elmes’s death, it fits more closely with his aspirations for architectural sculpture than with Cockerell’s more expansive approach. In the South Pediment, above the portico of St George’s Hall, the sculpture serves the architecture but is distinct from the decorative.22 The initial concept can be seen in Cockerell’s drawing, Idea for the frontispiece of a public building in England (Figure 4.7). Elmes saw the drawing at the Royal Academy in 1843 and he was impressed enough to ask Cockerell to execute it for St George’s Hall. Cockerell accepted the commission and passed on his designs to William Grinsell Nicholl, and the figures were carved in the early 1850s.23 While Nicholl was working on the pediment, Cockerell invited the sculptor and designer Alfred Stevens to assist him in making a presentation drawing of

Figure 4.7  Charles Robert Cockerell, Idea for the frontispiece of a public building in England, 1843, lithograph. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd.

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the sculptures. Stevens and Cockerell seem to have established a supportive professional relationship during the late 1840s, perhaps through their teaching positions at the Royal Academy and the Government Schools of Art and Design.24 Cockerell, for example, recommended Stevens to the architect James Pennethorne who was looking for a designer for the bronze doors of the Geological Museum in Jermyn Street, London. The doors were never completed, but Stevens’s design drawing demonstrates his ability to work within confined forms in high relief. Appropriately for a geological museum, the figures are mining for coal and working with precious metals, depicting images of industry and trade, broadly similar in theme to the figures in the pediment of St George’s Hall.25 Cockerell went on to become a long-term supporter of Stevens’s sculpture and of his approach to ornament, which involved working across painting, sculpture and design, as we shall see in Stevens’s other work for St George’s Hall, such as Minton’s mosaic floor. Stevens’s drawing of the pediment design was published as a lithograph (Figure 4.8) with the following inscription: To the honourable and worshipful / The Mayor and Council of the City of Liverpool / This representation of / The Sculptured Pediment of St George’s Hall / Is most respectfully dedicated by their obedient and humble servant C.R. Cockerell / Designed by C.R. Cockerell: Sculptured by W.G. Nicholl: Superintended by / C.L. Eastlake, R.A.

Figure 4.8 After Charles Robert Cockerell and attributed to Alfred Stevens, The Sculptured Pediment of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, c. 1850, lithograph. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Prudence Cuming Assoc. Ltd.

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Stevens is not credited, but according to his assistant Hugh Stannus, he adapted the original concept, as seen in Cockerell’s 1843 Idea drawing (Figure 4.7). Stannus reports that Stevens made ‘suggestions for improvement by simplifying it and designing new groups for the difficult spaces at the ends’.26 This simplification is evident in the 1849 lithograph, where one male and two female figures seen in the 1843 drawing have been removed from the space around Neptune. Cockerell preferred these changes and asked Nicholl to translate them into the pediment. While Elmes saw sculpture as subordinate to architecture, Cockerell attempted to elevate the status of the pediment into the category of fine art. The composition of the South Pediment is based on fragments of the Parthenon in the British Museum, thus aligning Cockerell’s designs with the then most highly regarded classical sculptures in the Western canon. Furthermore, as consulting sculptor, Stevens was given artistic autonomy over the final designs. The simplifications he made and the fact that the figures were carved in high relief, with some completely in the round, emphasize their three-dimensionality and equal standing to architecture. This is evident even in the lithographs, where precise tonal modelling indicates volume and negative space, rather than flattening the figures into line and pattern, moving the pediment away from the realm of architectural ornament. After seeing the pediment designs, Liverpool Town Council, which was ultimately funding the building project, was concerned that the sculptures did not sufficiently reflect the city’s achievements. The debate was reported in the Liverpool Mercury: [Councillor] Mr. Birkett objected to incurring the great expense . . . as to the model itself, he was not a good judge, and did not wish to say anything against it but it appeared to him more fit for an academical building. What we want (said he) is something to represent rum, and sugar, and cotton, and corn. . . . That might do very well for Oxford or Cambridge, but not for Liverpool.27

Birkett questioned the suitability of Cockerell’s scheme for a public building in Liverpool. He suggested that the Roman gods and idealized personifications of Industry and Agriculture were more appropriate for a university building, for example, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge or the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, both designed by Cockerell and sculpted by Nicholl. Instead, Birkett wanted to see recognizable objects, which represented the major imports to Liverpool: rum, sugar, cotton and corn. Birkett argued that a new major public building should symbolize Liverpool’s distinctive economy and achievements.

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As we will see, Cockerell was again criticized for this lack of contemporary and local significance after St George’s Hall opened in 1854. The great expense of building and decorating St George’s Hall also became a recurring issue. Another councillor, Mr Rathbone, expressed his deep unease about spending such a large sum on sculpture, which, he argued, could have been better spent on improving public health, stating, ‘[The Town Council’s] duty to the town at large, was to do justice, and until they did that they could not be liberal and certainly not ornamental’, implying that the sculptural scheme was an expendable aesthetic luxury. Regardless of Cockerell’s best intentions, the perceived superficiality of ornament and the abstract nature of his designs were set against the ideals of morality and social justice.28 Despite the Town Council’s doubts, Cockerell fully intended to celebrate the city in the pediment, albeit using classical allusion rather than straightforward illustration. In an impromptu address to the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Liverpool, he conveyed his admiration for Liverpool and its citizens thus: [Cockerell hoped he] might be excused, as a metropolitan, in saying that, for a commercial city, there was not a parallel in any part of the world to the noble spirit which had animated the leaders of that society in carrying out those public as well as private works which he had seen with so much pleasure.29

Cockerell went on to say that ‘there was a certain grandeur of mind arising from the enterprise and commercial spirit’ in the city.30 Cockerell’s time in Liverpool coincided with a phase of growth and increasing diversity of the city’s shipping trade. Liverpool’s wealth and prosperity was founded upon the trade in enslaved people between Africa and America. During the 1800s the city was connected to every significant international port, through shipping, the railway and telecommunications.31 The main imports to Liverpool were cotton, grain and timber, while coal, salt and manufactured goods were the key exports, although a multiplicity of other smaller trades operated in and out of the port. The Albert Dock warehouses, opened in 1845, were seen as an important symbol of Liverpool’s status as a leading Atlantic port city. To Cockerell, the nobility and grandeur he perceived in Liverpool’s architecture, its people and enterprising spirit, made classically inspired architecture and ornament entirely appropriate to St George’s Hall. Cockerell translated his admiration into an idealized, classical vocabulary in the pediment. The standardized drapery and cloaks of the principal figures

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locate them in a classicized past. Most elements of the pediment design can be read as a celebration of the city. Neptune represents Liverpool’s dominion over the seas, also appearing on the city’s coat of arms. Mercury, the patron of commerce, reflects Liverpool’s status as a thriving port and the presence of Bacchus alludes to the wine and spirit trade. On Britannia’s right, Apollo and his chariot stand for the arts and music, particularly relevant to the Hall’s function as a concert venue. Agriculture rides in his chariot, with a father, mother and child grouped around. The father leans against his plough, while his wife holds a distaff wrapped with flax for spinning, and behind them is a beehive; together they symbolize industry, manufacture and domesticity.32 Located in the right acute angle are two smiths or metalworkers making anchors and armour. These allegories of productivity and war are relatively conventional, but a classical education was necessary to interpret the pediment as a celebration of industry, wealth and commercial success. It is easy to understand why councillors such as Birkett believed that this iconography was illegible to most of the citizens of Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century. The scheme also includes references to Liverpool’s role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, although it is difficult to know how evident this was to those who viewed the pediment. Just beyond the four continents, in the left acute angle, are figures representing ‘foreign productions’, including a bale of cotton. Despite the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1807, British traders in cotton imported the raw material from America, where it had been picked by enslaved people. The cotton was stored in large warehouses in Liverpool and then sold and distributed to manufacturers based in Manchester and throughout Lancashire.33 The city also had close ties with the abolitionist movement although it threatened to undermine Liverpool’s commercial wealth. In 1807 there were violent demonstrations in the city, particularly aimed at William Roscoe, the independent MP for Liverpool and a key abolitionist activist. By 1868 John Willox’s pamphlet Adams’ History and Description of St George’s Hall directly referred to the abolitionist movement in Britain, stating that the South Pediment included the figure of Africa ‘in a posture of gratitude and humility, with her sons in her arms, the breaking of whose chains is the work of Britannia, to whom she points’.34 Willox also describes Europe on bended knee, ‘with the sword of power in her right hand, raising Africa with her left’. Sculpture thus provided a further public forum for these debates. The representations of a civilized Britain and Europe lifting the bonds of slavery from Africa and her children in the St George’s Hall pediment were not without

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precedent in Liverpool. Matthew Cotes Wyatt and Richard Westmacott’s Monument to Lord Nelson, unveiled in Exchange Flags Square in 1813, features four shackled prisoners seated at the four cardinal points. Officially, these figures represent Nelson’s four great victories at Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar.35 Alison Yarrington has argued, however, that these figures should also be read in light of the abolition of slavery in 1807. Roscoe had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the monument. Yarrington suggests that Roscoe’s abolitionist stance gives the prisoner figures a resonance beyond naval triumphalism, representing the ‘suffering and the nobility of the enslaved’.36 Applying this reading to the South Pediment of St George’s Hall reveals how sculpture was employed to rewrite Liverpool’s role in the slave trade in the period after the 1807 Act, to project an image of Britain and its empire, and by extension Liverpool, as a civilized and powerful liberator. Historians have also argued that the anti-slavery movement can be seen as part of an individualistic desire of the British people for greater autonomy over their economic lives, which emerged in the early nineteenth century. Against this new social and economic context, casting Liverpool as a city against slavery, but still upholding imperial ideology, would have appealed to the politicians and merchants keen to maintain the city’s wealth and status. Sculptures such as the St George’s Hall Pediment and the Monument to Lord Nelson served to legitimize the city’s historic and continued economic dependence on enslaved labour.

The Great Hall The use of sculpture and ornament to broadcast Liverpool’s prosperity and grandeur continues in the Great Hall of St George’s Hall. The iconography spread throughout its decorative scheme emphasizes the city’s maritime history and its contemporary status as a hub of imperial trade. Cockerell’s decorative and sculptural scheme for St George’s Hall, with its eclectic references, was intended to depict Liverpool as a vibrant, patriotic, enlightened, lawful, resilient and cosmopolitan city. These messages are similar to those communicated by the South Pediment, although in the Great Hall Cockerell and his team of designers and craftsmen drew on a more diverse range of artistic and decorative reference points. The Great Hall is at the centre of St George’s Hall, between the law courts and the smaller concert hall. It is the largest congregational space in

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the building and was designed to be versatile, hosting civic banquets and assemblies as well as orchestral concerts. Contemporary commentators interpreted the scale or ‘magnificent extent’ of the Great Hall as a measure of the ‘wealth, refinement and social importance of Liverpool’.37 The room is 55 m (169 feet) long, including the recesses at each end, and 22 m (74 feet) wide, not including the balconies. Cockerell deployed a heterogeneous scheme of sculptural and decorative elements, combining references to the Gothic Angel Choir Screen at Lincoln Cathedral with Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace, ancient Greek coins and Celtic and heraldic designs.38 These varied ornamental referents incorporate a range of materials and surface effects, from the plasterwork ceiling to the tiled floor, and from the bronze doors to the brass light fittings. After analysing the layered decorative and art-historical allusions in the Great Hall, I will go on to explore how Cockerell’s intended meaning was borne out in the reception of the building by contemporary audiences. The free-standing statues positioned in niches along the walls of the Great Hall are the most conventional sculptural elements. They depict named figures from nineteenth-century Liverpool. Carved in white marble, the statues are idealized and have a clear commemorative and civic purpose beyond their aesthetic value. At the other extreme, Minton’s tiled floor is the most decorative component of the overall scheme. It is flat and highly coloured, and although the iconography of the mosaic relates back to Liverpool’s success and maritime associations, there are also large sections of geometric pattern. Other parts of the scheme can be positioned between these categories of three-dimensional, monochrome and figurative sculpture and two-dimensional, polychrome and illustrative decoration. Examples include the carved garlands of oak leaves or fruits and flowers adorning the pilasters either side of the statues’ niches, the Atlantes supporting the organ, the plasterwork ceiling and the figures of the Virtues in the spandrels between the porphyry pillars. Elmes originally intended to include fresco painting in the Great Hall, but Cockerell substituted these for plasterwork imitating chamfered masonry. Painting, or more specifically colour, was generally seen by contemporaries as a category in opposition to sculpture (as in the case of local sculptor John Gibson’s notorious Tinted Venus). Cockerell included many richly coloured elements inside the Great Hall in place of the frescoes, often combining polychromy with three-dimensional ornament. The statues in their niches and the plaster reliefs of the cardinal virtues, for example, are bounded and offset by the most

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highly coloured and decorative areas of the scheme: the mosaic floor and the plasterwork ceiling. The contrast between the white, three-dimensional statues and the reliefs and the ceiling and floor becomes even more apparent when viewing the long sidewalls of the Great Hall from a distance – areas of sculpture and decoration resolve themselves into horizontal layers (Figure 4.9). These bands are punctuated by vertical structural or decorative features such as doorframes, niches, dados and balustrades in marble, or most dramatically by a series of six columns of polished red porphyry, topped with plaster capitals painted to imitate bronze, which divide the wall into five bays. The viewer’s eye is naturally drawn from the lowest layer of the scheme, the mosaic floor, upwards to the plaster ceiling. The following visual analysis recreates this viewing experience. Like the South Pediment, the floor of the Great Hall was a collaboration between Cockerell and Stevens, this time working with Minton, Hollins & Co., who produced the encaustic tiles. The floor pattern consists of interlocking

Figure 4.9  Charles Robert Cockerell and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, The Great Hall, St George’s Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside, 1841–56. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

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circles of varied size, surrounded by diagonal diaper work. The main area of mosaic is sunken, with a tiled walkway around the design level with the main bronze doors. The circles contain symbols and emblems relating to Liverpool and the wider British Isles. Minton’s encaustic tiles came in a fairly limited range of hues, as pigmented clay was inlaid into a buff clay ground. Stevens and Cockerell utilized Minton’s entire main palette of buff, red, black, drab, chocolate, light blue and white in the floor. Small areas of more vibrant colour, notably cobalt blue and laurel green, were achieved by incorporating glazed tiles into the mosaic. The central circle of the floor contains the lion and the unicorn of the royal coat of arms, surrounded by a laurel wreath and set within a sixteen-pointed star, reminiscent of the points of the compass. The iconography of this focal circle encompasses Liverpool’s shipping trade and international reach as well as emphasizing a patriotic association with the royal family. The figurative borders designed by Stevens show Neptune, Roman god of freshwater and the sea, with tritons, sea nymphs, boys on dolphins and tridents surrounding these central emblems. Stevens’s designs recall his contribution to the South Pediment, where Neptune was depicted seated below Britannia. The coat of arms of the Corporation of Liverpool appears again in the two smaller circles. Each of the four smallest circles contain either the Star of St George, a red rose (emblem of England and the House of Lancaster), the Scottish thistle or the Irish shamrock, positioning Liverpool as a city at the heart of the UK as well as the British Empire.39 Along the edges of the walkway, Latin inscriptions, with their English translations, are set into the floor. The inscriptions identify the angelic cardinal virtues in the spandrels above, inviting visitors to read between the flat pattern, text and three-dimensional relief. The supremacy of classicism in the overall scheme is maintained across these elements, with the reference to ancient Roman floors and the High Renaissanceinspired figures of the virtues, in classical drapery. The motto of Liverpool, ‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’ (God has given us this leisure/these gifts), appears in each corner.40 This reminder of the Christian God’s generosity and his hand in Liverpool’s success tempers – or enhances – the celebration of the earthly, secular achievements of the city, and its bankers and merchants. The figures represented in the statuary inside St George’s Hall are personifications of this civic and commercial identity. Terry Cavanagh has argued that by incorporating statues in niches, Cockerell transformed the Great Hall from a place of entertainment into a ‘civic pantheon’, which Benedict Read

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describes as a ‘civic basilica’ or Valhalla.41 The date of the decision to fill the hall with statues of local figures has not been recorded, but several statues were installed by the time of its opening in 1854 and continued to be added to up until 1911. The statues are all by different sculptors and represent a range of contemporary styles of portraiture. Not all of the statues were originally intended for St George’s Hall. The marble statue of William Roscoe, which was completed in 1841 by Sir Francis Chantrey, had originally been housed in the Liverpool Royal Institution but was moved to a square niche in the Great Hall in 1893.42 Although Cockerell’s initial designs for the Great Hall marked out twenty-six niches for statues from the outset, only thirteen of these spaces were ever filled. The most recent addition is the statue of the health campaigner Kitty Wilkinson (1786–1860) by Simon Smith, which was installed in 2012. The only woman to be commemorated in the Great Hall, Wilkinson was an Irish working-class migrant who campaigned for public baths and other public improvements. Wilkinson was a contemporary of many of the men represented here and her achievements align with the Great Hall’s general ethos of civic responsibility. At the same time, however, her presence draws attention to how the selection of the statues reflects the vision of the (male) elite of Liverpool, rather than celebrating the contribution made by all genders and sections of society.43 The status of the men represented in the statues was matched by the significance of the sculptors who created them, including John Gibson (1790– 1866), Matthew Noble (c. 1817–76) and William Theed the younger (1804–91). The first statues to be installed were of George Stephenson (1781–1848) by Gibson and Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) by Noble; both works were unveiled at the inauguration of St George’s Hall on 18 September 1854. As with the iconography of the South Pediment, the selection of figures commemorated in the Great Hall emphasizes Liverpool’s status as a centre of trade and transport. Stephenson, for example, was one of the inventors of steam locomotion and planned and constructed the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830. The railway was crucial to the cotton industry as it enabled bales of raw cotton fibre to be transported quickly to the Manchester mills. Peel served as British prime minister twice, in 1834–5 and then again in 1841–6, and he had local and imperial roots as the son of a Lancashire cotton manufacturer.44 Peel also reformed the Bank of England and reduced import duties, which ensured that Liverpool retained its leading position in the international trade network. The statues of Stephenson and Peel demonstrate the different stylistic approaches evident in the sculptures in the Great Hall. Gibson depicted

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Stephenson in classical drapery and holding a drawing board and compass, invoking a comparison to Archimedes.45 This neoclassical characterization of Stephenson aligns with Cockerell’s decorative scheme but is exceptional. All the other statues are shown in nineteenth-century dress. Peel, for example, is shown wearing a long gown, over a waistcoat and fitted trousers, in accordance with arguments that modern men should be represented in contemporary dress rather than classical costume. Above the row of statues, but beneath the grand barrel vaulted ceiling, and between each of the five lateral arches, are six spandrels bearing winged female allegories running north to south on the east side of the hall and duplicated running south to north on the west side.46 The figures exemplify Cockerell’s transhistorical approach to Western art history and also blend sculptural and painterly influences. Cockerell was emulating the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dating from 1256 to 1280, by ornamenting the spandrels. The figures themselves, however, are classical rather than Gothic and reference Raphael, specifically the figures of Fortitude, Prudence and Temperance in the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes in the Vatican (completed 1508–11). Four of the figures in the spandrels represent the cardinal virtues, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude and Prudence, and personifications of the Arts and Sciences occupy the other two spandrels. The figures are dressed in classicized costumes and are accompanied by putti. The Stanza della Segnatura was an entirely appropriate source of inspiration. The room takes its name from the highest court presided over by the Pope, a reference which could allude to St George’s Hall’s dual function as law court and place of leisure. Similar to Cockerell’s aspirations for St George’s Hall, the iconographic programme for Raphael’s frescoes represented the greatest aspects of the human spirit – Truth, Goodness and Beauty. In the Stanza della Segnatura, Goodness was embodied by the figures in the fresco of the Cardinal and Theological Virtues and the Law. David Watkin suggests that Cockerell’s figure of Fortitude fits most closely with Raphael’s prototype (Figure 4.10).47 In both Raphael’s painting and in the plaster relief, the figure is seated, and slightly twisted, with her head turned to look over her left shoulder. Both figures are shown grasping the branch of an oak tree, wearing a helmet and cuirass, and accompanied by a winged putto. The lion, oak tree and oak-leaf garland are all symbols associated with England and with bravery, particularly the garland, which was presented to Roman soldiers who saved a life during battle. The visual prototype for Cockerell’s Fortitude is from the High Renaissance, but her

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Figure 4.10  Charles Robert Cockerell (architect), J. E. Goodchild (sculptor), Fortitude, 1841–56, plaster. Conway Library © Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

attributes come from Roman myth and poetry, restating the importance of the architecture and ornament of ancient Rome in the Great Hall’s overall design. In the context of Cockerell’s Roman-inspired neoclassicism, the plaster cardinal virtues are repurposed for a secular, civic society rather than one dominated by religion. Above the cardinal virtues, the highly coloured plaster ceiling is divided into three longitudinal sections and five horizontal ones, matching the division of the bays. The fifteen sections are divided into a series of smaller panels, with either the coat of arms of Lancashire or Liverpool or a depiction of St George at the centre. These emblems reinforce the connection between Liverpool and the textile industry throughout the north-west. Mermaids with lyres and conch shells feature in the surrounding relief panels, emphasizing Liverpool’s maritime heritage. The city’s commercial success is again referenced via the fasces or bundles of birch, the Roman symbol of authority and the caduceus – the ancient Greek symbol of peace and commerce – on a gold background.48

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This combination of Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance and contemporary sculpture, architecture and ornament demonstrates how Cockerell attempted to address the challenge of translating his interest in the architecture of the past into ‘living’ buildings fit for the nineteenth century. The weight of history and the range of stylistic choices available to the nineteenth-century architect are made clear in The Professor’s Dream drawing, which goes right back to Western architecture’s origins. Exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1849, The Professor’s Dream was seen by a broad audience, beyond the highly visually and historically literate circles reached by Cockerell’s lectures. Operating in a similar way to The Professor’s Dream, the Great Hall is imaginary, functional and didactic. More than visitors to the Royal Academy, the users of St George’s Hall came from diverse social and educational backgrounds. As discussed earlier, the different layers of The Professor’s Dream, representing Egyptian, then Greek and Roman and finally medieval and modern architecture, form horizontal bands. The Great Hall can be read in a corresponding manner, with the different sections – the floor, statues, spandrels and plasterwork ceiling – each representing a different art-historical period. If we read the Great Hall from bottom to top, from the mosaic floor to the statues, the plaster virtues and then the plasterwork ceiling, these periods approximately correspond to ancient Rome, the present or recent past, the High Renaissance and the medieval, respectively. The progression from floor to ceiling is not historically sequential but offers a synoptic logic like that of The Professor’s Dream, with no one period or style or nation being favoured over another. The lack of chronological demarcation between form and ornament in The Professor’s Dream creates a parallel reality, only possible in Cockerell’s imagined architectural museum.49 The combination of sculpture and ornament in St George’s Hall collects together high points of art and architectural history, sharing qualities with Cockerell’s hypothetical museum, while also employing the capability of modern manufacturing technology. Through sculpture and decoration, Cockerell goes against academic classical teaching by creating a universal museum of Western art and architecture fit for the nineteenth century. Cockerell’s designs for the exterior and interior of St George’s Hall treated all the styles and periods of architecture and ornament equally, and Stevens’s close involvement with the project, at Cockerell’s behest, demonstrates a similar approach by incorporating architecture, sculpture and decoration as elements with equivalent importance. Throughout his career, Stevens moved between design and sculpture, taking up the position of chief designer for the

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iron-founders Hoole of Sheffield in 1850, just after working with Cockerell on designs for the St George’s Hall South Pediment. Stevens also carried out work for Minton’s in the 1860s, designing majolica vases and plates in similar classical designs to the figures in the mosaic floor of St George’s Hall.50 While Stannus states that the mosaic floor was the only work Stevens carried out for the interior of St George’s Hall, his influence can be detected in other parts of the Great Hall.51 Stannus admits there is no correspondence dating from the early 1850s and Stevens did not keep a diary; furthermore, his work on St George’s Hall has not yet been fully researched. However, both Stannus and Kenneth Romney Towndrow note that in 1847 Cockerell asked Stevens to make drawings of the Angel Choir Screen in Lincoln Cathedral and to transfer these onto stone to become lithographs.52 It is possible that the two men at least discussed the Lincoln screen as an inspiration for the spandrels of the Great Hall. In addition to this, Stevens contributed to the Italian Courts of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, which opened in 1854. One of the rooms he worked on was a reproduction of the Stanza della Segnatura, part of the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Palace – and Cockerell’s source for the figures of the virtues occupying the spandrels in the Great Hall.53 While there is no evidence recording Cockerell and Stevens’s collaboration on these Virtues, both men were clearly thinking across the same source material and adopted a similar approach in their combination of sculpture and the decorative. Stevens worked in both three and two dimensions in his work for St George’s Hall, and it is tempting to see the Virtues as precursors to his work on the Wellington Monument in St Paul’s Cathedral, with its figurative groups of Truth and Falsehood and Valour and Cowardice. Stevens entered the competition for the monument in 1856, and Cockerell was instrumental in Stevens securing this prestigious commission, which is further testament of his high regard for Stevens’s work.

The reception of the building by contemporary audiences The bringing together of sculpture and decoration and the eclectic use of style and materials in St George’s Hall was intended to appeal to a socially diverse audience. The minutes of the Town Council meeting held in the week after the Hall first opened in 1854 recommended that ‘the recreation and improvement of the working classes should form a prominent and essential part’ of its function.54 Understanding and interpreting St George’s Hall as Cockerell intended, as a didactic

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compendium of art and architecture, required a scholarly familiarity with art of the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. The more illustrative cardinal virtues and the symbolism of the tiled floor had a broader appeal, clearly evoking virtuous aspiration and pride in Liverpool’s commercial and maritime success. The Latin transcriptions also appeared in English translation in the tiled floor, although before the introduction of the Education Act in 1870, rates of literacy in England were as low as 52 per cent.55 Coupled with these textual prompts, the emblematic ornament would have been legible, but Cockerell’s ideal of a synoptic architectural museum would have been less apparent to most of the visitors. The Town Council felt it was of great importance to enable the ‘greatest possible number of persons to visit and inspect that splendid structure’, and also used the opening of St George’s Hall to raise funds for public hospitals in the city through ticket sales.56 This philanthropic focus was perhaps a reaction to the unease over the high cost of decorating the Hall when there were many other demands on the council’s funds. While the council wanted the inauguration of St George’s Hall to be a celebration for the entire city, this aim was scrutinized when the ticket prices for the opening series of oratorios were released. A correspondent for The Times reported that they were ‘too dear’ and that it was anticipated that the concerts would not be attended by ‘the middle classes and tradespeople in Liverpool’.57 There was a separate performance intended for ‘the people’, which was cheaper and had a smaller cast of musicians, which was perceived to be of lesser quality than the grand oratorios, which further compounded claims of elitism.58 The Times’s reporter questioned the Town Council’s aspirations to make St George’s Hall an open and welcoming space for either middle or working-class people. The Liverpool architect Joseph Boult echoed this scepticism around the accessibility and appeal of St George’s Hall. His report was printed in the Liverpool Mercury the day after the opening on 19 September 1854. Boult highlighted the distance between Cockerell’s ‘scholarly and classical taste’ and the artistic appetites of the Liverpool public.59 He argued that ‘public edifices, being more especially for public use and enjoyment, should be so designed as to enlist the interests of the people in general; and that allegorical subjects or incidents foreign or remote history should be carefully avoided’. In other words, Boult understood Cockerell’s approach of combining sculpture and ornament from different periods and his reliance on classical allegories and symbols to be completely at odds with the ‘general interest’ of the people of Liverpool. These comments are reminiscent of Councillor Birkett’s concerns on seeing Cockerell’s designs for the South Pediment. Boult suggests that the ornament

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of St George’s Hall would ‘be very appropriate in the private residence of the scholar and the gentleman, whose associates may be reasonably expected to sympathize with his tales, and will experience no intellectual drawback arising from defective education’. But rather than inspire higher feelings in the people of Liverpool, the lack of sympathy they would feel towards the allegorical figures and foreign ornament would ‘put their self-esteem in arms by reminding them of their ignorance’.60 Boult goes even further, pointing out how particular elements of the sculpture and decoration are inappropriate for their Liverpool setting: It is not likely that the commercial men will feel complimented by the frequent introduction of Mercury and his emblems, when they learn that he was the patron of thieves as well as of merchants, which seems to imply that one sort of man is just as good as another.61

As the name of the local paper indicated, Mercury stood as a key symbol of Liverpool’s trade links and modern transportation and communication systems, and this is what Cockerell intended to highlight. Boult, however, implies that the iconography of the ornamental sculpture and decoration in St George’s Hall could easily have been misinterpreted. Could the references to Mercury be a slur or demonstrate Cockerell’s mistrust of the merchant classes and their new, self-made money? Boult also claimed that Cockerell’s scheme, with its diverse decorative and historical references, did not distinctively represent Liverpool as a city, which he believed was ‘in many ways superior to ancient Rome’.62 Here Boult displays a particularly nineteenth-century attitude, suggesting that the contemporary city far exceeds the achievements of the past, but it is also possible that he is referring to the decadence and eventual fall of the Roman Empire. This conceptualization of Rome had been given currency by writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Boult perhaps thought that contemporary, metropolitan Liverpool deserved an alternative historical model.63 In his description of the opening of St George’s Hall, Boult itemized each element of the building’s ornamental and sculptural decoration. He catalogues the size, the materials and the monetary value of the fixtures and fittings, foregrounding the wealth and status embodied in the Hall. These facts and figures were particularly appropriate for the industrial and mercantile readership of the Liverpool Mercury.64 Minton’s floor is the ‘largest in existence’ and the bronze doors ‘the largest in England’, for example. Reminiscent of an auction catalogue or sales brochure, Boult seems to emphasize the value of the mosaic floor, the bronze doors, the Peterhead porphyry columns and the state-of-the-art organ

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as commodities rather than as works of art. He also dismisses the monumental female figures, ‘said to be Virtues’, even though they were clearly identified by the Latin/English mottos beneath each spandrel in the mosaic floor. Writing for a largely middle-class audience, he empties out Cockerell’s carefully layered transhistorical construct of architecture, sculpture and decoration of its historical and cultural context and moral or symbolic significance. A viewer, Victorian or modern, armed with knowledge of the buildings and works of art Cockerell was referring to, can appreciate how St George’s Hall brings together layers of architectural, decorative and sculptural history. For the majority of people in Liverpool in 1854, however, St George’s Hall offered competing and confusing aesthetic messages, with statues of their modern statesmen, clergy and benefactors surrounded by opaque classical, medieval and Renaissance imagery. In the case of St George’s Hall, the classical and the contemporary are at odds, manifested in the interplay between the sculpture – the pediment and the statuary – and Cockerell’s highly decorative scheme. The sculpture and ornament highlights and at the same time attempts to reconcile the competing social and intellectual hierarchies operating in Liverpool, as well as rewriting the city’s status as a broker of wealth and power in the British Empire.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Imogen Hart and Claire Jones for their unfailing support and patience in editing this chapter; their comments and suggestions have been transformative. I would also like to thank the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for hosting and funding a workshop for the editors and authors working on British art and architecture for this publication, which was integral to the development of this chapter.

Notes 1 Quentin Hughes, Seaport: Architecture and Townscape in Liverpool (London: Lund Humphries, 1964), 95. 2 See Andrew Richardson, Civic Pride: The Major Public Buildings of England and Wales, No. 1: St George’s Hall, Liverpool (Liverpool: West Derby Publishing 1988), 2 and David Watkin, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell (London: A. Zwemmer, 1974), 238.

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3 On Baudelaire’s essay, see Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), ix and 62–3. 4 Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 63. 5 Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 2. 6 See Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects and Claire Jones, Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848 to 1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). See also the introductory essay by Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt in Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 15–55. 7 Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 242. 8 A music festival was established in Liverpool in the late eighteenth century, becoming a triennial festival in 1784. It was particularly associated with largescale performances of religious oratorios, opening with a performance of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah. See Pippa Drummond, The Provincial Music Festival in England, 1784–1914 (London: Routledge, 2016), 29. 9 For a full account of the commissioning, design and building of St George’s Hall see Terry Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1997), 253–54, Richardson, Civic Pride and Joseph Sharples and Richard Pollard, Liverpool: Pevsner Architectural Guides (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 49–59. 10 See Andy Foster, Birmingham: Pevsner Architectural Guides (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 58. 11 Elmes completed competition designs for St George’s Hall and the Assize Court in the early 1840s; RIBA Study Room, Victoria and Albert Museum (SA80/3 and SA80/2). 12 See Colin Cunningham, Victorian and Edwardian Town Halls (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 34–55. 13 See Anne Bourdeleu, Charles Robert Cockerell, Architect in Time: Reflections Around Anachronistic Drawings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 72; Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, 253 and Watkin, Cockerell, 238. 14 George Abel Blouet, Restauration des thermes d’Antonin Carecalla à Rome (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1828). 15 See Bourdeleu, Cockerell, 70–2. 16 Ibid., 79. 17 Ibid., 42. 18 Cockerell and Elmes already knew one another as Cockerell was friends with Elmes’s father, the fellow architect James Elmes (1782–1862).

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19 Barry Bergdoll, ‘Romantic Historiography and the Paradoxes of Historicist Architecture’, in Martin Bressani and Christina Contandriopoulos, eds, The Companions to the History of Architecture: Nineteenth Century Architecture, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 80. 20 Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, 1844, quoted in R. Rawlinson, Correspondence relative to St George’s Hall (Liverpool: 1871), 34 and cited by Benedict Read, ‘From Basilica to Valhalla’, in Penelope Curtis, ed., Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside (Liverpool: Tate, 1989), 33. 21 Bourdeleau, Cockerell, 79. 22 The figures from the frieze were removed from St George’s Hall in 1950 due to their poor condition. 23 Cockerell and Nicholl had been collaborators since 1821 when Nicholl had carved some of the capitols for Hanover Chapel on Regent Street, London (demolished 1896). Nicholl had recently worked on the sculptures for the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1838 and the pediment of the Taylorian Institute in Oxford in 1840; see Watkin, Cockerell, 144. 24 Cockerell was Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy and Stevens was Professor of Painting and Ornament. See Susan Beattie, Alfred Stevens, 1817–75 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1975), 6 and Kenneth Romney Towndrow, Alfred Stevens: Architectural Sculptor, Painter and Designer (London: Constable, 1939), 67. 25 Stevens had also completed some sculptural panels for the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cockerell’s request (now destroyed). See Towndrow, Alfred Stevens, 77–80. 26 Hugh Stannus, Alfred Stevens and His Work (London: The Autotype Company, 1891), 9. 27 ‘Town Council Proceedings’, Liverpool Mercury, 3 July 1846. 28 Ibid. 29 ‘Architectural and Archæological Society’, Liverpool Mercury, 30 March 1849. The Architectural and Archaeological Society was founded in 1848 to promote architectural taste and knowledge in Liverpool, which may be the ‘private as well as public works’ Cockerell refers to. See Arlene Wilson, ‘The Cultural Identity of Liverpool, 1790–1850: The Early Learned Societies’, read 14 May 1998, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .hsl​​c​.org​​.uk​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/20​​17​/05​​/147​-​​4​-Wil​​son​.p​​df. 30 Ibid. 31 Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 1. 32 The attributes of the plough and distaff are visible in the 1850 lithograph and are also mentioned in a description accompanying an illustration published in ‘The Sculpture Scheme in the Pediment of St George’s Hall, Liverpool’, The Builder 13, no. 632 (17 March 1855): 126.

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33 Milne, Trade and Traders, 50. 34 John Willox, Adams’ History and Description of St. George’s Hall, Liverpool (Liverpool: Stephen Adams, 1868), 29. 35 Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, 54. 36 Alison Yarrington, ‘Nelson the Citizen Hero: State and Public Patronage of Monumental Sculpture, 1805–18’, Art History 6, no. 3 (1983): 315–27, 325. 37 Willox, Adams’ History, 38. 38 Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, 305. 39 It is not clear why the emblems in the floor do not refer to Wales. 40 Loraine Knowles, St George’s Hall (Liverpool: National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside, 1994), 9. 41 Read, ‘From Basilica to Valhalla’. 42 John Foster and James Yates had commissioned Chantrey to produce the statue of Roscoe in 1835, probably acting on behalf of the Liverpool Royal Institution, in which Roscoe had played a key role in its foundation. 43 Catherine Jones, ‘Saint of the Slums: Kitty Wilkinson is Commemorated with a Statue in St George’s Hall’, Liverpool Echo, 21 September 2012. 44 Read, ‘From Basilica to Walhalla’, 33–5. 45 Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, 270. 46 These monumental painted plaster reliefs were designed by Cockerell and executed by Mr Watson; see Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, 289. 47 Watkin, Cockerell, 240. 48 Richardson, Civic Pride, 3–4. 49 Bordeleau, Cockerell, 44–6. 50 See Beattie, Alfred Stevens, 6–7. 51 Stannus, Alfred Stevens, 14. 52 Towndrow, Alfred Stevens, 88. 53 Stannus, Alfred Stevens, 14. 54 Liverpool Council Minutes, 4 October 1854, quoted in Knowles, St George’s Hall, 30. 55 David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22. 56 J.H. Turner, ‘Opening of St George’s-Hall, Liverpool’, The Times, 31 August 1854, 6. 57 ‘Opening of St George’s Hall’, The Times, 18 September 1854, 4. 58 Tickets for the cheaper concert tickets cost 2s. 6d. – around a tenth of the average ‘comfortable’ working family’s weekly income. Tickets for the oratorios cost 1 guinea or 14 shillings for the evening performance. See, ‘Opening of St. George’s Hall’, The Times, 18 September 1854, 4. 59 For more on taste and the broader public understanding of the art and architecture of classical Greece and Rome in nineteenth-century Britain, see Kate Nichols,

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Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 60 J. Boult, ‘St. George’s Hall’, Liverpool Mercury, 19 September 1854. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Rosemary Barrow, ‘Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London’s Late-Victorian and Edwardian Popular Stage’, Theatre Journal 62 (2010): 209–26, 210. 64 The Liverpool Mercury was founded in 1811 on Liberal principles and was a strong campaigning voice in the city, particularly on issues such as housing, public health and social reform. At the same time, advertising was a key aspect of its commercial success, suggesting the paper appealed to socially aware but middle-class audiences with some disposable income.

5

Sculpture and the decorative in fin-de-siècle Brussels Women as creators and consumers Marjan Sterckx

Focusing on the triangulation of sculpture, the decorative and gender, this chapter discusses the convergence in fin-de-siècle Brussels of the representation of women as consumers of statuettes in Art Nouveau posters and the rise of women as creators of decorative sculpture. I argue that both developments and their possible interrelatedness were no mere coincidence but originated from a particular momentum of related phenomena. Notably, in the 1890s in Brussels, sculpture acquired a strongly decorative role in the domestic interior within the context of Art Nouveau. The decorative arts were actively stimulated and increasingly shown amid fine arts, blurring the boundaries between these fields. Women began to manifest themselves as art devotees, collectors and artists, aided by a moderate feminism. Training and exhibition opportunities for women in the fine and decorative arts increased and contributed to the emergence of a first generation of Belgian sculptresses.

Women as consumers of sculpture: An intimate interference Belgian Art Nouveau posters (called affiche illustrée ou décorative) and advertisements often represent fashionable women, usually in profile with their (often red) hair tied up. This reflects the graphic work of international artists such as Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, Alphonse Mucha and Henri de ToulouseLautrec, all of whom exhibited their work at the successive progressive Brussels’ arts societies Les XX (1884–93) and La Libre Esthétique (1894–1914).1 In the

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decorative arts, including graphic design, the female form was commonly used as an ornament, attesting to gender-stereotypical imagery. In fin-de-siècle advertisements, women adorned with flowers are frequently shown holding decorative consumer goods such as a coffee pot, a cup of chocolate, a hand mirror or a vase. Viewing a large corpus of such prints from turn-of-the-century Belgium, it is remarkable how often the women depicted, especially between 1895 and 1905 – the height of affichomanie (poster mania) – are shown holding a statuette, often in the shape of a woman (a motif that knows a longer tradition), and mostly held in the left hand. An early example is the advertisement designed by Armand Rassenfosse for the Brussels branch of The Fine Art and General Insurance Co. Ltd, founded in 1894 (Figure 5.1). Fitting the company’s core business, a seated woman wearing a long dress – a kind of guardian angel – holds up in her outstretched left arm, against a decorative background, a figurine of the semi-nude classical Venus de Milo. The poster designed by Rassenfosse in 1896 for the cancelled Exposition Rops was reused for the Salon des Cent in Paris later that year, and depicts a similar scene but now in Felicien Rops’s style.2 Here,

Figure 5.1  Armand Rassenfosse, Poster for the Brussels branch of The Fine Art and General Insurance Company Ltd, c. 1896, lithograph, Impr. Auguste Bénard, Liège. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp.

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a seated, naked, realistic woman, wearing a jester’s hood, uses a magnifying glass to study one of Rops’s erotic, naked female creations that seems to be sitting in her hand. This smaller, doll-like figure somewhat resembles the looking figure herself; she has similar skin tones and seems alive rather than a statuette, with her eyes open and wearing a hat, neckerchief, stockings and mules, a potential ‘femme fatale’. In 1897, the fourth salon of La Libre Esthétique included ‘ingenious decorative combinations’ and actively promoted the decorative arts and prints (after Paris, Brussels developed an early expertise in lithography, with the aid of specialized printers).3 To advertise the exhibition, Théo Van Rysselberghe chose to depict two fashionable women wearing cloaks and hats, one of whom (in red) holds a pink skin-coloured nude statuette (Figure 5.2).4 This woman’s left hand, with the little finger raised, barely touches the statuette, at the level of the armpit and navel, whereas her right thumb is curiously located in the pubic area, lending an unexpected intimacy to this tactile interaction with sculpture (albeit with gloves). Although the thumb might also suggest male genitals, the statuette, without visible breasts or arms, resembles most a girl’s body. A first sketch for this poster appears on a postcard, sent from Russia in 1897 by Van Rysselberghe to Octave Maus, an influential Brussels lawyer, director of La Libre Esthétique and first editor of the progressive Brussels weekly L’Art Moderne (1881–1914). This shows a different, larger and more vertical statuette.5 Van Rysselberghe situates the scene in an interior. The floorboards, the lack of a plinth, the sculpture stand instead of a pedestal (showing the legs of a larger sculpture) and the table or large block (of stone?) that both women are seated on suggest a sculptor’s studio rather than a public exhibition space, such as the museum where the salon of La Libre Esthétique was held. In museums it was usually not permitted to touch artworks, contrary to the privacy of an artist’s studio, or of a commercial or domestic environment. For the decoration of their homes, women were accustomed to the careful manipulation of objects, and in fin-de-siècle Brussels they became more frequent visitors to artists’ studios and to art galleries.6 However, the representation of such tactile engagement with sculpture by women was new. A tactile approach to art objects has long formed the basis of (male) connoisseurship, by way of elitist sociability or enjoyed alone in the studiolo or art cabinet (e.g. Titian, Frans Francken).7 An example of this trope is the 1905 poster for the Exposition d’art ancien in Bruges designed by Florimond Van Acker. This depicts a connoisseur, writing with a quill while holding and

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Figure 5.2 Théo Van Rysselberghe, Poster for Le quatrième Salon de La Libre Esthétique, 1897, lithograph, Impr. Monnom, Brussels. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp.

closely inspecting a (neo)gothic statuette of a long-dressed, Burgundian woman, who in turn seems to hold a statuette. Three years later, Pierre-Auguste Renoir portrayed the art dealer Ambroise Vollard at a table with decorative objects (both men were interested in sculpture’s relation to the decorative arts) while gazing at and grasping in both hands a statuette of a female nude by Aristide

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Maillol, thus displaying visual perception as well as tactile pleasure or embodied ‘jouissance’ within the intimacy of an interior.8 Isidore Opsomer’s poster for the 1911 exhibition of the Brussels art circle Pour l’Art (1892–1941) shows a seated nude man from the back, holding and watching a clothed and winged female figurine on a globe (evocative of winged allegories of ‘Victory’). This connects to this tradition, yet in a divergent way because of its male nudity – perhaps unexpected for an art connoisseur. Scrutinizing an art object optically and haptically (looking, feeling and weighing) enhances not only its study but also its aesthetic experience, sensory enjoyment and desirability. In line with this practice, lawyer Edmond Picard, second editor of L’Art Moderne and an important animateur d’art in fin-de-siècle Brussels, presented contemporary art ‘in a novel and original manner’, in a quasi-domestic setting in his former dwelling on the Avenue de la Toison d’Or.9 Known as the Maison d’Art à la Toison d’Or (1894–1900), fine and decorative arts were installed together as if in an aesthete’s lived interior, with decorative furniture, coloured walls and chimney pieces, one decorated with female sculptures of Athena and Justice by the Brussels sculptor Charles Van der Stappen.10 Here, incidentally, an early poster exhibition was held in 1896, while the following year the first monograph on the Belgian poster was published.11 The cultural, social and economic elite – male and female – gathering here were allowed to touch the artworks and objets d’art that could be purchased ‘without any hint of mercantilism’, unlike the more commercial triennial salons or the artistically respected salons of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique, where one could also buy art.12 According to Picard, ‘Madame la Maison d’art’, as the all-male members of the organizing Société anonyme L’Art named the exhibition space, was an almost sacred place in which the ‘virgin goddess of art’ roamed.13 He associated the venue with connoisseurship and idealized concepts of femininity. Maurice Rheims has noted that in the nineteenth century, ‘Sculptors caressed blocks of marble with their chisels in the hope of bringing forth female figures as chaste and sensual as those carved by Germain Pilon.’14 This description echoes the creation myth of the sculptor Pygmalion whose life-size nude statue of Galatea, with which he had fallen in love, came to life thanks to Aphrodite. This tale, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was well known in the fin de siècle through depictions such as those by Jean-Léon Gérôme (who also created his statue of Tanagra (1890) – a seated female nude holding a polychrome Tanagra figurine). Here, the relationship between the active, dominant male sculptor-creator and his passive, dependent female model-creation is firmly and (hetero)sexually

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rooted. In a humorous design by Belgian artist Henri Cassiers for the poster Une dame d’Edam, one of the frames depicts a male sculptor eagerly grasping a female nude sculpture.15 In 1896, Camille Claudel created a hardly flattering etching of her former lover Auguste Rodin (who held a solo exhibition in Picard’s Maison d’Art in 1899) modelling a female figurine that appears to turn away from him.16 The myth of Pygmalion, common associations of modelling with touching (the sculpture’s surface being perceived as its skin) and of touch with intimacy or sexuality might well have been an unspoken or unconscious reason for the general disapproval of women modelling male or female bodies – and thus of women aspiring to become sculptors. When the Belgian painter Yvonne Serruys announced in 1898 to her Catholic bourgeois family that she wanted to become a sculptor, their response was vehement: ‘Then came the second family scandal! Just think! [.  .  .] that I thought I wanted to be a sculptor! .  .  . Me, a well-bred girl! [. . .] Consternation reigned. Sculptor! I was going to do a man’s job, to be looking at nude models! . . . It was a rough blow, but I persevered.’17 Access to nude models within this ‘male’ profession was considered indecent for a well-educated woman, in a society still strongly organized on the basis of gender segregation, in which the role of women – the ‘weaker sex’ who was ‘legally incapacitated’ – was in caring for her family and keeping her home.18 In France, a rare iteration of a female Pygmalion, the ‘Pygmalionne’ or ‘Madame Pygmalion’, surfaced in theatre and literature, but this feminizing of the myth and its transgression of the male-female domination between sculptor and model did not have a unanimously positive connotation.19 It is surprising, then, that Van Rysselberghe’s 1897 poster (Figure 5.2), deviating as it did from contemporary (male) Pygmalion and (hetero)sexual norms, by showing women as handlers of a nude statuette, appears not to have caused a stir, although it was widely visible in Brussels’s public spaces. Seemingly, contemporary press coverage only reported enthusiasm. L’Art Moderne noted: ‘We are asked from many quarters where one may obtain the beautiful poster that Théo Van Rysselberghe has designed for the Salon of La Libre Esthétique and which for the past few days has brightened up the monotony of the streets with a shimmering harmony of reds and greens.’20 In the liberal Brussels newspaper L’Indépendance Belge could be read, ‘A charming poster by Mr Van Rysselberg [sic] advertises this Exhibition . . . the delicate yet dazzling tones of which it is made up creates the most beautiful effect on the walls’.21 A similar kind of praise can be found in other newspapers and journals.22 Focusing on the harmonies of colour, the critics carefully avoided the subject matter altogether,

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thereby perhaps obscuring the poster’s potential subversiveness. Likewise, the colour scheme of sea green and yellow-brown for the hair strands and the tinting of flesh on a poster by Henri Privat Antoine Théodore Livemont (known as Privat-Livemont) for the 1897 spring exhibition of the Cercle Artistique de Schaerbeek (Brussels) was positively received (Figure 5.3).23 Depicting a ‘highly attractive female figure’ holding a statuette of a long-haired woman in a long semi-transparent robe that mirrors herself, this was nevertheless deemed to be ‘more suitable to be seen inside than outside’.24 Van Rysselberghe’s poster (Figure 5.2), representing two stylish uppermiddle-class women visiting a sculptor’s studio or art gallery, presumably aimed to appeal to the emergent group of female amateurs and consumers of art in Brussels. Posters for other salons of La Libre Esthétique, and for those of L’Essor (1876–91), Pour l’Art, Le Sillon (1893–c. 1910) and other art circles, as well as advertisements for galleries and luxury goods

Figure 5.3  Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster for the annual Exhibition of the Cercle artistique de Schaerbeek, 1897, lithograph in six colours, Impr. Trommer & Staeves, Brussels. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp.

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manufacturers, also depicted and addressed this new, wealthy and cultured female Brussels clientele. Enjoying leisure time, they increasingly attended concerts and lectures and visited salons, galleries and studios, some buying and collecting artworks.25 A shining example was Anna Boch, a descendant of the Boch ceramic specialists, and the only female vingtiste. She exhibited twenty-two times at Les XX and later at La Libre Esthétique, with paintings and some decorative objects. Boch acquired a considerable art collection, including several sculptures representing women by Constantin Meunier, Charles Samuel and Alexandre Charpentier. Her first Brussels house, in the same avenue as Picard’s Maison d’art, was redesigned in 1895–8 by Victor Horta, who often collaborated with sculptors, to adorn mantelpieces or furniture, and argued that sculpture needed architecture to complement it.26 Boch placed a marble bust of herself by Juliette Samuel-Blum in the dining room, while other statues were displayed in the stairwell, the yellow salon

Figure 5.4  Charles Lefébure, Maria van de Velde-Sèthe in the dining room of Villa Bloemenwerf, Ukkel, holding George Minne’s Kleine Gekwetste II (bronze, 1898), 1898– 1900, photograph. Brussels, Archives et Musée de la Littérature. © AML (Archives et Musée de la Littérature) © Sabam Belgium.

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and the music room, where a female choir practised weekly for the music sessions of Les XX.27 Henry van de Velde, who had been a vingtiste since 1888, exhibiting first paintings and then decorative arts, also devoted attention to sculpture within the interior. He had a clear preference for Meunier and George Minne, who both exhibited at Les XX and La Libre Esthétique and moved (back, in Meunier’s case) to Brussels around 1895. Statues by Minne can be seen in various contemporary interior photographs of houses designed by Van de Velde, including his own Villa Bloemenwerf (Brussels, 1895–6), of which some furniture was exhibited at La Libre Esthétique in 1896.28 One such photograph shows his wife Maria Sèthe holding with both hands Minne’s bronze Small Injured Figure II (1898) (Figure 5.4). The way she is viewing and touching the sculpture recalls the 1897 poster of her former teacher Van Rysselberghe (Figure 5.2), whom she posed for and who himself possessed another bronze

Figure 5.5 Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster Ville de Bruxelles. Fêtes Nationales et communales de 1899, 1898–9, lithograph, Impr. O. de Rycker, Brussels. Brussels, City Archive, ASB Affiches 2035. Photo: Archief van de Stad Brussel.

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figurine by Minne.29 Minne’s statuette represents a nude boy, evoking yet another gender tension. While most of the statuettes held by women in these fin-de-siècle posters represent women, nude or scarcely dressed, some examples show male statuettes. These, however, are not touched but held by their pedestal. For instance, Henri Meunier’s fourth postcard in the series Le Chic à Paris (c. 1900) shows an elegant, red-haired woman holding and examining a greenish (bronze) statuette, whose muscled legs and the contours of a belly suggest a male body. Another example is Privat-Livemont’s poster for the City of Brussels, which was used frequently between 1898 and 1901 to promote local and national festivities (Figure 5.5). This shows a woman decked with pink roses holding aloft a statuette of St Michael, the city’s patron saint, fighting the devil.30 As both the saint – wearing full armour – and the devil – displaying more flesh – are represented with wings, it is clear that their physicality is not that of real men. Furthermore, any

Figure 5.6  Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, Poster Orfèvrerie d’art Miele & Co., Brussels, 1901–2, lithograph. Private collection, Brussels. Photo: Vincent Everarts, 2019.

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imaginary eye contact between the woman and the object is prevented through the atypical composition, with both characters facing the viewer. With a print run of 10,000 copies, this poster must have contributed to the familiarity in turn-of-the-century Brussels of the motif of a woman holding a statuette. PrivatLivemont himself depicted it several times again, for instance, for advertisements for the Brussels goldsmith’s firm Orfèvrerie d’art Miele & Co. (1901–2) (Figure 5.6), with the statuette as a figure on the base of a tazza, and on a fireplace he decorated with Les Beaux-Arts (1907) in an industrial school in Schaerbeek.31 The women represented in these fin-de-siècle prints are not just passive ideals of beauty, subject to the male and female viewer’s and the (male) artist’s gaze (most poster artists in Brussels being male, except for Léo Jo, who did not depict this motif as far as we know). Several women are shown examining or manipulating sculptures, decorative objects, prints or paintings with an attentive gaze, sometimes aided by a lorgnette.32 On his poster for the eighth exhibition of

Figure 5.7  José Dierickx, Poster for the 8th Salon of Pour l’Art (8ème exposition annuelle de peintures, sculptures et art appliqué), 1900, lithograph, Impr. Vve Monnom, Brussels. Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis. Photo: Letterenhuis, Antwerp.

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Pour l’Art in 1900, José Dierickx depicted a seated woman shining a torch onto the standing female nude statuette in the palm of her hand (Figure 5.7). This enhances the impression that she is studying the object. The seated figure itself has sculpture-like qualities, thanks to the monotint, the block-like character of the slightly toppled object that seems to float over its darker background and the sculptural folds of the clothes. This seems to be a working gown. Confusion is thus created over the status of the seated figure: Is she a sculpture devotee, a sculptural object herself or a sculptor?

Women as creators of sculpture: Best at bibelots? In 1909, the Belgian sculptor Hélène Cornette exhibited at the Brussels Salon de Printemps a large plaster bas-relief entitled La Sculpture (Museum of Ixelles) – a personification of sculpture represented as a seated woman sculptor in a long working gown. She leans forward while studying and holding with both hands a statuette of a standing, slender woman. Somewhat earlier, Privat-Livemont had drawn a female personification of sculpture, ‘sculpture’ being a feminine word in Latin and French (Figure 5.8). His is a fashionably dressed young woman holding a small decorative bust of a woman. Her right hand, adorned with a ring and a bracelet, rests on a sculpture stand, thereby situating the scene in a sculptor’s studio (unusually, it seems, decorated with wallpaper). The harshness of the métier remains invisible and does not have an impact on her femininity and her decorative role within the image. She is not shown at work with hammer and chisel on hard stone but holds a tiny modelling tool, aimed at working in the softer materials of clay or wax. In his 1897 essay ‘Féminisme’, Brussels-based painter and art critic Edgar Baes compared women artists to ‘soft wax that is easily manipulated’, so as to argue that they were easily influenced by their (male) masters, attesting to their ‘instinctive subordination which does not detract from their qualities as executers but makes them rather interpreters than creators’.33 Yet Privat-Livemont’s print (Figure 5.8), showing the woman sculptor according to a common mise-en-scène of sculptors, posing near a finished object while still holding a tool, displays the creation of a sculpture rather than its execution.34 As the outcome is a statuette, however, the association of female creativity with home decoration, rather than with ‘high art’, is nevertheless confirmed. Belgian women sculptors had been exhibiting since the 1840s, yet by 1900 still did not realize monumental, public sculpture in Brussels. The first of these were two

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Figure 5.8 Antoine Théodore Privat-Livemont, La Sculpture, lithograph, 1900–1, lithograph, 50 x 31.9 cm. Private collection, Brussels. Photo: Vincent Everarts, 2019.

busts of Léon Vanderkindere by his daughter Sylvie, who exhibited in Brussels from 1888 and donated the bust, which was integrated into two different architectural monuments by Jules Brunfaut and Victor Horta, both inaugurated in Uccle in 1909.35 Privat-Livemont’s personification of sculpture (Figure 5.8) is part of a series of decorative prints entitled ‘les arts de la femme’, that represent, through allegories,

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this essentialist concept and field of ‘women’s art’. Here, sculpture was regarded as a suitable artistic discipline for women. Two years previously, in 1898, the Dictionary of Employment Open to Women was published in London by The Women’s Institute. This listed ‘sculptor’ as a possible profession for women, stating that ‘sculptors are employed in many branches’, including commissioned monumental work and the decoration of facades (said to be harder for women to obtain for it needed acquaintance with architects), as well as smaller, utilitarian, decorative work such as light fittings, jewellery, cutlery, cups and plates.36 In Belgium, too, ‘sculpture’ was listed as a potential profession for women in the catalogue to the exhibition La femme contemporaine (The Contemporary Woman) in Antwerp in May–June 1914.37 However, only four out of seventy-four women exhibited sculpture within the Fine Arts section, whereas the Decorative Arts section showcased nearly 500 works by women, including sculpted mirrors and frames, objects in copper, pewter and silver, flowers modelled from breadcrumbs, and so on. The essay on sculpture was not quite encouraging either. It was written by Alice Hölterhoff de Harven, who herself exhibited marble figures of children, a plaster allegory, drawings and portraits in pastel in the Fine Arts section, as well as a pewter desk set in the Decorative Arts section.38 She points out the difficulties of the métier, such as the required physical strength, the lengthy training, the high cost of materials, the need for a spacious studio and the lack of interest in sculpture among the public and critics. Hölterhoff de Harven concludes that women, except for the most talented and persevering, would better focus on applied art instead of aspiring to the ‘highest regions’ of sculpture: ‘Girls . . . don’t go and join the ranks of this type of artistic bohemian who earns too little to live and too much to die. Resolutely abandon pure art for applied or industrial art; don’t be afraid of losing status; a well-designed and artistically executed piece of applied art will always be superior to a bad bust or an uninteresting statue.’39 This sounded like a pragmatic call to earn a good living rather than succumb to the (male) myth of the bohemian artist. Yet, paradoxically, while trying to promote applied sculptural work for women, she simultaneously downgraded it as a subfield within sculpture, intended mainly for domestic interiors, while discouraging women from higher aspirations. It seems that the implicitly inferior fields of smaller-scale, (quasi)functional and often decorative sculptural designs were considered more appropriate for women, more in line with their assumed fragility and their expected modesty and domesticity. Her advice fits in perfectly with contemporary gender views in patriarchal Belgium.40 In 1897, Edgar Baes noted ‘an attempt at feminism that deserves attention: . . . a group of young girls

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who, without trying a pretentious art, limit themselves to treat, with grace and adroitness, painting on fabrics, ceramics, leather works . . . women can expect success in this path’.41 Such opinions know a longer tradition, internationally. In 1860, Léon Lagrange advocated in the French Gazette des Beaux-Arts that women ought not to aspire to make grand sculpture: ‘What more delicate hand will know better to decorate the fragile porcelain that we love to surround ourselves with. .  .  . It is up to female hands, unable to raise our great monuments of stone . . . the male genius has nothing to fear from the feminine taste. To the first [men], the great architectural designs, the statuary . . . the great art. To women . . . those secondary arts that are . . . especially suited to their nature and character.’42 In similar language, the French feminist Olympe Audouard noted the increased participation of sculptresses to the Paris Salon of 1882 as follows: ‘At the sculpture section, women begin to assert themselves; it is not yet great art, but it is already an art that prognosticates a glorious future to feminine art in sculpture.’43 Following such essentialist discourse, smaller-scale sculpture and the decorative arts have frequently been associated with femininity, domesticity, superficiality and amateurism, requiring less intellectual skill than fine art but more adroitness and patience. The different terminology used, such as taste instead of genius, execution instead of invention and craftsmanship instead of art, reinforced the inferior status of the applied arts and women’s agency therein.44 In Brussels, following the international debates about design reform and related training after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the decorative arts – needlework foremost – were described as eminently suitable for women. Les arts de la femme – later to become the name of a women’s society in Brussels (1908–18) – could be practised at home, without the need of a separate studio and without making dirt or noise, so that they could contribute to domestic happiness and to the family budget in a ‘respectable’ way, making these a favourable field for feminine creativity.45 In 1863, Brussels lawyer and liberal politician Auguste Orts advocated that girls should be allowed to train in industrial drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, particularly mentioning the textile arts, but also the painting of porcelain, ceramics and fans.46 Shortly after, partly brought about by some early Belgian feminists, the École professionnelle pour jeunes filles (to be renamed École professionnelle Bischoffsheim in 1891) was established in Brussels, where girls learned these skills. In 1886, thanks to Charles Buls, Octave Maus, Edmond Picard and Charles Van der Stappen, the city also witnessed the establishment of a School of Decorative Arts (École des arts décoratifs),

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connected to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.47 Van der Stappen became its teacher in decorative sculpture, and Privat-Livemont attended classes there in drawing and decoration. The training opportunities for women in the fine arts also increased. The Brussels Academy of Fine Arts opened its doors to women in 1889, although nude classes remained problematic.48 In 1895–6, Elisa Beetz was the first to enrol in the sculpture class, then taught by Van der Stappen. She also trained in Paris with Alexandre Charpentier, her later husband, who regularly exhibited decorative sculpture at Les XX and La Libre Esthétique.49 Between 1898 and 1901, the Viennese sculptor Ilse Conrat enrolled at the Brussels Academy and joined Van der Stappen’s private studio.50 Various Belgian sculptresses attended private studios in Brussels, both with painters and with sculptors, such as Berthe Van Tilt and Claire Colinet with the vingtiste Jef Lambeaux; Louise Mayer with Ernest Blanc-Garin; Rosalie Nicolas, Hélène Cornette and Elisa Beetz with the vingtiste Paul Dubois; and with Egide Rombaux, Yvonne Serruys (she had previously taken painting lessons with Georges Lemmen in Brussels) and Valentine Bender, who would later become his second wife. In 1897, La Fédération Artistique noticed a ‘remarkable extension of the number of women artists’ in the present time and thought ‘education alone, with the freedom to devote oneself entirely to the arts’ was responsible for this evolution, although the anti-feminist author did not approve of this, calling the art of women an anomaly, ‘generally of secondary degree’.51 Exhibition opportunities for women augmented in fin-de-siècle Brussels, just as they did internationally. Moreover, specific exhibitions devoted to the decorative arts and crafts by women extended the discourse of domesticity linked to women’s artistic production. A Belgian critic writing on Clara Voortman-Dobbelaere explicitly labelled bibelots as a feminine artistic preserve: ‘Finally, in what is essentially a feminine branch of art, viz. decorative bibelots – leatherwork, book bindings, small bronzes – Mrs Clara Voortman has submitted a world of small objects that bear the mark of her refined taste. And this is not the least original side of this eminently conscientious talent.’52 Bibelots were small, refined objets d’art that male and female owners could ‘touch, replace within the home, carress and contemplate’,53 but they were sometimes described with a certain disdain.54 Voortman exhibited leatherwork (twenty items) at La Libre Esthétique in 1901 but she also painted and created sculptural objets d’art.55 Some were cast in bronze by the Brussels firm Petermann, such as a frog-shaped table bell (Design Museum Ghent), or by the Compagnie des Bronzes, to which numerous sculptors sold their models for reproduction. Even if commissioned

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monumental and public sculpture was generally still considered of higher value, international tendencies from the 1870s onwards, such as the New Sculpture in Britain, turned to smaller-scale sculpture while promoting aesthetic qualities and crafts-oriented materiality.56 In 1897, the Brussels art historian and critic Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert argued in his article ‘La sculpture décorative’ that all sculpture is in itself decorative, irrespective of whether it concerns large statues adorning the city or portable bronze bibelots adorning mantelpieces, side tables and cupboards.57 From around 1890, Les XX, followed by Pour l’Art and La Libre Esthétique, as well as the triennial salons from 1895 onwards, made way for this latter category and for the applied arts more generally. The category ‘art appliqué’ was not yet well defined and encompassed manifold decorative objects, including bronze statuettes (often of female bodies) and functional items with sculptural qualities, such as vases, trays, jars, vide-poches, candlesticks or plant holders, executed in diverse materials, some of which enjoyed a revived interest such as ceramics, stoneware, pewter and ivory (chryselephantine sculpture was particularly stimulated in fin-de-siècle Brussels because of the Congo Free State). Even if most of these objects were authored by men, who often already held established careers in the more prestigious fine arts, the rise in exhibiting opportunities and in market demand for bibelots in belle epoque Brussels presumably played a role in the parallel emergence of a first generation of Belgian sculptresses. The work they showed at several turn-of-the-century Brussels salons indeed seems to fit largely – yet not solely – within the constraints of this sculptural field, even if this is difficult to judge from the catalogues when few artworks survive (in museums) or have been traced.58 Laurence Brogniez and Vanessa Gemis have calculated that 47 per cent of all ninety-one exhibiting women artists at Les XX and/or La Libre Esthétique between 1884 and 1914 concentrated on applied art.59 It is however essential to note that this field was not clearly defined; ‘sculptures et objets d’art’ were regularly merged into a single category. In an overview of ten years of La Libre Esthétique published in L’Art Moderne in 1903, the participating artists are divided according to artistic category and nationality. For Belgium the Sculpture section lists only two women, Cornette and Mlle G.[abrielle] des Cressonnières (who exhibited a marble bust of a child in 1899), whereas the Objets d’art and Decoration section comprises ten women, including Voortman-Dobbelaere and Jenny Lorrain.60 In 1901, the latter exhibited ten functional objets d’art in bronze and pewter (vases, ashtrays, tableware, a dish and an electric torch), all referencing flora and fauna

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in their titles (e.g. Cyclamen, Les Sauterelles, Libellules and Lézard), linking them to the fine arts as well as the decorative Art Nouveau style.61 It seems that Belgian sculptresses, such as Lorrain and Cornette, who also made life-size nudes, figures and busts, sent small-scale decorative objects rather than their larger statues to La Libre Esthétique. Alternatively, it may have been that these more decorative objects were selected for entry, being considered more acceptable within women’s conventionally defined scope. Nevertheless, reviews of the decorative arts at this society rarely mention women.62 The only women to be invited to exhibit sculpture at Les XX were French: Marie Cazin née Guillet in 1887 and Charlotte Besnard née Dubray the year after. At La Libre Esthétique, the first participating sculptresses were equally French: Camille Claudel in 1894 and Charlotte Besnard again in 1895 and 1897.63 Claudel made her debut with four sculptures, including her bronze Waltz, which L’Art Moderne described in gendered terms as ‘both virile and tender’ and ‘original and strong’, so as to denominate that it diverged from what was essentially considered as ‘feminine’ art.64 The gender deviant behaviour of women choosing the ‘male’ profession of sculptor was frequently referred to by calling them or their work ‘virile’, but this was mostly countered by relating them or their work likewise to ‘typically feminine’ features, so as to restore the ‘separate spheres’. Claudel’s Waltz would be shown again two years later, now executed in glazed stoneware by the French firm of Emile Muller & Cie, in the objets d’art section, under the company’s rather than the artist’s name – typical for artists working in the decorative field, where authorship functions differently.65 This also applied to the French Jeanne Itasse’s works in ‘céramique d’art’ for the same firm. In an article in L’Art Moderne devoted particularly to the objets d’art at La Libre Esthétique, both Claudel and Itasse were unmentioned except for a general appreciation of the firm’s stoneware. Its author pleaded for a ‘renaissance des Arts mineurs’ while criticizing that ‘this movement seems to concentrate too exclusively on a group of painters and sculptors who content themselves with ornamenting usual objects without thinking of perfecting their form, choosing the material most suitable for their purpose, making them elegant, harmonious and useful at once’.66 Charlotte Besnard clearly did experiment with diverse materials in the many sculptures she exhibited in Brussels. In 1893, L’Art Moderne praised her ‘ceramic figures, so very attractive in their metallic colourations’ at the Paris Salon.67 In 1897, the Journal de Bruxelles applauded her Echo statuette at La Libre Esthétique but added, ‘terracottas, stoneware masks, a high-relief Ceres, of a polychromy that is a bit too realistic and too violent’ (Figure 5.9).68 Seemingly, for the author,

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Figure 5.9  Charlotte Besnard née Dubray, Ceres or Persephone, high relief polychrome glazed stoneware produced by Emile Muller, 1895. 74 x 64 x 40 cm. In memory of John F. Paramino, Boston Sculptor. Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 1998.401. Photo © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Besnard’s colourful Ceres appeared too decorative for the realm of sculpture, or too sculptural for the decorative arts, or maybe the object was considered too bold and innovative for a woman artist, moving beyond the traditional work of women painting ceramics, such as at Sèvres or Boch. Her high relief of the goddess of agriculture as a life-size, red-haired, bare-shouldered woman with red lips and a convincing skintone, only covered by a white fabric, in polychrome stoneware reminiscent of the Florentine Renaissance workshop of della Robbia, was also cast by Emile Muller. The firm paid for a full-page advertisement in the catalogue of the Fine Arts section at the International Exhibition in Brussels that year, mentioning among others the ‘edition of over 300 models from contemporary statuary’.69 In the same year 1897, Alexandre Charpentier designed a promotional poster for ‘Grès [stoneware] Emile Muller’, printed in Paris, featuring a bare-chested boy holding a roof tile in his left hand and a statuette of a classically dressed woman in his right hand, illustrating the

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company’s double expertise in architectural work and ‘Sculpture décorative’, notably ‘execution in stoneware of the works of masters of statuary’. In 1896, Hélène Cornette, who was described as having ‘an energetic and virile temperament’,70 some of whose works were ‘less feminine’ than others,71 would be the first Belgian sculptress to exhibit at La Libre Esthétique (having previously exhibited at other Salons). She would be invited again by Maus to participate in 1900 and 1902. Like many contemporary sculptresses, she exhibited a bust, statuettes and bas-reliefs, including a symbolist Sainte that was subsequently bought by the Belgian State, via Maus, who advised on the acquisition of decorative artworks for the new Musées Royaux des Arts décoratifs et industriels in Brussels, founded in 1889.72 For this museum, work was also purchased at La Libre Esthétique in 1899 from Jeanne de Brouckère and Alice Holbach, who were both registered at the same Brussels address and exhibited objects in copper, pewter and silver, including a clock, candle holder and lantern, and from the German Sophie Bürger-Hartmann.73 The latter, who specialized in nude female bodies (Figure 5.10), exhibited seven silver brooches and four decorative bronzes as part of the work submitted to La Libre Esthetique by the German Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (c. 1898–1907).74 Hereafter, in 1906, 1909 and 1911, mainly foreign women sculptors exhibited at La Libre Esthétique – Jane Poupelet from Paris and Bessie Potter Vonnoh from New York (four bronzes), who specialized since 1895 in innovative and ‘intimate’ plaster statuettes for the home. These she called ‘potterines’, referring to

Figure 5.10  Sophie Bürger-Hartmann, Vide-poche, c. 1899, bronze and ivory. Private collection. (Auction Artcurial, Paris, 9 October 2018, lot 50). Photo: Artcurial.

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her name (feminized) as well as to pottery, and they obtained great commercial and critical success in turn-of-the-century America.75 Also exhibiting was Marie Ténicheff from Smolensk, with twelve decorative objects in a display case, plus animal sculptures in diverse materials. Meanwhile, the participating Belgians Louise Mayer and Yvonne Serruys had moved to Paris.76 Serruys showed ten small bronzes following the lost wax process (cast by Hébrard), mainly female nudes, including a Surtout de table (table centre) consisting of four groups of nude female dancers. She also exhibited a mask of a bulldog in glass paste produced by the glass manufactory of George Despret. They collaborated for five years (1905–10); Serruys supplied some 300 models for glass vases, bowls, porte-bagues (ring holders) and presse-papiers (paperweights), while a few of her statuettes, such as Femme couchée (Reclining Woman) were also executed in pâte de verre.77 Whereas Ochsé-Mayer increasingly focused on the so-called ‘curious’ ‘application of sculpture to modern decorative art’, especially in faience and small-scale works, Serruys would apply herself to more robust nudes of the ‘new woman’.78 According to one critic, she pursued for too long small-scale Tanagralike figurines of women.79 Yet, Octave Maus pointed out in L’Art Moderne in 1912, the ‘decorative’ character of two of her monumental statues that had been purchased for public display by the City of Paris (a faun with playing children) and by the French State (female bathers); ‘two groups – very important ones – by Mrs Yvonne Serruys-Mille. . . . Both have a solid structure, a largely decorative appearance and an eloquent shape.’80 By 1910, the momentum in Brussels of a strong association of women with small-scale sculpture appeared to be past its height, even if a handful of sculptresses continued to work and exhibit in Brussels. In 1911, French critic Louis Vauxcelles observed in L’Art Moderne that ‘All women paint. When they are not handling pastel sticks or producing commercial and sickly sweet watercolours, they devote themselves to decorative art.’81 Some rare posters still showed a woman holding a statuette, yet these mainly surfaced in Wallonia, such as that by Gisbert Combaz for an exhibition in ‘Le Pays Noir’ (c. 1911), or that by Emile Berchmans for the Triennial Salon of Fine Arts in Liège in 1912.82

Conclusion In fin-de-siècle Brussels, emerging women consumers and art devotees were frequently depicted on and addressed through decorative Art Nouveau posters.

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Particularly between around 1895 and 1905, many of these prints featured fashionable women optically and haptically engaging with small-scale sculpture. In these images, a triangulation of sculpture, gender and the decorative is articulated, with tactility playing a central role. These reflect the growing presence and market demand for small-scale bibelots for domestic interiors that was stimulated by, among others, La Libre Esthétique, L’Art Moderne and its protagonists. Simultaneously, a first generation of Belgian women sculptors emerged, preceded and probably inspired by their foreign, mainly French counterparts. Training as well as exhibition opportunities for women in the fine and decorative arts were steadily growing in the Belgian capital from the late 1880s onwards, increasing also women sculptors’ visibility. Although they challenged the boundaries of traditional bourgeois gender roles and occupations, leading to misogynist reactions, much of their work shown at La Libre Esthétique fitted within the gender constraints of the small-scale bibelot and the statuette. PrivatLivemont’s and Hélène Cornette’s turn-of-the-century depictions of ‘Sculpture’ also show a woman sculptor holding a statuette. This sculptural category was more easily associated with femininity, domesticity and inferiority, and thus regarded as being more in line with women’s assumed fragility and expected modesty, even if men were also very active in this field. All public sculpture commissions in Brussels until then went to men. The prominent motif of women contemplating and manipulating smallscale sculptures and objects in Art Nouveau prints in Brussels around 1900, and the increase in the contemporary creation and presentation of small-scale sculpture by women from the 1890s, also at the triannual salons, may have influenced each other. Yet the interplay between these two developments, that both seem much determined by gendered concepts, powers and patterns, was complex. Paradoxically, the posters discussed in this essay make the women represented into decoration themselves, as passive objects of the artist’s and the public’s gaze, while simultaneously the representation of women’s own act of looking at, manipulating and creating sculpture, undermines a male monopoly of these actions. In fin-de-siècle Brussels, where a moderate feminism reacted against stubborn patriarchal and misogynistic views, women became more active, visible and acceptable as beholders, collectors, creators and exhibitors of sculpture, and the interpretation of such concepts as sculpture, gender and the decorative were negotiated and stretched. Women’s agency in the ‘masculine’ discipline of sculpture appears to have flourished to some degree in this particular context where women became visually and positively associated

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with sculpture, and sculpture with the decorative. However, by systematically representing women consumers and creators as interacting with small-scale ‘decorative’ sculpture, and by primarily exhibiting similar objects by women artists in Brussels, prejudices about female creativity as being more closely related to interior decoration and domestic consumption than to ‘high art’ were confirmed and reinforced.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to sincerely thank both editors of this volume for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this text, as well as Werner Adriaenssens, Thijs Dekeukeleire, Ulrike Müller and Linda Van Santvoort.

Notes 1 Les XX – La Libre Esthétique – Honderd jaar later (Brussels: Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, 1993); Lori Anne Loeb, ‘Commercial Interpretations of the Domestic Ideology’, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 16–45; Pierre Sanchez, ed., Le salon des ‘XX’ et de La Libre Esthétique. Répertoire des exposants et liste de leurs œuvres (Dijon: Echelle de Jacob, 2012). 2 Yolande Oostens-Wittamer, De Belgische affiche 1892–1914 (Brussels: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1975), cat. 127; Jane Block, Homage to Brussels: The Art of Belgian Posters 1895–1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1992), 106. Rassenfosse’s family held a shop in interior design and decorative arts. 3 ‘d’ingénieuses combinaisons décoratives’, Vurgey, ‘Salon de “La Libre Esthétique”’, La Fédération Artistique 24, no. 21 (7 March 1897): 163. 4 An undated anonymous note on the back of one copy of the poster identifies both women as Madeleine Simon and Maria Monnom, the respective, befriended wives of Octave Maus and Van Rysselberghe. Oostens-Wittamer, De Belgische affiche, 108, cat. 155. Monnom was known for her non-conventional love life and was the daughter of the Brussels editors that published the poster, L’Art Moderne, and the catalogues of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique. 5 Brussels, Archief voor Hedendaagse Kunst van België (AHKB), Archive Octave Maus, inv. 6333: postcard dated 24 January 1897. Here, the sculpture stand seemingly features the nude lower body of a woman.

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6 On the role of women and men in nineteenth-century home decoration, see Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 89–121. 7 See Fiona Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Peter Dent, ed., Sculpture and Touch (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 8 Kathryn Brown, ‘The Domestic Interior as a Tactile Space: Jules-Aimé Dalou and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’, in Anca Lasc, ed., Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse (London: Routledge, 2016), 49–67. 9 ‘sous une forme nouvelle et originale’. Advertising for ‘La Maison d’Art’, L’Art Moderne 19, no. 50 (10 December 1899): 416. 10 Jane Block, ‘La Maison d’Art. Edmond Picard’s Asylum of Beauty’, in Michel Draguet, ed., Irréalisme et Art Moderne. Mélanges Philippe Roberts-Jones (Brussels: ULB, 1991), 145–62; Jane Block, ‘Bruxelles-Paris: La Maison d’Art d’Edmond Picard et la galerie L’Art Nouveau de Siegfried Bing’, in Virginie Devillez, ed., Siegfried Bing & La Belgique/België (Brussels: KMSKB, 2010), 112; Paul Aron, ‘“La Maison d’art” d’Edmond Picard: Ongesien kan geschien. Un avocat esthète et collectionneur’, in Willy van Eeckhoutte and Bruno Maes, eds, Genius, grandeur & Gêne. Het fin de siècle rond het Justitiepaleis te Brussel en de controversiële figuur van Edmond Picard (Herentals: Knops, 2014), 187–200. 11 Alexandre Demeure de Beaumont, L’affiche Belge (Toulouse: Chez l’Auteur, 1897). The picture of Rassenfosse in his studio on p. 35 shows he held a plaster cast of a nude female torso (possibly the Venus de Milo). 12 ‘en dehors de tout esprit de mercantilisme’. Advertising for La Maison d’Art, L’Art Moderne 19, no. 50 (10 December 1899): 416. 13 Oostens-Wittamer, De Belgische affiche, 14. The Société anonyme L’Art was founded by Picard together with Maus, writer Emile Verhaeren, third editor of L’Art Moderne and Mayor Charles Buls, a follower of Ruskin’s and Morris’s aesthetic principles. 14 Maurice Rheims, 19th-Century Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), ‘Decorative Sculpture’ chapter, 237. 15 Oostens-Wittamer, De Belgische affiche, cat. 17. 16 Musée Rodin, Paris, G. 7635; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Camille Claudel & Rodin (Paris: Hermann and Musée Rodin, 2014), fig. 99. 17 ‘C’est alors qu’eut lieu le second scandale familial! Songez donc! [. . .] que je m’avisais de vouloir être sculpteur! . . . Moi, une jeune fille bien élevée! [. . .] La consternation régna. Sculpteur! J’allais faire ce métier d’homme, avoir sous les yeux des modèles nus! . . . Le coup fut rude, mais je tins bon.’ Suzanne-F. Cordelier, ‘Leur travail vu par elles-mêmes: III: L’Art vu par Yvonne Serruys, Sculpteur’, La femme au travail (October 1936): 9. In this quotation, ellipses without brackets appear in the original text. Ellipses with brackets indicate extracted text.

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18 Gita Deneckere, 1900. België op het breukvlak van twee eeuwen (Tielt: Lannoo, 2006), 165–81. 19 Charlotte Foucher Zarmanian, Créatrices en 1900. Femmes artistes en France dans les milieux symbolistes (Paris: Mare & Martin, 2015), 68–74. 20 ‘On nous demande de plusieurs côtés où l’on peut se procurer la très belle affiche que Théo Van Rysselberghe a composée pour le Salon de la Libre Esthétique et qui, depuis quelques jours, égaie d’une chatoyante harmonie de rouges et de verts la monotonie des rues.’ Anon., ‘Petite Chronique’, L’Art Moderne 17, no. 8 (21 February 1897): 63. The poster could be obtained from Brussels art dealer Dietrich. Block, Homage to Brussels, 60. 21 ‘Une charmante affiche de M. Van Rysselberg [sic] annonce cette Exposition . . . les tons délicats et éclatants à la fois dont elle se compose font sur les murs le plus bel effet’. Anon., ‘Le Salon de la Libre Esthétique’, L’Indépendance Belge (24 February 1897): 1. 22 See, for example, Le Journal de Bruxelles. Supplément (14 March 1897); Le Carillon (21 March 1897). 23 Pol De Mont, ‘Plakkaatkunst’, De Vlaamsche School (September 1897): 278. 24 ‘een aantrekkelijk figuurtje’, ‘meer geschikt om binnen dan buiten gezien te worden’. Ibid. 25 Laurence Brogniez and Tatiana Debroux, ‘Les XX in the City: An Artists’ Neighbourhood in Brussels’, Artlas Bulletin 2, no. 2 (2013): article 5; Laurence Brogniez and Vanessa Gemis, ‘Les femmes, les XX et La Libre Esthétique: entre ombre et lumière’, in Malou Haine and Denis Laoureux, eds, Bruxelles ou la convergence des arts (1880–1914) (Paris: Vrin, 2013), 227–47. 26 Françoise Dierkens-Aubry, ‘Stijl en interieurdecoratie’, in Jos Vandenbreeden, ed., De 19de eeuw in België: architectuur en interieurs (Tielt: Lannoo, 1994), 187. 27 Thérèse Thomas and Cécile Dulière, Anna Boch 1848–1936 (Tournai: Renaissance du livre, 2000), inventory from 1936; Brogniez and Gemis, ‘Les femmes, les XX’. 28 See Thomas Föhl, Sabine Walter and Werner Adriaenssens, eds, Henry van de Velde. Passie-Functie-Schoonheid (Ghent: Lannoo, 2015). 29 Brussels, AHKB, inv. 11.862: Letter from George Minne to Octave Maus, s.l., s.d. 30 Octave Maus, ‘Privat-Livemont’, Art et Décoration, VII (1900): 61; OostensWittamer, De Belgische affiche, cat. 98. The statuette seems inspired by the statues by Van der Stappen for Brussels Town Hall (1885–8) or its statuette version in ivory, metal and bronze, exhibited in Ghent in 1895 – the first Belgian Salon to integrate a section of applied arts, with Maus and Belgian sculptor Paul Dubois as jury members. 31 Benoît Schoonbroodt, Privat-Livemont. Entre tradition et modernité au cœur de l’Art Nouveau (Brussels: Racine, 2007), 30–1.

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32 Privat-Livemont also depicted female art amateurs in his studio. Schoonbroodt, Privat-Livemont, 22–3. On the feminization of art consumption, see Julie Verlaine, Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes de 1880 à nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2014). 33 ‘cire molle qui reçoit aisément les manipulations’, ‘une subordination instinctive, qui n’ôte rien à leurs qualités d’exécutantes mais qui les rend plutôt interprètes que créatrices’. Edgar Baes, ‘Féminisme’, La Fédération artistique 24, no. 28 (25 April 1897): 218. 34 Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, eds, Hiding Making – Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 35 Marjan Sterckx, ‘Publieke sculpturen van de hand van vrouwen. De casus Brussel’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis 80, no. 1 (2011): 99–123. 36 Leonora Philipps, Katharine Esther Dixon, Marian Edwardes and Janet Tuckey, Dictionary of Employment Open to Women (London: The Women’s Institute, 1898), 120. 37 Catalogue de l’Exposition ‘La Femme Contemporaine’, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Salle des Fêtes de la Ville, Place de Meir) (Antwerp: Flor Burton, 1914), 4; L’officiel artistique et théâtral, 2 June 1914. 38 La Femme Contemporaine, 1–8. The other three women in the Fine Arts section were Berthe Centner, Hélène Cornette and Juliette Samuel-Blum, displaying in total eight bronze and marble statuettes and busts. 39 ‘Jeunes filles . . . N’allez pas grossir les rangs de cette bohème artistique qui gagne trop peu pour vivre et trop pour mourir. Abandonnez résolument l’art pur pour l’art appliqué ou industriel, ne craignez pas de déchoir, une œuvre d’art appliqué hautement conçue et artistiquement exécutée, sera toujours bien supérieure à un mauvais buste ou à une statue sans intérêt.’ Alice Hölterhoff de Harven, ‘Sculpture’, in Catalogue de l’Exposition ‘La Femme Contemporaine’, 6–8. 40 Deneckere, 1900, 169. 41 ‘une tentative de féminisme qui mérite l’attention: . . . un groupe de jeunes filles qui, sans essayer d’un art prétentieux se bornent à traiter avec grâce et adresse la peinture sur étoffes, la céramique, les travaux en cuir . . . la femme a dans cette voie des succès à attendre.’ Edgar Baes, ‘La section des Arts Décoratifs à l’Exposition’, La Fédération Artistique 24, no. 39 (11 July 1897): 307. 42 ‘Quelle main plus délicate saura mieux décorer les porcelaines fragiles dont nous aimons à nous entourer. . . . C’est à des mains féminines, incapables d’élever nos grands monuments de pierre . . . le génie mâle n’a rien à redouter du gout féminin. Au premier les grandes conceptions architecturales, la statuaire . . . le grand art. Aux femmes . . . ces arts secondaires . . . qui conviennent spécialement à leur nature et à

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leur caractère.’ Léon Lagrange, ‘Du rang des femmes dans l’art’, Gazette des BeauxArts 1, no. 8 (1860): 34–5, 39. 43 ‘A la section de sculpture, la femme commence à s’affirmer; ce n’est pas encore du grand art, mais c’est déjà l’art qui pronostique un avenir glorieux à l’art féminin dans la sculpture.’ Olympe Audouard, ‘Les femmes sculpteurs au Salon de 1882’, Le Papillon, 9 (18 June 1882): 484. 44 Colin Cunningham, ‘Gender and Design in the Victorian Period’, in Gill Perry, ed., Gender and Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 175–93, 193; Foucher, Créatrices en 1900, 94–7. 45 Pieter D’Hondt, L’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et École des Arts Décoratifs de Bruxelles. Notice historique publiée à l’occasion du Centenaire de la réouverture de cette institution artistique (1800–1900) (Brussels: J. Lebègue et Cie, 1900), 140; Brogniez and Gemis, ‘Les femmes, les XX’, 9. Cf. Debora L. Silverman, L’Art Nouveau en France. Politique, Psychologie et Style Fin de Siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994); Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, eds, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 46 D’Hondt, L’Académie Royale, 140. 47 Anon., ‘L’École professionnelle Bischoffsheim’, Bruxelles Féminin 2, no. 26 (December 1903): 8–9; Claire Leblanc, ‘Sierkunsten in de 19de eeuw: tussen kunst en industrie’, in Art nouveau en design: sierkunst van 1830 tot Expo 1958 (Tielt: Lannoo, 2005), 22; Daniela Prina, ‘Design in Belgium Before Art Nouveau: Art, Industry and the Reform of Artistic Education in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 23, no. 4 (2010): 329–50; Charles Van der Stappen 1843–1910 (Brussels: Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten, 2010), 119–20. 48 Alexia Creusen, Femmes artistes en Belgique. XIXe et début XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); Denis Laoureux, ed., Femmes artistes. Les peintresses en Belgique (1880–1914) (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2016); Wendy Wiertz and Joye Desmedt, ‘Cours de peinture pour jeunes filles. De officiële installatie van een meisjesklas schilderkunst aan de Brusselse Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (oktober 1896)’, Brusselse Cahiers 50, no. 1 (2018): 433–55. 49 Alexandre Charpentier (1856–1909). Naturalisme et Art nouveau (Paris: Musée d’Orsay-Nicolas Chaudun, 2008). At the Paris Salon of 1899 she showed door handles and a bell button, reproduced in Gustave Soulier, ‘Les objets d’art des Salons’, Art et decoration. Revue mensuelle d’art moderne VI (July–December 1899): 8–11. 50 Christine Dupont, ‘Charles Van der Stappen. Pedagoog’, in Charles Van der Stappen 1843–1910, 107–8. 51 ‘cette extension assurément remarquable du nombre des femmes artistes’; ‘c’est l’éducation seule, avec la liberté de se consacrer entièrement aux arts’; ‘du degré secondaire auquel atteint d’ordinaire l’art de la femme’. Baes, ‘Féminisme’, 218.

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52 ‘Enfin, dans une branche d’art essentiellement féminine, les bibelots décoratifs, – travail du cuir, reliures, petits bronzes, – Mme Clara Voortman a laissé tout un monde de menus objets qui portent la marque de son goût raffiné. Et ce n’est pas le côté le moins original de ce talent éminemment consciencieux.’ University Library Ghent, Fonds Frederic De Smet, 66 V: Voortman, s.d. (c. 1900). 53 Pierre Sabatier, L’esthétique des Goncourt (Genève-Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1984), 129. 54 For example, ‘Les Expositions’, La Fédération Artistique 24, no. 15 (24 January 1897): 114. 55 Caroline D’Hondt, ‘Clara Voortman-Dobbelaere (Gent, 1853–Menton, 1926)’, MA thesis, Ghent University, 2012. Voortman would also play a role in the establishment of a course in decorative arts at the Ghent Academy in 1904 and of separate classes for girls. 56 Martina Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making. Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851–1900’, Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 221–35; Martina Droth, ‘Small Sculpture c. 1900: The “New Statuette” in English Sculptural Aesthetics’, in David J. Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), 141–66; Brown, ‘The Domestic Interior’, 50. 57 Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert and Gaston Migeon, ‘La Sculpture Décorative’, Art et Décoration (April 1897): 81–4. 58 Sanchez, Le Salon des “XX” et de La Libre Esthétique. An extensive sample of catalogues shows that other independent Brussels Salons, such as L’Essor or Pour l’Art, offered women sculptors fewer opportunities than Les XX and La Libre Esthétique. In 1895, Pour l’Art included the first sculpture by a woman, by the Swedish sculptor and bookbinder Antoinette Vallgren-Räström. Catalogue de l’Exposition de peintures, sculptures et art appliqué. Pour l’Art (Brussels: Musée Moderne, 1895), s.p. 59 Brogniez and Gemis, ‘Les femmes, les XX’, 4, 9. 60 Anon., ‘La Libre Esthétique. Dix années de campagne’, L’Art Moderne 23, no. 16 (19 April 1903): 143. The proportion of applied art among male participants has not yet been studied but is presumably lower. 61 Anon., ‘Petite chronique’, L’Art Moderne 21, no. 10 (10 March 1901): 78. On the use of pewter in late nineteenth-century decorative sculpture, see Claire Jones, Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848–1895. Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), chapter 3. 62 No women are mentioned in these articles, for instance: Anon., ‘Le Salon de la Libre Esthétique. Les objets d’art’, L’Art Moderne 16, no. 11 (15 March 1896): 81–2; Gisbert Combaz, ‘Les arts décoratifs au Salon de La Libre Esthétique’, L’Art Moderne 17, no. 13 (28 March 1897): 97–101.

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63 French ‘sculpteuses’ were present at the Brussels Salons from 1854 onwards. See Marjan Sterckx, ‘“Dans la Sculpture, moins de jupons que dans la Peinture”. Parcours de femmes sculpteurs liées à la Belgique (ca. 1550–1950)’, Art&Fact. Revue des historiens de l’art, des archéologues, des musicologues et des orientalistes de l’Université de Liège (2005): 56–74. 64 ‘à la fois viril et tendre’ and ‘originale et forte’. Anon., ‘Le Salon de La Libre Esthétique. Les sculpteurs’, L’Art Moderne 14, no. 13 (1 April 1894): 99. The article opens with three paragraphs about Claudel’s work. That year, four women took part out of a total ninety-one participants. 65 An edition of Claudel’s Waltz in blueish-glazed stoneware by Emile Muller, dated 1889–93, is at the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine (inv. 2010.1.11). At La Libre Esthétique in 1898, the Danish sculptor Anne-Marie Carl-Nielsen, born Brodersen, showed a ‘Bird’ as part of the works submitted by the Copenhagen porcelain company Bing & Gröndahl, but this is apparent from archival research only. Brussels, AHKB, inv. II.825: form from Bing & Gröndahl, nr. 13. 66 ‘ce mouvement paraît se concentrer trop exclusivement dans un groupe de peintres et de sculpteurs qui se contentent d’ornementer les objets usuels sans songer à en perfectionner la forme, à choisir la matière qui convient le plus exactement à leur destination, à les rendre à la fois élégants, harmonieux et utiles.’ Anon., ‘Le Salon de la Libre Esthétique. Troisième article. Les objets d’art’, L’Art Moderne 16, no. 11 (15 March 1896): 81–2. 67 ‘figures en céramique, fort attrayantes en leurs colorations métalliques’. Anon., ‘Le Salon du Champ-de-Mars. La sculpture’, L’Art Moderne 15, no. 21 (26 May 1893): 164. 68 ‘des terres-cuites, des masques de grès, un haut-relief Céres, d’une polychromie un peu trop réaliste et trop violente’. E.V., ‘La Libre Esthétique, II’, Le Journal de Bruxelles (14 March 1897): 5. In La Fédération artistique 24, no. 21 (7 March 1897): 164, her work was mentioned positively. In La Ligue Artistique 2, no. 4 (19 February 1895): 6, she was mentioned under ‘sculpteurs et artisans d’art’. 69 Catalogue Illustré de l’Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles. Beaux-Arts (Paris: E. Bernard et Cie, 1897), s.p. 70 ‘un tempérament énergique et viril’. L., ‘A La Libre Esthétique’, La Ligue Artistique 3, no. 5 (8 March 1896): 6. 71 ‘moins féminine’. Edmond-Louis [De Taeye], ‘Le Salon. IX. La sculpture’, La Fédération Artistique 24, no. 47 (5 September 1897): 381. On the same page, the author called Belgian sculpture ‘more virile’ than the more ‘elegant’ French sculpture. 72 Anon., ‘Petite chronique’, L’Art Moderne 16, no. 11 (15 March 1896): 87; Nos contemporains. Portraits et biographies de personnalités belges ou résidant en Belgique (Brussels: A. Breuer, 1904), 170. Brussels, KMKG collection (inv. A.M.154). Maus

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donated his art collection, including a bronze statuette by Serruys, to the Museum of Ixelles. 73 Anon., ‘Petite chronique’, L’Art Moderne 19, no. 9 (26 February 1899), and 19, no. 10 (3 March 1899): 79. 74 Anon., ‘Petite chronique’, L’Art Moderne 19, no. 13 (26 March 1899): 103; Foucher, Créatrices en 1900, 105–7. Brussels, KMKG collection: inv. A.M.303: Colchique d’automne. 75 Linda Kim, ‘Separate Spheres: Potterines, Gender, and Domestic Sculpture in Turnof-the-Century America’, American Art 28, no. 2 (2014): 2–25. 76 In 1914, Ochsé-Mayer, Serruys and Poupelet participated together at the Paris salon (SNBA) where their work was jointly discussed as ‘sculpture féminine’. Anon., ‘Le Salon de la Société Nationale’, Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne 35 (January–June 1914): 383. 77 See Marjan Sterckx, ‘L’artiste & l’entrepreneur. La création collaborative de Georges Despret et Yvonne Serruys entre 1905 et 1910’, in Aziza Gril-Mariotte, ed., L’Artiste & l’objet. La création dans les arts décoratifs (XVIIIe-XXe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), 197–211. 78 ‘Elle s’est livrée à de curieuses recherches pour appliquer la sculpture à l’art décoratif moderne’. Anon., ‘Le Carnet d’un Curieux’, La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe, March 1918; Arsène Alexandre, ‘Galerie Georges Petit. Sculptures de Louise Ochsé’, La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe, June 1926. 79 André Mabile de Poncheville, ‘Yvonne Serruys’, Gand Artistique 2, no. 8 (1923): 185–91, 187. 80 ‘deux groupes – très importants ceux-ci – de Mme Yvonne Serruys-Mille. . . . L’un et l’autre sont d’une structure solide, d’une allure largement décorative et d’une plastique éloquente’. Octave Maus, ‘Les Artistes belges à la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts’, L’Art Moderne 32, no. 23 (23 June 1912): 192. 81 ‘Toutes les femmes peignent. Quand elles ne manient pas les bâtonnets de pastel ou ne lavent pas de mercantiles et mièvres aquarelles, elles se livrent à l’art décoratif.’ Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Peintresses’, L’Art Moderne 31, no. 30 (23 July 1911): 233. 82 Oostens-Wittamer, De Belgische affiche, cat. 38.

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‘Sacred stones guarded about with dragons’ Welsh national identity in William Goscombe John’s Corn Hirlas (1898) Melanie Polledri

Performing Welsh identity: Sculpture and the decorative in the British Empire What is it about the alignment of sculpture and the decorative that permits the articulation of national identity? The Cardiff-born Welsh New Sculptor William Goscombe John (1860–1952) and his drinking horn, Corn Hirlas (1898), provide an ideal case study through which to explore this question. Through the first in-depth art-historical analysis of the Corn Hirlas, this chapter untangles complex ideologies that surround decorative visualizations of nationhood.1 Composed of three parts, the Corn Hirlas comprises a horn with a silver-jewelled cover, featuring miniature bard, castle and dragons, resting on a silver-dragon stand (Figure 6.1). Its medieval mythical iconography articulated, fashioned and performed late nineteenth-century Celtic-Welsh identity at Wales’ most important arts festival, the National Eisteddfod, that also provided a platform for discussions on the state of Wales.2 During a move to reinvigorate and authenticate Welsh identity for the new twentieth century, the third Viscount Tredegar commissioned the Corn Hirlas as part of the National Eisteddfod’s ceremonial regalia. He presented it to the Gorsedd of Bards, the Welsh literati associated with the National Eisteddfod, at the 1899 National Eisteddfod in Cardiff.3 Now stored for the Gorsedd at St Fagans National Museum of History near Cardiff, the Corn Hirlas, a ceremonial object and now a historical museum piece, remains somewhat unknown, having fallen outside sculptural, national, imperial

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Figure 6.1 William Goscombe John, Corn Hirlas, 1898, silver, horn, precious gemstones, approx. 60 × 40 × 60 cm. Henry Dixon & Son Photographers. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales.

and museum histories. While recent scholarship on sculpture and the decorative from Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, Imogen Hart, Claire Jones, among others, raises awareness of decorative objects marginalized from mainstream art history, the relative obscurity of the Corn Hirlas is representative of a tendency to overlook ceremonial British decorative objects, especially Welsh ones.4 My focus on this unique object brings a fresh dynamic to New Sculpture and Arts and Crafts scholarship as it explores the relationship between national identity, sculpture, the decorative and the ceremonial object.5 Following a brief overview of late nineteenth-century Wales and the National Eisteddfod, this chapter explores the Corn Hirlas’ turn-of-the-twentieth-century roles at National Eisteddfodau in England and Wales and at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London through considerations of its reception, identity, materiality and performance. This leads to a consideration of how, and why, John reconciled his Welshness as sculptor and decorative object maker through this object. As a synthesis of animalier sculpture, architectural elements and widely sourced materials, it questions Welsh nationalisms in relation to England, other Celtic states and the British Empire. As this chapter will demonstrate, within this context, its successes and

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failures as a performative ceremonial object illuminate the relationship of the decorative to fine art sculpture. Given the emphatic Welshness of the Eisteddfod, once considered a ‘[q]uaint and picturesque ceremony’, it may seem surprising that Welshman Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams) instigated the restoration of ancient eisteddfodau on Primrose Hill in London in 1792.6 Here, he gathered a group of bards together to form the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain (Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain). By the mid-nineteenth century, many small nations began asserting their national identities throughout Europe; in Wales, Celtic revivalism was taking hold both culturally and politically. This was further fuelled following an 1847 government review, Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales, which provoked Welsh outrage as it condemned the Welsh as backward and its women as immoral.7 Ostensibly, the report was concerned with educational standards for which there was genuine concern. However, at a time of rising Irish nationalism, it enabled a nervous London-based government to destabilize potential Welsh agitation by undermining the dominance of Welsh-language Nonconformist churches. Welsh campaigners, determined to redeem their reputation, sought ways to promote, encourage and assert positive perceptions of Wales, especially to the English. The National Eisteddfodau were an important platform upon which to do this. Perhaps as a result, this was also the National Eisteddfod’s most anglicized period.8 Between 1878 and 1929, National Eisteddfodau were held in England eight times: twice in London and three times each at Liverpool and Birkenhead. While future Welsh British prime minister David Lloyd George pushed for Welsh home rule during the late 1890s, expatriate loyalty, seen in societies such as the London-based Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, set up strong links for the Welsh in London with their homeland.9 Furthermore, wealthy patrons from other Welsh expatriate hubs, such as Liverpool’s English soap magnate, William Hesketh Lever (later Viscount Leverhulme and onetime Eisteddfod president), held strong Welsh interests including his patronage of artists such as John.10 Alignment with England, the dominant, wealthiest and most powerful part of Britain, also offered the prospect of modern economic advantages. With a booming economy through its ports and docks, South Wales was the most cosmopolitan and racially diverse area in Wales. Here, products from throughout the British Empire – perhaps including the Corn Hirlas’ materials, such as its silver, gemstones and South African horn – arrived alongside the exportation of

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coal and iron, as South Wales benefited from imperial trading with the empire’s subaltern colonies.11 The 1899 Cardiff National Eisteddfod commenced within these linguistic, economic and nationalist debates. As the Cardiff Times and South Wales Weekly News noted, Cardiff anticipated ‘welcoming back to Wales’ a wider, and united, pan-Celtic community, ‘for which Celtic patriots of all nations have long and ardently laboured’.12 The 1899 Eisteddfod offered a ‘fraternal intercourse between the .  .  . Celtic nations’, for the ‘cultivation of peace’ that ‘had been a dream in Wales for generations’, and was now proudly ‘realised . . . in Cardiff ’.13 Against the backdrop of growing colonial resistance, rising nationalism in India and, as perceived by the English government, increasingly violent Irish ‘insubordination’,14 South Walian resistance, mindful of the benefits of being a nation within an empire, seemed to offer a point of peaceful reconciliation within the British Empire.15 Contributing to the full pomp and pageantry of the opening procession and watched by crowds of thousands on a hot July morning, the Corn Hirlas made its ceremonial debut. Departing from the Town Hall, male druids decked in white, blue and green robes, along with Welsh dignitaries and gentry, paraded through Cardiff ’s streets before reaching Cathays Park, near Cardiff Castle (Figure 6.2). Here, Hwfa Mon, the bardic name of Rowland Williams, the Archdruid, ‘resplendent in his white robes of office, silver sandals, a breast-plate of beaten gold, and chaplet of oak leaves’, officiated the spectacle.16 Once the celebrants had gathered within the Gorsedd Stone Circle, the opening ceremonies began. The key ceremonial objects were designed and made collaboratively between Welsh and English artists and artisans. This included the new Grand Sword, with dragon-guarded crystal on its hilt, partially unsheathed for the Peace ceremonies; two trumpets, Cyrn Gwlad, adorned with red dragon banners; and the elaborate Gorsedd banner.17 Having been transported ‘on a hand carriage covered with an embroidered cloth’ the Corn Hirlas was ritualistically offered to the Archdruid by the Mam-o-Fro (mother of the area) accompanied by young dancing flower girls.18 This performance signalled the ancient rites recalled in John Parry’s popular Welsh Melodies (1822) and Felicia Hemans’s poem ‘From the Hirlas of Owain Cyfeiliog’ (1841) that instilled heroic myths into the popular Welsh consciousness.19 Meanwhile, within the circle, the dragon stand and the cover’s decorative scheme asserted national pride and artistic skill (Figure 6.3). On the cusp of the twentieth century, such visual articulations of a Welsh nation were based on the romantic valorization of ancient myths and legends.

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Figure 6.2 William Grant Murray, Gorsedd in Singleton Park, Swansea, 1926, lithograph, 23.8 × 23.8 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of Peter Lord. While this image shows a later procession in Swansea, it gives the general idea of the procession in Cardiff.

The Gorsedd’s newly commissioned regalia ceremonially re-sanctioned these for the new century in which (south) Wales sought recognition within Britain and its empire (Figure 6.4). The Gorsedd’s new regalia was funded by wealthy Welsh and Welsh-interested individuals, and also received support from members of the RA. The Germanborn academician Hubert von Herkomer had developed strong connections with Wales through his second marriage. He had designed and donated the Grand Sword and designed the Archdruid’s gold crown and breastplate.20 Tredegar commissioned the Corn Hirlas from John just before the sculptor’s election as Associate Royal Academician in 1899. As the most prominent Welsh sculptor of his day, John was a natural choice. He was closely involved with Welsh affairs and on friendly terms with leading members of the Gorsedd such as the First Herald, Arlunydd Pen-y-garn (T. H. Thomas), who had made ‘a preliminary design’ when the Corn Hirlas was first proposed. The Western Mail later suggested John

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Figure 6.3  T. H. Thomas, Arlunydd Pen-y-garn, The Herald Bard’s Order of the Gorsedd of the Bards’ Circle of Stones, 1901, pen and ink on paper, dimensions unspecified. Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales.

had modelled Thomas’s design. An irritated John, not wanting to be ‘done out of the credit’ for his own work, vehemently claimed he had ‘at once cast [Thomas’ design] aside’ as the ‘conception, design & carrying out were all’ his.21 For John, as I discuss below, asserting his role as both creator and maker was especially significant as the Corn Hirlas was exhibited at the RA in 1898. Around this time, the Gorsedd also commissioned from John the Medal of the National Eisteddfod Association, exhibited in silver at the RA in 1899.22 The detail on this medal permits an additional contextual reading of the Corn Hirlas through its background that adds to the Welsh narrative in a way that free-standing sculpture does not. While the reverse features a two-dimensional intertwined version of the Corn Hirlas dragon (Figure 6.5), the obverse displays a duplicate figure in relief of the bard. With the name, ‘Taliesin’, Wales’ first bard, inscribed alongside it, the figure is set against a background of a rising sun and cromlech (stone circle).23 These similarities indicate that the bard on the Corn Hirlas can also be identified as Taliesin. The Corn Hirlas thus references Welsh culture before Edward I’s conquest of Wales (1277–83), and suggests a resistance to English dominance through the arts rather than the sword.24 Other

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Figure 6.4  Benjamin Stone, Welsh Eisteddfod Regalia & Officers, c. 1906, Corn Hirlas centre front, black and white photograph. © Historical Images Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

Welsh sculptures represent bards as keepers of Welsh history, such as John Evan Thomas’s bronze Elkington’s electrotype, Death of Tewdric (1848–56). Portraying the dying king in the arms of his daughter, accompanied by a windswept bard with harp telling of his victories against the Saxons in 610 AD, it recalls John Martin’s frequently reproduced painting The Bard (1817), which portrays the

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Figure 6.5  William Goscombe John, Medal for the National Eisteddfod Association (top and bottom centre), modelled 1898, medal material and dimensions unspecified, unknown photographer, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museums Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales.

defiant legendary last Welsh bard. Such narratives extended beyond Wales. In 1893 another Elkington’s product, a Welsh gold and silver centrepiece that was a wedding gift from the people of Wales to the Duke and Duchess of York, draws on Welsh history and subjects. It asserts a peaceful and historically important Welsh nation to a largely non-Welsh audience.25 Its many gold relief panels depicting scenes of Welsh history include a visualization of Iolo Morganwg’s

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formation of the Gorsedd, while three-dimensional seated bards holding harps proclaim Welsh harmony. The Corn Hirlas’ mythical poetry defines Wales’ cultural identity (with an eye on its English sceptics) for the Welshest of Welsh festivals – a point John confirmed in a letter to his close friend and adviser, Cardiff ’s chief librarian, John Ballinger, of which more later. The dragon, horn and cover stand on a mahogany rectangular base (approximately 60 × 40 centimetres); their contrapuntal forms provide contrasts of texture and materials. At the back a bronze plaque marks, in Welsh, the occasion of its presentation from Tredegar to the Gorsedd. The once silver-gilt (golden) dragon stand supports and protects the cover’s elevated symbols of Welsh culture.26 Standing at the apex of a pentagonal dais, the bard, with flowing robes, long hair and beard, holds a Welsh harp against his chest with his left arm and hand, while his right hand plucks at imaginary strings.27 Safe in his turret, he represents poetry, music and song. Six small mask-like dragonheads form a pedestal beneath the dais; their interwoven scaled wings form undulating collars around the circumference, while the encircling walls below, interspersed with five slightly different circular and conically roofed towers, echo the bard’s outline. The configuration of dormer arches, arrow slits and windows recall William Burges’s (1827–81) design for the Marquis of Bute’s medieval-style hunting lodge, Castell Coch (Red Castle), on the outskirts of Cardiff. His projects for Bute’s Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch are two of Britain’s most significant Gothic Revival projects. The Corn Hirlas, while relating more broadly to local interest in the Gothic Revival Style, was not, as the next section now considers, only intended for a Welsh audience. The year before its National Eisteddfod debut, John showed it at the RA in London.

‘English’ New Sculpture and its Welsh connections In showing the Corn Hirlas at the RA in London (RA no. 1910), John took a Welsh national object to the heart of the British Empire. Nonetheless, described in the catalogue as ‘A Drinking Horn and Dragon Stand’, its Welshness was muted to appeal to an English audience.28 As a composite object, materially and sculpturally, it worked with and against sculptural and decorative conventions, dividing critical opinion especially in comparison to John’s other exhibited work, The Elf (Figure 6.6). This life-size plaster of a crouching female nude overshadowed the Corn Hirlas at the RA. As we shall see, this demonstrates

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Figure 6.6  William Goscombe John, The Elf, 1898, photographed at the St Fagans National Museum of History c. 1950, black and white photograph, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museums Wales. © Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru – National Museum of Wales.

that, despite positive assertions at the RA, the gulf between ideal and decorative sculpture remained.29 While the North Wales Times claimed the Corn Hirlas was a ‘master-piece of fanciful art’, and Arthur Fish believed it demonstrated that ‘[d]ecorative work [was] greatly to [John’s] taste’, Marion Spielmann preferred The Elf’s ‘perfect embodiment’ of John’s ‘conscientious love of the purity and refinement of nature’.30 Yet by 1901, following British sculptor Alfred Gilbert’s introduction of metalwork and gems into sculpture, Spielmann was claiming that decorative works at the RA were so ‘excellent in taste’ that they ‘did not detract from [sculpture’s] dignity’; as large-scale bibelot, decorative works belonged in ‘the domain of fine art’.31 Both John’s materially different works demonstrate his imagination and modelling skills. The Elf’s pure conceptual virtuosity contrasts with the showier, high status and materially expensive Corn Hirlas. A letter John wrote to Ballinger reveals he expected the Corn Hirlas would garner greater critical attention than The Elf, suggesting he believed elite patronage affected critical reception at the RA.32 The Elf, for some ‘the work of the year’,33 indicates that

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contemporary responses continued to position decorative art as distinct, even inferior, to fine art sculpture, despite Spielmann’s later assertions. John’s was not the only decorative work shown that year. If decorative could mean ‘less conventional’, then A. C. R. Carter, writing for the Art Journal, noted the sculpture galleries were ‘graced by many noble . . . examples’.34 The Athenaeum, meanwhile, noticed ‘the increased use of bronze . . . coloured marbles, precious metals and jewels’.35 In 1899 Aymer Vallance described George Frampton’s Lamia in materially similar terms to the Corn Hirlas. This ‘composite sculpture’ of ‘bronze . . . marbles . . . lapis lazuli . . . mother of pearl . . . amber and ivory’, was further enriched with ‘enamelling, gold and silver’.36 These examples indicate the emergence of a crucial distinction; critics appeared to reference material composition when describing decorative objects, overlooking, as Droth notes, the decorative frameworks in which the object functioned.37 M. G. Natorp’s A Cup demonstrates this discrepancy as the critic, while noting its ‘ivory and gold’ materials, could only commend it for the academic modelling of the female nude stem.38 Distinctions between decorative art and fine art sculpture were complex, ambiguous and context dependent. The Corn Hirlas, removed from its intended ceremonial context, was for some, including The Athenaeum’s anonymous critic, confusing. While its ‘energy and spirit’ were recognizable, the ‘most furious’ dragon had become ‘quasi-Chinese’.39 John may have adapted its title to improve its reception to a non-Welsh audience; yet, stylistically, in London the Far East was noticeably a closer reference for a dragon than John’s homeland, Wales.40 Born into an artisanal Welsh family in Cardiff, John’s master-woodcarver father, Thomas, worked on Burges’s projects and produced ‘the most exquisite work in wood to be found anywhere’.41 His designs incorporated Burges’s eclectic synthesis of classical, French Gothic, Islamic, Italian Renaissance and Scandinavian influences.42 At the same time as John joined his father’s workshops as an apprentice woodcarver, Burges’s important architectural projects were foregrounding Wales at the heart of the Gothic Revival.43 John absorbed influences from London artists and artisans based temporarily at Cardiff such as stonemason Thomas Nicholls, responsible for the decorative architectural schemes at Cardiff Castle, including the famous Animal Wall. At twenty-one, John went to London as an apprentice in Nicholls’s studio. While learning stone-carving skills, he attended William Silver Frith’s modelling night classes at Lambeth City and Guilds School of Art – an applied arts training school for the nearby Doulton Potteries.

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Artisanal workmanship was clearly second nature to John, whose potential was now gaining attention in London. In 1884, on the recommendation of Lambeth head, John Sparkes, John attended the RA schools. With growing Welsh interest at home John, like Welsh-born, but Liverpool-resident, sculptor John Gibson before him, pragmatically profited from local support, tapping into a market eager to fund their rising star. Funded by Welsh patrons while continuing his studies, John undertook travels on the Continent to see first-hand ancient Graeco-Roman and Renaissance art. Meanwhile, his continuing success at the RA resulted in him ultimately winning the student Gold Medal and Travel Scholarship in 1889.44 Among his teachers, the sculptor and silversmith Henry Hugh Armstead taught John the intricacies of working with precious metals and gemstones, thus linking his fine art and artisanal practices within the RA. Arthur Baldry, commenting on John’s Associate Academician election in 1899, charted the trajectory of John’s ‘progress from small beginnings’.45 He claimed in the Studio, one of the most important British journals for decorative and artisanal arts, that John offered a ‘text’ for the ‘advocates of technical schools’.46 John’s success continued; his busy studio produced portraiture, memorials and decorative works destined for locations throughout the empire. With a growing international reputation and permanent address in London, John nevertheless remained a proud Welshman and, especially in Welsh journals, self-identified as a Welsh artist.47 As the ‘Great Welsh sculptor’,48 he became increasingly involved in Welsh cultural affairs, such as the Eisteddfod and the founding of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales. While The Athenaeum was noticing sculptural changes in 1892, in 1894 Edmund Gosse, art critic and champion of what he termed ‘the New Sculpture’, was to pinpoint ‘English’ sculpture’s revolution to Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python, shown at the RA in 1877 (Figure 6.7).49 This initiated the British London-centric phenomenon, influenced by the modelling of French sculptors temporarily in London, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Jules Dalou. As an English response to European developments,50 the New Sculptors’ naturalistically expressive work assimilated surface effect and the decorative through a vocabulary that challenged the earlier marble neoclassical styles of Gibson and John Flaxman. New Sculptors such as Gilbert, Hamo Thornycroft and second-generation artisan-artists Frampton, Frederick Pomeroy and John fused their academic and artisanal arts training.51 Placing equal value on creativity and technical skill, John claimed in 1899 that ‘[a] man’s ideas are not worth two pence if he hasn’t the skill to interpret them

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Figure 6.7  Frederic Leighton, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, 1877, bronze, 176.4 × 98.4 × 109.9 cm, Tate London, presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1877. © Tate, London 2019.

in good work’.52 Many sculpture students attended the Lambeth school prior to the RA; going on to use silverwork, metalwork, mixed media and gems, they created imaginative fantasies that acquired links with Arts and Crafts artisans.53 Furthermore, as the RA preferred ‘the exquisite seduction’ of ‘medievalism’ in decorative art, John could align his artisanal Burgesian background with the RA.54 If decorative sculpture was tentatively recognized at the RA, elsewhere it was rapidly ascending. The Art Workers’ Guild, founded in 1887, aimed to promote closer ties between decorative art and the traditional fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture.55 Being a member of the Art Workers’ Guild (1894– 1923) and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society committee (1894–9), John’s self-conscious embodiment of the artist-workers of his youth is reflected in the Corn Hirlas’ affiliation with the Arts and Crafts, the New Sculpture’s surface expressiveness and inherited medieval aesthetics.56 John arrived as a student in London just as the New Sculpture was beginning to arouse considerable critical

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and artistic interest; by the time he emerged onto the professional scene, it was well established. The New Sculptors’ insistence on incorporating the decorative and the artisanal were increasingly accepted within a fine art discourse and, in John’s case, deeply rooted in Burges’s Gothic and Welsh Celtic revivals. As I shall now discuss, the sourcing of materials also addressed notions of national and political identities.

Empire: Materiality and animalier sculpture While John’s letter describing the Corn Hirlas demonstrates the materials’ conceptual importance in staging Gorseddic symbolism, their origins force us to question Wales’ relationship with England and the empire. Materially nonWelsh, this ceremonial object masked its origins through performance and iconography to recall pseudo-Celtic histories. In the same letter, John’s lively description of the Corn Hirlas’ materials reveals his imaginative approach. The silver cover (originally silver-gilt) sits atop the silver-lined South African ‘Cape trekking ox’ horn that was, John claimed, ‘a fine specimen’, now polished and adorned with Tredegar’s enamelled coat of arms. All these embodied ‘the Gorseddic idea’, namely an embattled & turreted wall .  .  . [with] sacred stones guarded about with dragons[;] in the centre & above, crowning the whole, stands a figure of a bard, harp in hand & singing[.] [M]any of the precious stones used in this decoration of the cover are very fine specimens & of great beauty. . . . The Horn & cover rest upon a Dragon supporter, winged and fearsome, triple horned and wattled, whose eyes are formed of two fine opals, flashing fire & giving the creature a terrible appearance as he lashes himself into coils, under his right claw he holds & guards from injury a large crystal, the symbol of mystery.57

The stones, of ‘Chrysophase, Jasper, Amethyst, Lapis lazuli, Thuliti, Turquoise, Moonstone, [and] Carbuncle’, are strategically placed.58 Five rhombus-cut gemstones, approximately 3 centimetres in diameter, are set at regular intervals below and around the dragonheads-collar, between which are five smaller oval gemstones; below these, smooth crenellated walls hold a different oval stone. While their beauty and quality are uppermost in John’s mind, numerically they symbolize the twelve astronomical points of the Gorsedd Stone Circle (in which the ceremonies traditionally took place) and the three points of the Mystic Mark.59

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Its gilded surface distinguished it from other silver trophies such as Edmund Cotterill’s prototype for silver medieval castles, The Eglinton Trophy (1843).60 It also disguised its material colonialism, as its golden appearance evoked the native Welsh gold mined in North Wales since the Roman period. This link was explicitly and concretely established at the prince of Wales’ Investiture in 1911, for which John designed the Welsh gold regalia.61 In terms of precedents with which, generationally speaking, John had to compete, the Corn Hirlas fits among largely silver objects that blend small-scale architecture, animalier and figurative sculpture. Along with Cotterill’s Eglinton Trophy, these include his Queen’s Cup (1844) that features St George battling a ferocious Japanese-style dragon – an iconography also recalled in Alfred Gilbert’s bronze St George (1891–6) and Edward Onslow Ford’s later silver St George and the Dragon salt cellar (1901).62 John was equally adept working in bronze and silver for small-scale works, yet, for setting gemstones he preferred silver or gold, as demonstrated in the Corn Hirlas, the regalia for the prince of Wales’ Investiture at Caernarfon (1911) and the National Museum of Wales’s foundation stone ceremony tools (1912).63 These decorative objects were crammed with symbolic Welsh, English and even French iconography such as daffodils, roses and fleurs-de-lis. As argued above, the iconography of the Corn Hirlas’ horn, silver and gemstones defined Welsh identity, yet the raw materials’ origins challenge this connection. As Martina Droth and Morna O’Neill have independently argued, decorative frameworks permit an exploration that expands the expressive potential of the materials used.64 Deconstructing the Corn Hirlas’ elements takes us from Wales to British colonies including South Africa, Australia, India and Afghanistan (where Britain fought to control lapis lazuli mining).65 This presents a unique Welsh perspective on the colonial exploitation of materials that contributes to recent postcolonial scholarship on Australian and Indian silverware.66 The Corn Hirlas evokes works such as Armstead’s silver, gold and damascened steel Outram Shield (1858–62), celebrating General Sir James Outram’s imperial contribution to the relief of Lucknow in India; and Henry Wilson’s silver, crystal and gemstone Chamberlain Casket (Figure 6.8), presented to Joseph Chamberlain, the South African colonial secretary during the Second South African War.67 Yet, though the Corn Hirlas originates from a colonized (Welsh) nation, it contrasts with the work of non-British colonized artisans who used indigenous materials to shape their national motifs. These include the Indian royal sculptor Oomersi Mawjii’s decorative Indian silverware (although much was produced for an extensive European market) and the German-born Australian

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Figure 6.8 Henry Wilson, The Chamberlain Casket, 1903, silver with gold, moon stone, wood, rock crystal and enamel, 57.1 × 49.5 × 42.5 cm, Birmingham Museums Trust, 1957 M295. Birmingham Museums Trust.

silversmith Henry Steiner’s Lady’s Companion (1865–70) that includes an emu egg and Queensland black bean seed, as well as silver-worked representations of Australia’s indigenous people, palm trees and an emu to form its iconographical vocabulary.68 Welsh identity as visualized in the Corn Hirlas, like Wilson’s Casket, is expressed through the imperial appropriation of other colonies’ materials. As

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part of the British Empire, Wales exploited, rather than consolidated, its position with other non-Celtic colonized nations. Moreover, as a replacement for the once common native Welsh cattle breeds, the horn’s appropriation goes further.69 Unlike the symbolic emu egg and seed, the South African horn becomes a crosscultural and transferable commodity sourced through trade within the British Empire. At the height of Welsh nationalist revivals, the Corn Hirlas’ endorsement of colonial materials wrought into Welsh cultural symbols differentiates it from English decorative ceremonial wares while simultaneously mapping its imperial position within Britain’s empire. Despite such material imperial readings, to those in Wales, the Corn Hirlas dragon symbolically acknowledged an independent Welsh culture and the historical traditions of Wales within Britain. While recalling Henry VII’s (1457– 1509) coat of arms, the dragon further references the last native prince of Wales, Owain Glyndwr, whose standard, Y Ddraig Aur (the golden dragon), was carried into battle against the English at Caernarfon in 1401 and the legends of King Arthur, claimed by the Welsh as well as the English, whose standard was similarly emblazoned with a golden dragon.70 As animalier sculpture, the Corn Hirlas’ dynamic mythological dragon and the bodily representations of dead oxen blur the boundaries between material actuality and mythical representations. The actual yet wholly absent ox, of whose existence its polished and embellished horn is the only surviving evidence, contrasts with the inorganic silver-gilt expression of the legendary, yet synthetically reptilian, dragon. Its body with viscerally tangible rounded belly is a weighty embodiment of the dragon’s lizard-like form. The jointed wings fold around the body, and the taught smooth undersides contrast with the scaly topside and body. Intricate details of long narrow tendrils, small, curly, gnarled and ribbed horns and twisting tail break up its heaviness, contrasting against the ox horn’s smooth serpentine line and the crystal ball clasped under its right front claw. Beneath the front of the horn, the dragon raises its head on its long neck, a diminutive, decorative reforming of Leighton’s Athlete as it rears back open-mouthed spewing flames or bardic poetry. Referencing the RA president’s seminal work that, as Gosse claimed, revolutionized British sculpture, within a decorative context asserts the Corn Hirlas as fine art. John’s dragon provides dynamic energy, aesthetic rhythm and, in supporting the horn, a functional role. Sculpturally, the Corn Hirlas fits between Gilbert’s and Ford’s St Georges. Both show England’s patron saint standing atop a slain dragon, bookending John’s ‘fearsome’ specimen. In this context, the Corn Hirlas’ nationalism is evident; it is significant that although

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Ford’s later work appears to re-slay John’s Welsh dragon, its annual Eisteddfod performances revive it. Yet, containing ‘over 800 oz’ of ‘heavily gilt’ sterling silver, logistical problems encountered during the ceremonies suggest that, for John, its sculptural status, rather than its ceremonial performance, was primary.71

Conclusion: Performativity, afterlife and surface As both decorative art and sculpture, the Corn Hirlas’ ritual function was essential. Its processional and narrative performances symbolically, materially and aurally – through the singing bard, harp and open-mouthed dragon – enriched the Eisteddfod tradition, from the Proclamation (announcement of the following year’s location) to the concluding ceremony.72 When originally carried on a bier during the summer processions, its shiny golden surface would have caught the faintest rays of sunshine. Once inside the Gorsedd Circle, while the Archdruid received the horn, the stand and cover served as stationary sculptures pedestalled on the bier. Yet, as its weight meant arduous work for the carriers, the unwieldy Corn Hirlas was also precariously unsteady; John even recalled catching the cover as it fell off.73 Unlike Wilson’s working hinged Casket containing documents relating to Chamberlain’s service, the Corn Hirlas looked like an applied art object but failed to fully function as one.74 That John, a practically minded artist, should overlook this further suggests he registered the Corn Hirlas as fine art. That it stemmed from elite patronage, with decorative art idioms executed in expensive materials, alongside his renown as an exceptionally skilled award-winning Welsh sculptor, reinforced the status of an object intended for Wales’ most important cultural event. Yet the Corn Hirlas is not only a historical object. Although the stand and cover no longer feature in the processions, the horn is still presented by the Mam-o-Fro among flower girls and pageboys. Following restoration during the late 1980s, the dragon’s now dark-charcoal finish diminishes the effect of the original gilt and the cover’s bare silver surface reveals the gemstones’ original gold settings.75 Late twentieth-century approaches to sculptural and decorative arts were defined, at least in part, by surface effects. It would appear that disguising, and thus rejecting, overly glamorous surfaces demonstrates a preference for fine art sculpture characterized by perceptions of the value of modelling over ‘gaudy’ decorative finishes. For some, despite the Corn Hirlas’ evident fine art credentials, decorative surfaces such as these were still seen pejoratively as Victorian art.76 While decorative surface finishes were diminished during the late twentieth

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century and these changes altered the Corn Hirlas’ original appearance, the dragon, bard and gemstones nonetheless continue to symbolically perpetuate nineteenth-century national values to a contemporary Welsh nation. Within the Corn Hirlas, sculpture and the decorative meet, presenting meaning specifically tied to Welsh mythology and largely misunderstood outside Wales. As a decorative, sculptural and ceremonial object, it functioned, and still does, through its symbolism and performance at the Eisteddfod. Its presence enriched the ceremonial rites, staging a national identity for a nation then without a political state. In looking to Wales, this chapter pushes beyond the geographical boundaries set out in the expanding scholarship on British sculpture, including the extensive Sculpture Victorious exhibition, in which the Welsh nation has been characteristically overlooked. While Wales might not have the appeal of colonies such as India in terms of scale and significance, its contributions to the role of sculpture and the decorative within the British Empire are nevertheless important and under explored. The Corn Hirlas asserts Welsh cultural identity and a nationalist imperialism that simultaneously resists and embraces its relationship to England and its place within the empire. At the close of the nineteenth century, new Welsh futures formulated by recapturing and revitalizing past traditions inspired a national consciousness that helped drive the nation’s ambitions.77 Venerating histories through such decorative articulations culturally, economically and politically recharged a Welsh nation for the new century within the British Empire.

Notes 1 This important object is barely mentioned in any scholarship, aside from the National Museum of Wales’ website, ‘Scrolls, Swords and Mystic Marks’, (http​​s:/​/ m​​useum​​.wale​​s​/art​​icles​​/2010​​-07​-2​​5​/Scr​​olls-​​Sword​​s​-an​d​​-must​​ic​-ma​​rks) (accessed 5 May 2017) and Fiona Pearson’s brief mention in Goscombe John at the National Museum of Wales, exh. cat. (Cardiff: National Museum Wales, 1979). 2 On new traditions as old, see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, The Invention of Tradition (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (1983)), 1–14. 3 Proposals for the National Museum and Library of Wales first took place at the, now international, National Eisteddfod festival. 4 See Martina Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious: Art in the Age of Invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 370–411; Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts

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10 11 12 13 14

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Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Martina Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c.1851–1900’, Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004): 221–36; David Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For more on this late nineteenth-century phenomenon, see Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Penelope Curtis, Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Britain (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2003); David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). ‘The National Eisteddfod of Wales’, The Musical Times (1 July 1908): 451–2, 451. The first eisteddfod was held at Cardigan Castle in 1176. Published in blue-covered files, the report became known as Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. Throughout the twentieth century, the Eisteddfodau have maintained strong royal links; various members, including Queen Elizabeth II, have played significant honorary roles. See Dillwyn Miles, The Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales (Swansea: C. David, 1977). My thanks to Dyfrig ab Ifor, Herald Bard for suggesting this book to me. As Prys Morgan in Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, observes, the creation of shared national emblems to unify diverse regions and religions was most commonly endorsed among Welsh expatriates, such as the original Primrose Hill bards, or the Cymmrodorion Society of which John was a member. Following the sudden death of Edward Onslow Ford, Lever turned his attention to John. For a contemporary, if somewhat biased account, see The Illustrated Guide to Cardiff and the Neighourhood (Cardiff and London: Western Mail Limited, 1897), 3–4. ‘The National Eisteddfod: Opening Ceremony’, Cardiff Times and South Wales Weekly News, 22 July 1899, 5. ‘Speech of Councillor Thomas JP, Vice-Chairman of Executive Committee’, Cardiff Times, 5. See Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013) and Lawrence McBride, Images, Icons and Irish Nationalist Imagination (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). For more on Welsh nations and Celtic races, see M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales 1890–1914: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016) and J. Graham Jones, The History of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018 (1990)). ‘The National Eisteddfod: Opening Ceremony’, 5.

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17 Designed by T. H. Thomas, the banner’s symbolic programme included the Gorsedd emblem, and, like the Corn Hirlas, a dragon along with a sun and crystals marking the astronomical points and the Mystic Mark. 18 ‘The National Eisteddfod: Opening Ceremony’, 5. 19 See John Parry, A Selection of Welsh Melodies with Symphonies and Accompaniments by J. Parry, and Characteristic Words by Mrs. Hemans (London: J. Power, 1822) and Felicia Hemans, ‘From the Hirlas of Owain Cyfeiliog’, in Poetical Verse (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1841), 480. 20 For more on Herkomer’s role, see Peter Lord, Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). 21 Underlining original, letter from John to Ballinger, 5 May 1898, Cardiff Library MS 3.565, Goscombe John 21. 22 See Peter Lord, The Tradition: A New History of Welsh Art, 1400–1990 (Swansea: Parthian Books, 2016), 228–230. 23 The cromlech was an ancient sacred gathering place for druids. Taliesin Penbeirdd (c. 534–99) was a sixth-century poet and mythical hero connected with the Arthurian legends. 24 This recalls Edward I’s thirteenth-century massacre of the Welsh bards, or, more likely, Hungarian János Arany’s 1857 allegorical and more politically subversive Welsh resistance poem, The Bards of Wales. 25 The design, by French designer Auguste-Adolphe Willms, was based on suggestions from prominent Welshmen Vincent Evans, Cymmrodorion secretary, and David Evans, former Cardiff mayor. 26 At present, its method and location of casting are unclear. 27 Edward Onslow Ford’s bronze female nude The Singer (1889) also explores this. See Jason Edwards, ed., In Focus: The Singer Exhibited 1889 and Applause 1893 by Edward Onslow Ford, Tate Research Publication, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.tat​​e​.org​​.uk​ /r​​esear​​ch​/pu​​blica​​tions​​/in​-f​​ocus/​​the​-s​​inger​​-and-​​appla​​use​-​e​​dward​​-onsl​​ow​-fo​​rd. For more bardic sculpture, see William Theed’s marble The Bard (1856), Mansion House, London. Julius Bryant, Magnificent Marble Statues: British Sculpture in the Mansion House (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013). 28 Pearson, Goscombe John, 80. 29 Letter from John to Ballinger, 5 May 1898, Cardiff Library MS 3.565. John deposited the bronze as his diploma work upon election as Royal Academician in 1909 (RA exhibition number: 1960). 30 ‘The Gorsedd Hirlas Horn’, North Wales Times, 12 March 1898, 8; Arthur Fish, ‘One of Our Sculptors’, Cassell’s Magazine, 1899, 496; Marion Spielmann, British Sculptors and Sculpture of Today (London: Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1901), 130–1. 31 Spielmann, British Sculptors, 2.

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32 Letter from John to Ballinger, 5 May 1898. 33 Ibid. 34 A. C. R. Carter, ‘The Royal Academy, 1898’, Art Journal (1898): 183–91, 184. 35 ‘The Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum 3688 (1898): 41–2, 41. 36 Aymer Vallance, ‘British Decorative Art in 1899 and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Part 1’, The Studio 18, no. 79 (October 1899): 37–58, 50. 37 Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making’, 232. 38 ‘The Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum (1898): 41–2, 41. 39 Ibid. Herkomer also acknowledged this, claiming that John ‘had gone to Japan for his dragon’, ‘The National Eisteddfod: Opening Ceremony’, 5. 40 As new trade links with Japan opened, Western interest in Japanese art and artefacts increased. The Corn Hirlas complicates the scholarly focus on Anglo-British colonial relationships; its engagement with the wider world creates a new Anglo– Welsh–Japanese axis. On Japanese influences see Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–2000: Volume V: Social and Cultural Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Hornel and Nineteenth Century Japan (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003). 41 John Ballinger, ‘A Welsh Sculptor’, Wales (July 1894): 115–6. For more on John see Melanie J. Polledri, ‘Networks, Geographies and Ambition: The Works of William Goscombe John’, PhD diss., University of York, 2018. 42 See J. Mordaunt Cooke, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (London: John Murray, 1981). 43 As a chorister at Llandaff Cathedral, John was exposed to the work of PreRaphaelite-era artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, who worked on J. P. Seddon and John Pritchard’s mid-nineteenth-century restoration. 44 Pearson, Goscombe John, 10. 45 For a discussion on the perceptions of the artisan to artist trajectory in relation to Rodin’s work, see Claire Jones, Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848 to 1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), especially the Introduction, 1–16. 46 Baldry, ‘A New Associate’, 115. 47 John was the only Welsh Royal Academician sculptor during his lifetime. 48 ‘Welsh Statues Sensation’, Western Mail, 28 February 1914. 49 See Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture 1879–1894’, Art Journal 56 (May 1894): 138–42, 199–203, 277–82, 306–11. 50 For more on Carpeaux and Dalou, see Anne M. Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, ed., Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870–1904, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 145–89.

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51 For sculptors as self-positioned makers, see Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making’. 52 Fish, ‘One of Our Sculptors’, 491. 53 The Corn Hirlas is a New Sculpture work (as are most of the other works mentioned) that, along with Gilbert’s ceremonial objects, remains sidelined in current scholarship. Approaching sculpture from the perspective of the decorative encourages wider engagement with these objects. 54 Spielmann, British Sculptors, 2. See letter from John to Dr Fox, 16 July 1926. NMW A 11747. 55 For more see H. J. L. J. Massé, The Art Workers’ Guild 1884–1934 (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1935). 56 ‘Sir William Goscombe John RA’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 (http​:/​/sc​​ulptu​​re​.gl​​a​.ac.​​uk​/vi​​ew​/pe​​rson.​​php​?i​​d​=msi​​​ b2​_12​​03385​​023, accessed 2 October 2017). See John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, prefaced by William Morris (London: Kelmscott Press, 1892). 57 Letter from John to Ballinger, April/May 1898, Cardiff Library MS 3.565. 58 Letter John to Ballinger, April/May 1898. While there may be an acrostic meaning to the choice of these gems that spells out a word or meaning, I have yet to uncover it. 59 Or ‘Ray of Light’, signified by three vertical lines representing love, justice and truth. 60 See Michael Hatt, ‘The Eglington Trophy, 1843’, in Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 150–3. 61 On the Investiture and national identity, see John S. Ellis, Investiture: Royal Ceremony and National Identity in Wales 1911–1969 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 391–418. 62 See Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 374–7 and 378–9. See also Shirley Bury, ‘The Source and Influence of Virtuoso Silverwork at International Exhibitions’, in Susan M. Wright, ed., The Decorative Arts in the Victorian Period (London: Society of Antiquaries of London: Distributed by Thames and Hudson, 1989), 37. 63 See John’s bronze statuette Merlin and Arthur, 1902, NMW A 127, National Museum Cardiff. 64 See Morna O’Neill, ‘The Chamberlain Casket’, in Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 382; Droth, ‘The Ethics of Making’, 230. 65 While Mary Ann Steggles and Jason Edwards have worked in depth on British New Sculpture in India, and Kirsty Breedon investigates Herbert Ward’s Congolese works, this chapter is the first consideration of Welsh contributions. See Steggles, British Sculpture in India: New Views and Old Memories (Kirkstead, Norfolk: Frontier, 2011); and Kirsty Breedon, ‘“A Voice from the Congo”: Herbert Ward’s Sculptures in Europe and America’, in Julie Codell, ed., Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 177–98.

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66 See John Culme, Nineteenth Century Silver (London: Country Life Books /Hamlyn Publishing, 1977), and Bury, ‘The Source and Influence of Virtuoso Silverwork’. 67 See Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 223, 288–9, 380–2; and Jason Edwards, ‘The Relief of Lucknow: Henry Hugh Armstead’s Outram Shield (c. 1858–62)’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 22 (2016). http://doi​.org​/10​ .16995​/ntn​.734 (accessed 30 September 2017). 68 Droth et al., Sculpture Victorious, 295–7. 69 Edward Jones, Musical and Poetic Relicks of the Welsh Bards (London: Edward Jones, 1808), 117. 70 Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, translates as ‘Head of a dragon’. It was not until 1959 that the Welsh dragon officially adorned the nation’s flag. 71 Letter from John to Ballinger, Friday April/May 1898. The weight of 22.5 kg suggests the dragon stand was mostly solid. 72 My thanks to Professor Christine James, Y Prifardd Christine, Recorder of the Assembly of Bards of the Island of Britain, for initially clarifying the Eisteddfod’s ceremonial roles. 73 John also recalled the ‘comic way’ the sword carrier placed the empty mead bottle inside the horn when asked to carry the cover, adding, ‘of course we soon took it out’. Christabel Hutchins, The Correspondence of Thomas Henry Thomas: ‘Arlunydd Penygarn’ (Newport: South Wales Record Society, 2012), 170. 74 See O’ Neill, ‘The Chamberlain Casket’, 380–2. 75 Possibly due to years of polishing. 76 Towards the end of the twentieth century, scholarship was beginning to challenge perceptions of kitsch, sentimental and overly academic Victorian art. See, for example, Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), and Elizabeth Prettejohn, After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 77 Katie Trumpner, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30.

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Sculpture and the decorative at the Scottish National War Memorial Imogen Hart

Phyllis Bone was one of seven sculptors who contributed to the Scottish National War Memorial (SNWM) at Edinburgh Castle. Her stone roundel of an elephant’s head in profile is carved in high relief (Figure 7.1). The almost semicircular ear expands to fill the left-hand side of the roundel, the top of the skull curves obligingly within the stone frame, and the trunk is coiled tightly under the chin in a spiral that repeats and reinforces the overall format and completes the circle begun by the ear. The smooth surface of the ear reflects the light, while deep wrinkles serve to accentuate a heavy-lidded eye, and the shadow cast by a projecting tusk suggests a glimmer of a smile. Bone’s elephant roundel exemplifies the explanation she once gave for her interest in animals: ‘I am enthralled by their shapes, their rhythmic movements, which, separately and combined, are so decorative and sculptural.’1 This carved head is manifestly ‘decorative and sculptural’. The architectonic manipulation of the features to fit the roundel emphasizes certain ‘shapes’ in the elephant’s form – circle, semicircle, spiral – and allows it to take its place among a series of roundels depicting animal heads in the memorial’s interior; the stylized treatment and architectural function mark the roundel as decorative. At the same time, the skilful differentiation of the surface to suggest texture, the use of light and shade to animate the figure, the rendering of the head in profile like a portrait and the employment of direct carving indicate the roundel’s sculptural preoccupations.2 An attempt to parse out the sculptural and decorative elements of Bone’s elephant quickly reveals the overlaps between the two categories. Were stylization, geometric abstraction and the series not also characteristics of modern sculpture? Direct carving, meanwhile, leads back to the decorative via craft, while the focus on the head and the profile format invite comparison as

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Figure 7.1  Phyllis Bone, Elephant, stone. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

much with the decorative medal or coin as with the sculptural portrait relief or bust. Sculpture and the decorative are malleable concepts whose boundaries cannot be firmly drawn. Bone’s comment illuminates not only her own work but, I will argue, the whole of the SNWM. The various components of the memorial are simultaneously ‘decorative and sculptural’ (my italics), drawing on the languages and conventions of both decoration and sculpture, and bringing the two concepts into productive dialogue. Belonging to a complex ensemble constructed by many hands, the parts of the memorial need to be considered both ‘separately and combined’ (my italics). While a single work like Bone’s elephant can be analysed to reveal decorative and sculptural qualities, I will argue that all the memorial’s separate contributions shed light on one another when their ‘combined’ meaning is contemplated. This in itself can be considered characteristic of the decorative insofar as the combination of different things to adorn a space is a form of decoration. In the case of the SNWM, the decorative condition allows sculpture to be many different things at once.

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Since the concept of the decorative is often associated with utility, the SNWM is also decorative by virtue of its function. Perhaps because of this, it is often suggested that what is to be discovered there is always already known. Every single detail, large and small, can be explained. Description hampers accounts of the memorial, as though by enumerating, identifying and attaching symbolism to each of its components, a verbal equivalent can be produced, fixing and exhausting the meaning of the whole.3 The verbal can never encompass the meaning of the visual – as Walter Sickert observed in 1910, ‘If the subject of a picture could be stated in words, there had been no need to paint it’ – but the inadequacy of description is particularly marked in the case of an ensemble as complex and multifaceted as the SNWM.4 The memorial is not one thing after another, as a verbal description would suggest. It is many things all at once. That narration was an unsatisfactory approach to the memorial was recognized by General Sir Ian Hamilton, who wrote the introduction to the guidebook published in 1932, five years after it opened. Expressing gratitude for the high-quality photographs that illustrated his text, Hamilton reflected that a skilful photographer ‘conveys the simultaneous mass effect of perhaps two hundred details in a flash; whereas, the writer would have to use thousands of words to describe the same details and to fit each of them into its place’.5 The visitor to the memorial is confronted with ‘the simultaneous mass effect’ of all of its diverse components; while they may attempt a methodical journey around the space, focusing on each part in turn, a host of surrounding elements compete for attention and mediate each encounter. This is both the weakness and the strength of the decorative. It threatens the autonomy of art and what Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler termed the ‘independent existence’ of free-standing sculpture.6 On the other hand, it is mobile and interactive and uncontainable, as this chapter will attempt to demonstrate. *** Around two hundred artists and craftspeople laboured to produce the SNWM, which opened in 1927. The project was overseen by the Scottish architect Sir Robert Lorimer. The details of the commission, the controversy over the site at Edinburgh Castle and the negotiations about the design have been well documented.7 My focus in this chapter is the way in which the different elements of the memorial work together. For many artists the years immediately following the First World War were dominated by memorial commissions. This was

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particularly true for sculptors, who have traditionally shouldered what Penelope Curtis has described as the ‘burden’ of commemoration.8 The SNWM stands out among British war memorials in bringing together a large team of creators to work collectively towards the production of a structure composed of a variety of media and with a solely commemorative function. As a fundamentally collaborative project serving the public, the memorial realized the ideals of social and artistic cooperation cherished by John Ruskin, William Morris and their followers. When art historians write about the SNWM it usually appears as a late manifestation of the Arts and Crafts movement, an identity reinforced by the fact that it was one of the last projects Lorimer, Scotland’s leading Arts and Crafts architect, completed before his death in 1929.9 In contrast, histories of sculpture allocate little, if any, space to the SNWM.10 Sculpture is readily accommodated to the decorative narrative, but the decorative is less willingly embraced by sculptural narratives. Indeed, to discuss the SNWM in relation to sculpture is to disrupt more familiar narratives of what modern sculpture is. I suggest that the SNWM should be approached as what C. R. Ashbee calls an ‘aesthetic synthesis’. In 1916, Ashbee wrote, For many of us artists the chief lesson to be learned at this moment is that the new society will need before all things the ‘Aesthetic synthesis’. By that I mean it will be put together no more in little mechanical bits, by little individualistic wills, but by a greater will, and with a more nobly regulated purpose.11

By adopting Ashbee’s phrase I aim to emphasize two things. First, the notion of ‘synthesis’ involves the combining of different things; those elements remain different but are brought into productive relationship with one another. Second, the notion of ‘aesthetic synthesis’ is a reminder of the importance of the visual. It was not enough that people worked together in collaboration; the resulting synthesis had to be perceivable. The challenge was how to make visible the possibility for unity within diversity. As an ‘aesthetic synthesis’ the SNWM opens up a space for debate. It has something to say about the relationship between decoration and representation, between figuration and ornament, between image and substance, between the material and the intangible, between creation and destruction, between the real and the ideal, between the contemporary and the timeless, between order and disorder, between repetition and variation, and between presence and absence. ***

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Figure 7.2  Entrance to the Shrine showing stone sculptures by Charles Pilkington Jackson. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

From the threshold of the shrine a host of sculptures are visible, by different hands and in diverse materials (Figure 7.2). Gilded stone angels surround the doorway, and to the left and right gilded stone putti adorn the keystones at each end of the vaulted hall. On the walls five bronze panels make up a frieze encircling

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the shrine (Figures 7.3 and 7.4). In the centre of the shrine is the ornamented metal casket containing the Rolls of Honour, listing the names of war casualties, surrounded by four kneeling bronze angels (Figure 7.4). A wooden figure hangs from the ceiling above the casket and stone reliefs fill the space above each tall stained glass window (Figure 7.5). Many other sculptures wait just out of view both in the interior and on the exterior of the memorial, but this one position in the heart of the memorial gives a sense of the range of sculpture on display. In the face of ‘the simultaneous mass effect of perhaps two hundred details’, it makes no sense to think in terms of the autonomous work of art. According to Kahnweiler, writing in 1919, the ‘essence of sculpture’ was its ‘independent existence’ which ‘must be so robust that it stands out victoriously in spite of everything’.12 Kahnweiler’s combative language suggests that the relationship of a sculpture to its surroundings is one of competition and aggression. In contrast, sculpture at the SNWM exists in an environment of interdependence. By abandoning the quest for ‘independent existence’, sculpture here pursues a different path. The memorial provides the space for a sculptural conversation in which many different answers can be offered simultaneously to the questions that faced modern sculptors. This is a more cooperative model than Kahnweiler’s, and one which makes sense in a memorial dedicated to peace in the aftermath of a horrific war.

Figure 7.3  Alice Meredith Williams, detail of first left-hand panel of bronze frieze. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

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Figure 7.4  View of the Shrine showing bronze angels by Alice Meredith Williams around the casket and Williams’s bronze frieze in the background. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

At the SNWM, neither does sculpture have to choose between the ideal and the naturalistic. Instead, the different components of the memorial employ a wide spectrum of sculptural languages. For example, the stone angels surrounding the entrance to the shrine and the soldiers represented in the frieze within the shrine draw on different sculptural precedents, claim different

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relationships to the visible world and invite different kinds of engagement from the viewer. The stone angels are by Charles Pilkington Jackson, while the bronze frieze was modelled by Alice Meredith Williams from designs by her husband Morris Williams. Nestled into their niches and dissected by the lines of the masonry, the stone angels are embedded in the architecture (Figure 7.2). The three pairs of angels mirror one another, producing a symmetry interrupted only by the arms they bear, which stand for the five Scottish cities, so that the doorway presents a harmonious nation while acknowledging regional difference. A more pictorial approach is taken in the bronze frieze, where a sequence of military figures, modelled in low relief, occupies four rectangular frames (Figures 7.3 and 7.4). The varying uniforms and equipment have been meticulously researched. The figures appear to be moving forward purposefully, which introduces a narrative element to the frieze. On the face of it, the stone angels and the bronze reliefs exemplify sculpture’s language for the ideal and the real respectively. The dialogue between the two sets of sculptures is more nuanced than this simple opposition suggests, however. While the bronze figures are individualized, a likeness can be discerned between their faces and physiques; they are more or less equal in height, and their postures echo one another as they all move, and face, in the same direction. These elements suggest repetition and regularity and pattern. The overall format of the reliefs echoes that of the stone angels around the doorway. Two long reliefs mirror one another across the shrine, followed by a pair of shorter reliefs, and the series culminates in a fifth relief depicting a sword and wreaths (see Figure 7.4); similarly, the format around the doorway consists of two pairs of angels looking across the space at one another, surmounted by a fifth sculpture that brings a third pair of angels together to jointly hold the arms of Edinburgh. If four of the bronze reliefs are broadly pictorial in depicting an illusory three-dimensional space populated with human figures, the fifth disrupts the programme. The sword and wreaths, which stand upright with no visible means of support, do not invite interpretation as physical objects in the same fictional space as the figures in the other reliefs but rather as symbolic ornaments. As the climax of the whole frieze, the fifth relief lends its character to the other reliefs, encouraging a reading of those processing figures as symbolic and ornamental too. The idealism of the bronze frieze is still more apparent in contrast to the merciless realism of Charles Sargeant Jagger’s bronze No Man’s Land (Tate, 1919–20), whose subject is the horror of the battlefield populated with the forsaken dead. The SNWM’s frieze does not depict active conflict or

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death and its figures’ expressions are ambiguous. These elements allow the frieze to be read as a supplement to the Rolls of Honour housed in the casket by offering a visual example of each of the war-related roles that the individuals memorialized here would have performed. The official guide provided a list to assist the visitor in identifying the figures in the frieze, each of which stands for a specific group, from the Cameron Highlanders to the Women’s Royal Air Force.13 Yet, even if the figures in the bronze frieze are symbolic and idealized, they still invite a different kind of engagement from that offered by the stone angels. The intricate detail draws the viewer in close. As spectators move along the panel they mimic the slow, purposeful movement of the represented figures. The frieze opens up an opportunity for performing with one’s own body the embodiment depicted in bronze. The bronze figures become animated by association. Conversely, the spectator is compelled to join in the march towards the stillness of the final, ornamental panel; as mortals, viewers and figures share the same destination, and the same eventual fate. Their decorative character does not prevent the bronze panels from engaging with the problem of how to approach sculpture’s traditional subject – the idealized human body – in the modern age.14 These bodies may be whole but there is a suggestion of a blurring of the boundary between flesh and machine. Many of the figures are encumbered by elaborate equipment. At times the accessories are foregrounded, perhaps to facilitate identification of the figure’s occupation. The shallowness of the relief seems to compress objects into the very flesh of the figures. A coil of rope or wire takes the place of a man’s waist, the handle of a pickaxe juts upwards and seems to disappear into a figure’s chest, and a chain mail mask obliterates the face of another figure. A wide gap in the procession of figures exposes a section of aeroplane in the background, seeming to assign the machine an equal role. In places bodies seem to merge with one another in ways that can make the scene hard to read. The overall effect is not so much of a sequence of individual bodies but of a mass, suggesting a breaking down of the body’s borders. The fusing of organic and inorganic material here is subtler than the arresting juxtaposition of figure and machine in sculptures such as Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill (1915), and it may only become apparent with sustained viewing and close examination as the spectator draws near in an attempt to make out the frieze’s details. In contrast, Jagger’s and Epstein’s sculptures employ an aesthetics of shock and repulsion: faced with the horror of No Man’s Land and the unexpectedness of Rock Drill, the viewer is brought up short and kept at arm’s length. The more conventional style and decorative character of Williams’s

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bronze frieze make the breakdown of boundaries between the idealized sculpted body and other bodies and objects more surprising but no less poignant. Both of the sculptural groups discussed so far – the stone angels around the doorway and the bronze frieze – are reliefs, and both feature figures that are more or less life-size. In the centre of the shrine the four bronze angels surrounding the casket are rendered in the round, as is the figure of St Michael suspended from the ceiling, all of which are by Alice Meredith Williams. In each case, the scale and location of the sculptures are important. The four angels kneel and face inwards, directing the spectator’s attention towards the casket (Figure 7.4). The figures bow their heads and their hands are joined in prayer. The angels appear to be praying for the dead whose names are enclosed in the casket. As such they seem to model the behaviour expected of the visitor. While there was some debate among Protestant theologians, especially in the face of the mass slaughter of youth occasioned by the war, the orthodox view in predominantly Presbyterian Scotland was that it was inappropriate to pray for the dead, as this suggested that their souls languished in an intermediate place after death, and Calvinist doctrine taught that redemption was the result of belief during life, not intercession after death. James Lachlan Macleod notes that ‘belief in the “intermediate state” and praying for the dead were positions that had been absent from mainstream Scottish Protestantism since at least the seventeenth century’.15 Historians have described the SNWM as markedly Presbyterian in tone even though it is a secular space, but the praying angels around the casket seem to undermine the Presbyterianism of the memorial.16 The decorative mode operates productively here. As small statuettes arranged in a series, the bronze angels may be understood as purely ornamental, and any appeal to mimic their behaviour is minimized by the difference in scale between their bodies and those of living spectators. At the same time, the four angels are individualized, and they are rendered in the same material as the human figures in the panels of the frieze against which, from many positions, they are seen (Figure 7.4). The sculptures push the limits of the decorative, using the mask of ornament to raise theological questions and to make space for spiritual uses of the memorial, despite its ostensibly secular function. The other sculpture in the round inside the shrine depicts St Michael – also an angel, but not one engaged in prayer. Larger than life-size, the wooden figure of St Michael trampling a vanquished dragon, one hand clasped around the handle of his sword, hovers over the casket (Figure 7.5). From the threshold of the shrine a spectator has a frontal view of the St Michael, but within the

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Figure 7.5  Alice Meredith Williams, St Michael, wood with paint and gilding. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

shrine the figure is seen from below as an indecipherable mass of green scales and jutting limbs. The symbolism of St Michael in this context can be explained in various ways; for example, he ‘personifies the message of the end of all war’.17 While this sculpture may depict St Michael, its meaning cannot be contained by its subject. As a huge piece of carved, painted and gilded wood, apparently

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suspended in space, and designed to be viewed from below, the work seems deliberately to obscure its symbolic content, while maximizing the potential of its material, visual and spatial qualities. Its looming presence dominates the shrine. To those beneath it, the sculpture hangs ominously but also miraculously; correspondingly, it incites both fear and wonder. Again, the carving takes advantage of the decorative to expand possible modes of engagement with sculpture. There is something ornamental about the sculpture’s form, dangling as it does from its gilt-metal linked supports; Elizabeth Cumming observes that it ‘crosses the boundaries of jewellery and sculpture’.18 It also gestures to the chandelier, another large, elaborate structure we might expect to find suspended from a ceiling. Interpreting the St Michael as a giant pendant transforms the whole memorial into a body, while by standing for a chandelier the sculpture offers to shed light on the whole shrine. At the same time it seems to revel in thwarting the expectations raised by sculpture. The stone and metal sculptures around the shrine and elsewhere in the memorial are reminders of the weight of traditional sculptural materials; in hanging from the roof, the St Michael takes advantage of its lightweight medium. Where Kahnweiler dictated that sculpture ‘should rise up proudly in space’, the St Michael descends.19 And in place of a plinth, the St Michael substitutes empty space. A plinth formed the basis of most war memorials. The monumental, in-the-round sculptural figure at the centre of the SNWM is presented in such a way that a plinth is rendered superfluous. The St Michael draws on decorative precedents to explore what sculpture can do when liberated from its conventions. The SNWM reveals different artists experimenting with different ways of representing the male body at a time when war had both modified concepts of masculinity and cast doubt on sculpture’s conventional commitment to the idealized human figure.20 The memorial rejects both the traditional sculptural monument and the blank monolithic silence of Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph (1920), the war memorial in Whitehall, London. The SNWM seems to meditate on the role of the statue in a post-war world. At every turn the expectation of a statue is raised and denied. The shrine in particular overturns the status of the statue. It contains the relatively small casket supported by its green marble plinth and the exposed rock emerging from the ground, the flattened figures in relief, the broken and fragmented and transparent figures in the windows, but no solid, three-dimensional human figure. Instead, it presents a descending, other-worldly being slaying a mythological creature whose plinth is replaced by empty space. A decorative ensemble that allows for variation accommodates

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multiple conflicting or complementary experiments in sculptural approaches to the concepts of the monument and the memorial. It is the array of diverse sculptures displayed alongside one another that makes the complexity of each discernible. Each individually brings sculpture and the decorative into tension to challenge expectations, and the whole ensemble can be seen as weaving sculpture into a decorative framework, which plays each sculpture off the others, further expanding possible interpretations. The St Michael represents an angel, a celestial being without earthly substance; yet this is the sculpture that asserts its weightiness most insistently, threatening, as it does, to fall on the heads of visitors below. The frieze is where mortal flesh takes sculptural form, and yet this is the sculpture rendered in the shallowest relief, its figures reduced to flattened illusions of solid bodies. St Michael is both an angel, an immortal entity, and a warrior; the figures in the frieze are warriors, but in this memorial context they are also to be understood as ghosts. The boundaries between human body and spiritual being are blurred in this sculptural ensemble. In contrast with the figures in the bronze frieze, which are modelled in a naturalistic, if idealized, manner, the statue of St Michael is highly stylized. The wings are composed of smooth, almost leathery feathers that blend into and echo the smaller, tongue-like forms that signify the dragon’s scales. Most of St Michael’s body is hidden beneath his armour; his face is carved from harsh, straight lines and his hair is organized into separate, even locks curling back from his forehead. Where the modelling of limbs in the frieze suggests supple muscle and soft cloth, St Michael’s armoured form is stiff and hard, his bent arm forming a sharp right angle and his straight legs suggesting locked knee joints. (It is worth noting, however, that the chain mail over his pelvis is a reminder of the chain mail mask worn by the tank operator depicted in the bronze frieze, as shown in Figure 7.3.) The angularity of his pose is accentuated by the shapes of his armour, which is carved into pointed sections over the legs. Encased in overlapping layers of armour, the extended left foot takes on a scaly appearance that makes it blend in with the reptile beneath it. Armour and dragon are not separate from St Michael’s body, but part of it, suggesting a breaking down of the boundary around the body similar to that observed in the bronze frieze above. The exaggerated, harsh, bold forms of the carving evoke the medieval and particularly the grotesque. These features are echoed and exaggerated even further in the seven sculptures of planets that crown the stained glass windows in the shrine, and which frame many views of the St Michael figure (Figure 7.5). They too are based on sharp angles, strong diagonals and limbs that jut

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out awkwardly. Like the St Michael, they call to mind the grotesque and the heraldic, particularly the animals represented in the carvings of Mercury and the Sun. There is also a suggestion of the Celtic in the way the distorted, flattened figures fit themselves into the composition. At the SNWM, we find sculptors experimenting with different ways of mining the past for modern purposes. The interest shown by these sculptors in the medieval, the heraldic and the grotesque should be understood against a background in which sculptural practice more broadly held the concept of the ‘primitive’ in high esteem.21 Instead of turning to non-Western models of the ‘primitive’, these artists followed the Arts and Crafts precedent of venerating the Gothic and the vernacular. While medievalism may be a form of nationalism in Scotland, it also implies an ethics of unalienated craftsmanship (as interpreted by Ruskin and Morris) and a tradition of public and religious art.22 The sculptures of the planets were designed by Douglas Strachan, who was responsible for all the stained glass in the memorial. There is a discernible likeness between the sculpted planets and the windows below them in the

Figure 7.6  Douglas Strachan, detail of seventh stained glass window, showing parents mourning dead child. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

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shrine. Solemn, heavy-browed figures, bent and stretched into exaggerated poses, people both series, and the shallow relief, flattened composition and sharp angles of the sculptures evoke the medium of stained glass. Themes traced so far in the memorial’s sculptures are continued in the windows. Here Strachan uses colour and lead lines to raise similar questions about the boundaries around the body, and the relationships of different bodies to one another and to objects.23 A grieving mother’s hands are not separated by lead lines from the head and body of her dead child, whose arm seems to double as a bulging muscle in his father’s calf, and a pale grey hue unites the flesh of the three (Figure 7.6). Eve’s left hand and the dead Abel’s head are enclosed within the same lead lines, as are her right hand and his, while Adam’s hand rests on Eve’s head without a lead line to separate them (Figure 7.7). In yet another window a prostrate soldier’s head is cradled in a comrade’s hand; head and hand are outlined together in lead (Figure 7.8). Points of contact are emphasized here, both among the living and between the living and the dead. This is not a superficial glossing over of the barriers

Figure 7.7  Douglas Strachan, detail of second stained glass window, showing Adam and Eve mourning Abel. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

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Figure 7.8  Douglas Strachan, detail of fourth stained glass window, showing a pair of soldiers. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

between people or between life and death but an eloquent exploration of the possibility that in finding union with others we lose ourselves. Eve and the other grieving mother relinquish wholeness; their hands unite with other bodies and their faces are obscured. The memorial sees the arts grappling with an analogous dilemma. According to Modernists, by moving closer towards one another the arts risk losing their identity. The SNWM, by embracing the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative in ways that Kahnweiler, for instance, would consider beyond ‘the essence of sculpture’, refuses to draw firm boundaries between different categories of art. In Modernist discourse the potential gains offered by the ideal of the unity of the arts are countered by the threat of loss. The SNWM puts into practice the breaking down of barriers and makes visible the positive and negative implications of doing so, both for the arts and for society. In scenes of battle that populate the middle section of several windows, partial figures emerge from the melee. Disembodied armoured limbs appear,

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Figure 7.9  Douglas Strachan, detail of battle scene in sixth stained glass window, showing disembodied limbs and severed heads. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

echoing the exaggerated pointed left leg of St Michael in the wooden carving, while heads are severed from bodies by the lead lines demarcating other figures (Figure 7.9, Figure 7.10). In these battle scenes human, animal and weapon are broken down and entwined. Caroline Arscott has observed how in Edward Burne-Jones’s stained glass ‘the lead-lines are no longer differentiated for different orders of being’ so that ‘the organic building blocks get divided and reunited in a benign bulking up’.24 Strachan’s battle scenes use colour and lead lines to suggest a similar dividing and reuniting of parts but in the service of a different message; instead of a ‘benign bulking up’, we witness a violent fragmentation and an almost illegible reintegration. In these passages of the windows things are indistinguishable, and objects and bodies are abstracted into unidentifiable parts. As such Strachan’s windows are in conversation with Vorticist paintings such as David Bomberg’s In the Hold (Tate, 1913–14), which evokes cracked glass, and Wyndham Lewis’s A Battery Shelled (Imperial War Museums, 1919), where human, machine and land collapse into one another. While Strachan’s

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Figure 7.10  Douglas Strachan, detail of battle scene in seventh stained glass window, showing severed heads. Scottish National War Memorial, Edinburgh, 1927. Photo: Antonia Reeve Photography, Edinburgh, UK.

subjects seem more conventional, on close examination his windows deal with similar questions. In stained glass, the fragility of the material and the fact that the pieces of glass remain visibly separate even when connected make the medium’s exploration of the relationship between parts and wholes all the more powerful. Arscott argues persuasively that Burne-Jones’s stained glass follow a ‘sculptural logic’. Visual, material and thematic affinities can be traced between Strachan’s windows and the more obviously sculptural features that surround them in the memorial. By explicitly challenging the boundaries between different forms of artistic practice, the SNWM facilitates artistic dialogue and embraces interdependence. It may be objected that it is pushing the boundaries of sculpture too far to claim sculpturality for stained glass. Yet pushing the boundaries of sculpture is exactly what the SNWM does. When we attempt to separate out the sculptural elements of the SNWM it emerges that, in a sense, the entire memorial is

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one, large, complex, composite sculpture. Every element of its decoration is three-dimensional and textured, whether modelled, carved or assembled. The sculptures speak in different dialects, but they are participating in the same conversation. Instead of a smoothly coherent scheme created by a single hand, such as the Sandham Memorial Chapel painted by Stanley Spencer, the SNWM asks viewers to keep adjusting their expectations and drawing on different kinds of visual knowledge. The SNWM offers many simultaneous answers to the question of how sculpture, in dialogue with the decorative, can represent human experience and, more specifically, what a space conditioned by death and grief and memory demands of sculpture.

Acknowledgements My research on the Scottish National War Memorial has benefited from the generous assistance of Duncan Macmillan, Lt Col (Retd) Colin McGrory and his colleagues at the SNWM, and Keren Guthrie at Blair Castle. I am grateful to Whitney Davis, Claire Jones and Jeffrey Ochsner for opportunities to present versions of this argument at the University of York, the University of Birmingham and the Society of Architectural Historians, and to the audience members for their constructive feedback. I would especially like to thank Julia and Stephen Hart for their support and Claire Jones for inspiring conversations and insightful suggestions.

Notes 1 T. J. Honeyman, ‘Phyllis Bone: Sculptor’, Scottish Field (December 1955): 46. 2 Christopher Hussey designated Bone a ‘sculptor, in the true sense of a hewer of stone’, whose roundels at the Memorial ‘have the vitality that comes of direct cutting by an artist of imagination’, pointing to the importance of direct carving in contemporary criticism. Christopher Hussey, The Work of Sir Robert Lorimer (London: Country Life, 1931), 108. See Penelope Curtis, ‘How Direct Carving Stole the Idea of Modern British Sculpture’, in David J. Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 291–318. 3 See, for example, Jenny Macleod, ‘“By Scottish Hands, with Scottish Money, on Scottish soil”: The Scottish National War Memorial and National Identity’, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 1 (2010): 73–96.

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4 Walter Richard Sickert, ‘The Language of Art’, The New Age (28 July 1910): 300–1. 5 The Scottish National War Memorial, with an introduction by General Sir Ian Hamilton (Edinburgh: Grant and Murray, 1932), 5. 6 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ‘The Essence of Sculpture’ (1920) reprinted in Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, eds, Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 71–9, 77. S. K. Tillyard argues that sculpture’s status suffered when it was seen as dependent on commissions and architecture. S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1988), 147. 7 See Duncan Macmillan, Scotland’s Shrine: The Scottish National War Memorial (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014); Jenny Macleod, ‘Memorials and Location: Local Versus National Identity and the Scottish National War Memorial’, Scottish Historical Review 89, no. 227 (2010): 73–95; Jenny Macleod, ‘Britishness and Commemoration: National Memorials to the First World War in Britain and Ireland’, Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 4 (October 2013): 647–65; Angus Calder, ‘The Scottish National War Memorial’, in William Kidd and Brian Murdoch, eds, Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 61–74; and Fiona Pearson, ‘The Reliefs in the Scottish National War Memorial’, in Andrew Guest and Ray McKenzie, eds, Dangerous Ground: Sculpture in the City (Edinburgh: Scottish Sculpture Trust: 1999), 35–42. 8 Penelope Curtis, ‘British British Sculpture Sculpture’, in Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson, eds, Modern British Sculpture (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 14–27, 21. 9 See Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006); Annette Carruthers, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013); and Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 10 One book on sculpture that does include the SNWM is Fiona Pearson, ed., Virtue and Vision: Sculpture and Scotland 1540–1990 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1991), 105–11. 11 Charles Robert Ashbee, ‘Art in England in War Times’, American Magazine of Art 8, no. 1 (November 1916): 9–13, 9. 12 Kahnweiler, ‘The Essence of Sculpture’, 77. 13 F. W. Deas, The Scottish National War Memorial: Official Guide (Edinburgh: David Macdonald Ltd, 1928), 21–3. See also Ian Hay, Their Name Liveth: The Book of the Scottish National War Memorial (John Lane: London, 1931), 141–7. 14 See Getsy, Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal. See also Hal Foster, ‘Prosthetic Gods’, Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 2 (1997): 5–38.

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15 James Lachlan Macleod, ‘“Greater Love Hath No Man than This”: Scotland’s Conflicting Religious Responses to Death in the Great War’, Scottish Historical Review 81, no. 211, part 1 (April 2002): 70–96, 86. 16 Macleod, ‘By Scottish Hands’, 95. 17 Macmillan, Scotland’s Shrine, 140. 18 Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul, 197. 19 Kahnweiler, ‘The Essence of Sculpture’, 77. 20 On war and masculinity, see Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 21 See Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, ‘Primitive’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170–84. 22 See Stefan Goebel, ‘“The Spirit of the Crusaders”: Scottish Peculiarities, British Commonalities, and European Convergences in the Memorialization of the Great War’, in Gill Plain, ed., Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Bannockburn (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017). 23 Strachan wrote that ‘the designer expends almost as much care on it [the pattern of the leading] as he does on his cartoon, exercising to the utmost his ability in pure pattern-weaving’. Douglas Strachan, ‘Art Theory and Stained Glass Practice’, Aberdeen University Review 16 (1929): 111–26, 124. 24 Caroline Arscott, ‘Fractured Figures: The Sculptural Logic of Burne-Jones’s Stained Glass Windows’, in Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal, 39–62, 50.

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Ornament and monument in German sculpture, 1910–30 Milly Steger and Renée Sintenis Nina Lübbren

In 1914, the German critic and socialist Robert Breuer argued that ‘modern decorative sculpture’ had developed along two strands: as small sculpture and as monumental decoration of architecture.1 Breuer attributed both impulses to people’s psychological response to the functionality of modern buildings and interiors. Decorative sculptures ‘are the neural short-hands of a generation that is wholly committed to necessity; they are the liberating vibrations of people who are otherwise tied to an unsentimental quotidian existence’.2 Breuer proposed the decorative as pivotal to the modern condition. His two decorative types – the very small and the very large – were located respectively inside modern living spaces and on the façades of public buildings, and their purpose was to enliven each of these locations with playful, tender, ascetic or glamorous moods.3 How these two impulses played out in the field of German sculpture between 1910 and 1930 is the focus of this chapter. The following questions are considered: Pace Breuer, can we even talk about the same kind of ‘decorative’ in each case, given the different effects, modes of address and semantic charges of the monumental in contrast to the miniature? What happens to the notion of the decorative as it travels from the outside of architecture – columns, friezes, streetscapes – to the inside – living rooms, shelves, private spaces? And how do concepts of the decorative intersect with the mercantile transformations of the wider sculptural network around the First World War? In what follows, I focus on two of the most successful German sculptors of the period: Milly Steger and Renée Sintenis. Steger’s larger-than-life-size figures for the Municipal Theatre in Hagen of 1911 exemplify architectural sculpture and the monumental. Sintenis’s

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small-scale figurines, sought after as commodities by private buyers in the 1910s and 1920s, stand for the minuscule and the domestic. It was arguably Modernism that enabled these two sculptors to develop their art, and certainly both Steger and Sintenis positioned themselves within the avant-garde in various ways. Rosemary Betterton and Griselda Pollock have both suggested that women artists of the first decades of the twentieth century benefited from Modernist discourse and practice. Pollock argues that artistic liberation was empowered by ‘experimentation with the potentialities of radical modernism’.4 Betterton contends that the alliance between women and modernity did furnish a sense of agency and the ability to participate in cultural change.5 However, others have pointed to the obstacles that women encountered in the German art world where they were branded as suited to only certain ‘feminine’ pursuits, in particular applied and decorative arts but not large-scale monumental sculpture. Upon closer inspection, the two texts that scholars who argue this latter point cite repeatedly are those by Karl Scheffler (1908) and Hans Hildebrandt (1928).6 Carola Muysers has shown how a blinkered focus on only these two writers has obscured what was actually a lively, rich and feminist field of debate throughout the 1910s to early 1930s.7 Scheffler’s and Hildebrandt’s seemingly misogynist remarks will therefore have to be taken as minority voices in a larger concert of practice and discussion, and the works of Steger and Sintenis placed into this wider context. I would instead like to contend that neither of these two sculptors was hampered by their associations with the ‘feminine’ or the ‘decorative’; indeed, both successfully positioned themselves, and were positioned by patrons and critics, as women and sculptors with regard to particular concepts of the decorative. Both pursued successful careers, were discussed by contemporary critics and patronized by the leading curators of their time. The concept of the decorative did not impede these sculptors but instead enabled and, indeed, empowered them.

Milly Steger and large-scale architectural sculpture In 1911, Milly Steger completed four monumental larger-than-life semi-draped female stone figures for the façade of the newly completed Municipal Theatre in the city of Hagen (the Hagener Stadttheater) (Figure 8.1). The Hagen statues have the authority of monumental scale, regarded as appropriate for commissions in the public sphere. Steger’s figures were integrated into the structure of the

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Figure 8.1  Milly Steger, Four Female Nudes (Vier weibliche Akte), 1911, stone. Façade, Municipal Theatre, Hagen. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg; photographer: Andreas Lechtape 2013.

theatre’s façade. Compared to the well-established literature on free-standing monuments (Denkmäler), not much has been written on German architectural sculpture (Bauplastik) before 1914, but the combination of public architecture and statuary was common in the Wilhelmine period (1890–1918), as a glance at any pre-war civic building will confirm.8 Steger’s work differed from other architectural sculptures mainly in its formal qualities and in that it generated a controversy among Hagen residents. The two are related because what was disputed was the way the sculptures looked; in 1911, the need for decorative sculpture on a municipal building as such was taken as self-evident. According to art historian Birgit Schulte, Steger was employed in the unique role of ‘town sculptor’ for Hagen, where she lived from 1910 to 1917/18 (before moving to Berlin) and where she enjoyed the patronage of Germany’s most avantgarde curator and patron, Ernst Karl Osthaus, husband of museum director Gertrud Colsman.9 Osthaus was the director of the Folkwang Museum, which he had founded as the world’s first museum of contemporary art in 1902. During her sojourn in Hagen, Steger worked on many public commissions, nearly all of them associated with the decoration of architecture and many of them linked to

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Osthaus.10 Works include two figures for the entrance portal of the Altenhagen school (c. 1911–14), two female nudes for the Folkwang Museum’s façade (a photo survives), a woman’s head for the Folkwang Museum’s entrance (1912), a caryatid for her own residence in the Osthaus-sponsored Hohenhof estate (1912–17), an oval relief with dancers installed in architect Jan Thorn Prikker’s house (1912), a frieze on the Savings Bank (visible on a 1920 photo), a bronze monument of a smith for the Altenhagen Bridge (1914, today in the Volkspark on Karl-Marx-Straße) and six giant panthers on the roof of the newly built City Hall (1914, survived the Second World War bombing but mysteriously lost after the building was torn down in 1954).11 Among this impressive array of architectural and other public sculptures, Steger’s most famous commission was the set of figures for the theatre façade. The Municipal Theatre was designed by the Darmstadt architect Ernst Vetterlein, husband of Strasbourg newspaper editor’s daughter Milla David. The theatre is a stone building, roughly classical in design, cubic and geometric in character, with an emphasis on right angles, triangular pediments and straight lines. Four engaged columns structure the façade into three tall glazed openings above three entrance ways. The dentils along the pediment, the fluted shafts and the plain capitals gesture towards the Doric order, albeit a deformed and transformed Doric. Vetterlein did not include the sculptures in his designs. The theatre would certainly seem to fit in with Robert Breuer’s description of contemporary architecture as starkly functionalist and in need of sculptural embellishment. The public-limited corporation that managed the theatre project decided to add figurative sculptures to the otherwise unornamented façade.12 Steger’s figures are integrated into the façade’s geometric matrix. The statues are placed on plinths in front of the four attached columns and take up around a quarter of the vertical height of the shafts. The plinths are in turn placed on top of a corniced ledge, each plinth situated above the continuation of the columns in the form of jamb-like buttresses. This placement is especially evident in the two central figures whose vertical columnar aspect is enlivened by their contrapposto poses which, however, do not translate into a corresponding distribution of weight in the rest of the body. The central figures’ torsi are erect, with horizontal lines demarcating chest and belly. The figures hold draperies that curve behind them in a half-mandorla. The two outermost figures are similar in size, shape, drapery and stance, but they incline their heads towards the centre, lift one shoulder and hug their arms around their chests. Together, the four sculptures form a unified ensemble, but each woman is characterized by

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subtle distinctions: the left-most figure touches one hand to her collar bone; the centre-left one’s face is more rounded than that of the figure to her left, and her hand position differs; the right-hand figure has her arms crossed at the elbows. Furthermore, by virtue of their elevated position, the figures interact with the public space of the urban fabric around the theatre. Controversy followed the installation of Steger’s statues. Hagen citizens criticized the figures as inappropriate for this communal building and argued that they were more suited to a museum.13 Osthaus spoke of a ‘storm of indignation’.14 It appears that some members of the Hagen public objected to the ‘purely functional character of the figures without allegorical attributes’.15 Petitions to remove them were submitted, and teachers were reportedly exhorted not to take pupils on field trips to the theatre.16 The theatre’s architect, Vetterlein, contributed to the debate in a local newspaper, by coming out in support of Steger’s figures: If they [the sculptures] should fulfil this higher artistic aim, they must be stripped of all naturalistic attributes. Any true-to-nature attribute or form of dress would turn the body that is supposed to have an artistic effect as stone, into flesh. That is the greatest artistic achievement of the artist here, to have kept at bay any lustful thoughts. .  .  . And the artist has managed this by distancing herself from any individual features so that the faces appear strangely exotic, so that the hands and the swing of the drapery have not been taken from the living model but appear strangely interesting and do not lead the viewer’s gaze back to memories of the boudoir .  .  . [These are] people who are permitted to show their body without shame or coquetry, without fear, their body as noble and as pure as their soul.17

Vetterlein’s emphasis on ‘modern art’ as opposed to ‘lustfulness’ speaks to the alignment of art with modernity, and of both with values that transcend reality, and in particular the reality of sexuality. ‘Lustfulness’, that is, overtly erotic sexuality, was leached from the figures whose nudity became instead an emblem of their ‘purity’. But the locals’ resistance and Vetterlein’s defence also point to the dilemma faced by architectural sculpture. In Steger’s case, the expected impassivity of decoration seemed to step loose from its architectural context and become something other than mere applied ornament. When citizens found Steger’s figures more suited to the museum, they more or less acknowledged this aspect: that the women on the plinths had ceased to be ‘decoration’ and had turned into ‘art’, more specifically, into ‘modern art’. Different rules would appear to apply to an ‘artistic’ sculpture destined for the interior of a gallery space from those relevant to works in the exterior public domain.

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Hagen had not been a particularly lively artistic centre before the advent of the twentieth century and the foundation of the Folkwang Museum. Osthaus initiated what became known as the ‘Hagen Impulse’ – an intensive Modernist moment of activity within architecture, sculpture, public art and museum curatorship. The Folkwang Museum soon became known beyond its regional borders, nationally and internationally. In 1909, Osthaus opened a sister museum to the Folkwang, the Museum of Art in Trade and Industry (Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe) in Krefeld.18 He also started a shop window competition and was involved in numerous other activities designed to bring art to the people.19 He was above all convinced that the public would benefit from being educated in the arts, that this was best done in the industrial provinces (pre-war Hagen was one of the leading steel-producing cities in the Ruhr industrial area) rather than in Berlin, and that art and applied art went hand in hand. If we look at other public sculpture in Hagen and in Germany, we may come to understand how Steger’s figures could be viewed as unusual. In 1911, Hagen did not possess many other examples of public sculpture. One of the few is the Three-Emperor Fountain (Drei-Kaiser-Brunnen) of 1902 by Emil Cauer, uncle of National Socialist sculptor Hanna Cauer, which replaced an older monument commemorating the Franco-Prussian War and the 1871 unification of Germany. Emil Cauer’s bronze figures, arranged in front of a stone obelisk, are naturalistically conceived, draped and clothed, and furnished with clear attributes: the smith, emblematic of Hagen’s steel industry, rests a hammer on an anvil; Hermes holds the requisite caduceus and sports a winged helmet. A similarly allegorical fountain can be found in nearby Düsseldorf, the Father Rhine (Vater Rhein) of 1897, by Karl Janssen who, as it happens, was also Steger’s first teacher. This is the kind of allegorical, naturalistic, vaguely neo-baroque public sculpture that late Wilhelmine audiences were used to. If we have a look at architectural sculpture specifically, we encounter a similar trend towards classicizing, naturalistic, clothed figures, furnished with attributes, and adorning historicist neoclassical or neo-Renaissance edifices. In Germany, Wilhelm Haverkamp, later the teacher of Sintenis, contributed the allegories of Religion and Administration to the façade of Berlin’s Charlottenburg town hall. Eduard Beyrer designed statues for the exterior of a girls’ secondary school in Bavaria (the Dalberg-Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg, circa 1906).20 The contrast with the Hagen theatre sculptures of five years later is marked: the Dalberg School’s Empress Kunigunde, for example, is chastely draped and displays signs of her office (crown and miniature church model). Steger’s statues

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are not identified as anybody in particular: they are not historical, mythical or allegorical. They lack attributes, and are uncompromising in their nakedness and their austere formal idiom. The authors of the pamphlet published on the occasion of the Hagen theatre’s opening (among them, architect Vetterlein) affirmed that the goal of the commission had been to encourage a new kind of architectural sculpture. They wrote, Any kind of realistic banality has been avoided on purpose so that the figures don’t seem just to have been dropped in front of the façade and so to appear lonely and rejected, but instead seem to have grown up out of the material, out of the architecture, and to connect harmoniously with it. In this way, the idealized figures do not demand to be experienced as transfigured but as part of the whole as ornament! In their poses, they follow the taut columns that rise up behind them but their refined, well-balanced movements betray their inner life.21

In 1926, art writer and editor Otto Grautoff, husband of novelist Erna Grautoff, described Steger’s figures in a similar vein as being inserted into the building’s body (Baukörper) in the shape of subservient limbs in a strictly architectural way (streng architektonisch).22 However, by 1926, a shift had occurred in the evaluation of what was architectural about sculpture. The 1911 authors had talked of the figures as part of the ornamental whole; for them, this constituted their architectural character. By the mid-1920s, the meaning of the term ‘architectural’ (architektonisch) had changed. Writers now used it to describe particular properties they found in autonomous three-dimensional sculpture that was not intended to be attached to any actual architecture. For example, the Dresden sculptures of Gela Forster, destined for a gallery setting, were overwhelmingly characterized as architectural by contemporaries.23 In 1923, critic, journal editor and collector of Expressionist art Paul Westheim, later husband of translator and poet Mariana Frenk-Westheim, published a book entitled Architektonik des Plastischen (The Architectural of the Sculptural).24 The concept of the ‘architectural’ was for Westheim, as for other contemporary writers, a key way of counteracting the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand’s pronouncements on the opticality of sculpture.25 Hildebrand, husband of Irene née Schäuffelen and father of sculptor Irene Georgii-Hildebrand, had been the most influential thinker for the previous generation of Wilhelmine sculptors. The key principle behind Hildebrand’s approach was the idea of visuality; sculpture should be planar and relief-like; it should have one main viewpoint

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and a clearly defined silhouette so that it could be apprehended optically from afar without any resulting ambivalence. After 1910, every German writer on sculpture in one way or another rejected Hildebrand’s idea of the optical nature of sculpture. Westheim himself stressed the haptic and tactile properties of the medium. In place of Hildebrand’s concept of the ‘planar’, Westheim and others extolled the concept of the ‘cubic’.26 Sculpture was now understood as tension of the mass from the inside outwards; it extended mass as volume into space, and it was this that made it monumental, not its size.27 In Westheim’s words, This process of building (Bauen) that is at the same time a process of imaging (Bilden), we can recognize this rendering-as-body (Körperlichmachen) of sculptural (bildnerisch) energies as the architectural of the sculptural (die Architektonik des Plastischen).28

Steger did not produce any further architectural sculpture after her sojourn in Hagen. During the First World War, her style changed. The torsi became

Figure 8.2  Milly Steger, Dancer (Tanzende), 1918, bronze. Collection Karl H. Knauf, Berlin. Photograph: G. Ladwig.

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elongated, the facial expressions ascetic and remote. The vertical calm of the theatre figures was replaced with an agile, attenuated dynamics, such as can be felt in the geometric architecture of the Dancing Women (Tanzende) (Figure 8.2) or the twisted scaffold of the Ascending Youth (Auferstehender Jüngling, 1918–20).29 This change of style, congruent with an accommodation to a smaller format, was partly in response to the decrease of public commissions Steger experienced after her departure from Hagen. The sculptor herself never gave up the hope of once again working in an architectural context, as suggested by an interview she gave in 1936.30 However, it is as if, detached from the architectural frame, the sculpture itself becomes architecture. In the wake of war, the public commissions of the Wilhelmine era gave way to a more fractured, privatized patronage, and sculptors could no longer rely on federal- or municipal-sponsored projects. Steger’s Hagen theatre figures were among the last great architectural sculpture schemes of the pre-war period. The sculptor who best exemplifies the following era is Renée Sintenis.

Renée Sintenis and small-scale domestic objects Renée Sintenis was the favourite artist of dealer, publisher and gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim and, in terms of sales, the most successful German sculptor of the 1920s.31 Sintenis had studied decorative sculpture (Dekorative Bildhauerei) with Wilhelm Haverkamp, husband of Margarethe Ferlmann-Bringelmann, at the Berlin Applied Arts Museum’s college.32 By 1932, her work was to be found in fourteen German, twelve European and three American museums, and in numerous private collections.33 Sintenis produced small-scale bronze figurines of animals and athletes that were popular with private buyers.34 An example is the bronze Kneeling Deer. A version of Kneeling Deer (Kniendes Reh, also known as Young Deer / Junges Reh) was reproduced in the journal Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (German Art and Decoration) in 1916 (Figure 8.3).35 The large ears, round eyes, lanky legs and awkward pose mark this as a young animal. The bronze surface is smooth and reflects light, but the artist’s hand is detectable in several rough indentations, echoes of Rodinesque modelé. The deer is conceived with a clear main silhouette, to be viewed and photographed frontally; in the 1916 photo, a diagonal curved line leads from its rump to its neck, then up again to the head; the legs, seen from this viewpoint, form a rhomboid scaffolding around a central void. The head is

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Figure 8.3  Renée Sintenis, Kneeling Deer (Kniendes Reh), c. 1913, bronze. Reproduced in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 38 (1916), between pages 191 and 194. © DACS 2019.

turned at ninety degrees to the body. In 1918, another photo was reproduced in the journal Kunst für Alle (Art for All), this time on a rectangular stone plinth.36 Later versions of the Kneeling Deer also include this plinth but it is significant that upon its first publication the work was shown not so much as a sculpture, but as a plinth-less object, an object to be placed on any even surface, and one to be picked up and handled. The two publications of 1916 and 1918 do not give the Kneeling Deer’s dimensions but an extant 1915 version is 8 centimetres high.37 The tiny scale of Sintenis’s works combined with her choice of animal subjects and the lack of a pedestal generated a different set of associations than Steger’s Hagen statues. The diminutive size meant that these objects were portable and, crucially, touchable. They invited a particular type of haptic interaction, not just a purely optical Modernist gaze. Notwithstanding the photograph’s accent on the Hildebrandesque contour, the artefact encouraged an engagement with the material that was fundamentally different from Hildebrand’s principle of the ‘optical’. Writer and editor Moritz Heimann commented in 1916, ‘You can set these figures before you on the table, you can take them in your hand, you

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can enjoy them, they have a function.’38 For Heimann, their manipulability sets Sintenis’s works apart from contemporary attempts to place sculpture at the service of architecture which either resulted in ‘mere decoration’ or in an explosion of the architecture.39 In a similar vein, Czech art historian and painter Ignaz Beth noted in 1918, ‘You can comfortably take these little things in your hand and are then able to contemplate them from all sides, as in them lives a concentrated expression that seems to have been conditioned by the format.’40 The emphasis of writers on the haptic quality of Sintenis’s sculpture shows up a desire to touch that is more intensely activated by three-dimensional works than by paintings or prints. Sintenis played to this desire by chiselling the undersides of many of her sculptures and by doing away with plinths for many of them.41 Miniature works like Kneeling Deer satisfied a need for what archaeologist Doug Bailey calls the ‘cheirotic apprehension’ of figurines, that is, the ability to envelop objects in the hand.42 Both Bailey and Milette Gaifman reproduce photos of hands cradling objects: a Neolithic figurine and an ancient Greek libation bowl respectively.43 These two authors attest to a revived interest among today’s art historians and archaeologists in the sensory experience of objects beyond the optical. Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence note that research in the cognitive neurosciences has revealed the importance to human well-being of ‘inanimate touch’, that is, human-to-object tactile contact.44 Sintenis’s figurines directly indulge the need to touch – but, of course, only for their owners, not for general gallery goers and journal readers. Socialist critic, writer and homosexual rights activist Hans Siemsen’s response to Sintenis’ figurines eloquently evokes the powerful affective charge of the ‘cheirotic’ experience: In my hand lies Renée Sintenis’s little bronze foal that stretches out its front foot so coquettishly and innocently. . . . It is dumb and noble, like a young Greek god. Shy and tender. It is made in such a way (of bronze) that, once you have taken it into your hand, you can’t decide to give it up again. It makes you tender. One has to touch it! And nobody remembers that the item which you hold in your hand is just a piece of metal, just a piece of bronze.45

In Siemsen’s account, the little foal was animated by its graspability; it morphed into a kind of divinity, a modern fetish (Figure 8.4).46 Art critic Karl Scheffler, husband of Dora née Bielefeld, alluded to this graspability when he described Sintenis’s sculpture as akin to what he termed ‘toy expressionism’ (Kinderspielzeugexpressionismus); toys are precisely things to be held and manipulated.47

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Figure 8.4  Renée Sintenis, Foal, Looking Right (Rechtsblickendes Fohlen), 1917, bronze. Collection Karl H. Knauf, Berlin. Photograph: B. Sinterhauf. © DACS 2019.

Alfred Flechtheim reinforced the perception of Sintenis’s works as nonmonumental objects when he recommended them as ‘charming things’ rather than as sculptures.48 Sintenis herself observed that she did not want her sculpture to have a ‘monumental effect’, though it is to be noted that she said this in 1936, at a time when fascist Germany was rebooting the centrality of monumental sculpture.49 Despite the earlier efforts of the Bauhaus to re-evaluate the status of applied design, many writers on sculpture in the 1920s and 1930s were sceptical when it came to the value of small-scale works. Marxist-feminist art historian Lu Märten thought that small-scale sculpture or Kleinplastik came perilously close to low-quality kitsch consumables displayed in shop windows and destined for bourgeois interiors. Märten insisted that domestic settings were fundamentally unsuited to sculpture which was inherently monumental in character: ‘Sculptural form is never a form of intimate imagination: every attempt in this direction comes close to kitsch.’50 The large-scale invasion of storefront galleries by small-

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scale sculptures (Ladenbronzen or shopfront bronzes) was a relatively new phenomenon in Weimar Germany, and a whiff of ignobility perhaps adhered to this mode of dissemination as opposed to the more venerable public commissions of monuments and Bauplastik.51 Karl Scheffler, for example, aligned the decorative with consumer culture (and with women practitioners). However, in 1924, when praising Sintenis, Scheffler encountered a dilemma as here he was faced with work that was both Kleinplastik and made by a woman. Scheffler’s solution was to avow that Sintenis never ‘succumbed’ to the applied arts but was ‘primitive’ rather than ‘ornamental’.52 Scheffler did not seem to be gesturing towards the objects from Africa or Oceania that contemporaries associated with the ‘primitive’ but rather to the artist’s authentic ‘innocence’. According to Scheffler, the works are prevented from becoming applied art by virtue of their surface texture and their sense of materiality.53 This assessment aligns with Sintenis’s practice of making: the artist modelled her figurines out of wax on wire scaffolding before sending them to the Berlin bronze foundry Noack; she monitored the casting process closely and personally chiselled and finished each version so that no two bronzes are alike.54 Sintenis’s works were produced for commercial profit; Flechtheim offered each item in editions of twenty-five bronze casts as well as in silver.55 Notwithstanding this evident commercialization, Sintenis’s hands-on mode of making and the marks left on the final products, visible and touchable indentations of the maker’s fingers, were signifiers of ‘sculpture’ rather than of ‘kitsch commodity’. The statuettes teetered on a tightrope between the created and the commodified, between art and decoration. There is another sense in which Sintenis’s works were decorative: they decorated their owners’ homes. Scheffler noted that Sintenis’s sculpture was to be found among other art objects on the tops of tables and cupboards.56 A photo of Flechtheim’s apartment reveals at least five Sintenis figurines arranged on top of a dresser (Figure 8.5).57 Collector Edith Rosenheim owned around five animals by Sintenis, displayed on top of a chest of drawers.58 Moritz Heimann wrote, ‘On a low shelf in my study there have been standing, for about two years . . . between flowers, books and stones, three little figures [by Sintenis], two plaster and one bronze.’59 Book shelves, chests of drawers, side tables and other domestic pieces of furniture were the ultimate milieu for Sintenis’s figurines. This type of display was commensurate with the way other artists’ small-scale sculpture was placed; for example, one room of Dresden steam-mill owner and art patron Ida Bienert’s villa sported two works by Alexander Archipenko, husband of the brilliant sculptor Gela Forster and a sculptor in his own right, set on a table with some books.60 In

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Figure 8.5  Apartment of Berlin art dealer Alfred Flechteim, Bleibtreustrasse 15, BerlinCharlottenburg, 1929. Photograph: TopFoto / Ullstein Bild; photo: Zander & Labisch.

a Modernist home like the Villa Lange in Krefeld, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, boyfriend of designer Lilly Reich and father of dancer Georgia van der Rohe and of art historian and Art Institute of Chicago curator Waltraut Mies van der Rohe, Sintenis’s sculptures were kept in a specially made built-in glass case.61 In these domestic interiors, there is a tendency to display the figurines as ensembles. Collectors tended to buy several works, not just one.62 In 1917, poet

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Rainer Maria Rilke, author of a book on Auguste Rodin and himself married to a sculptor, Clara Westhoff, recommended Sintenis’s works to the banker Karl von der Heydt, husband of Elisabeth née Wülfing, who went on to purchase three figurines; according to Rilke, they included an ibex and ‘as a very fitting counterpart .  .  . a jolly little goat’.63 Rilke’s choice of the word counterpart (Gegenstück) is telling; it shows that Rilke, and probably von der Heydt, thought of these statuettes as part of an ensemble. Arranging Sintenis’s sculptures on furniture in domestic interiors was part of a well-established haut-bourgeois mode of engaging with art. Carol Duncan has argued that collectors of avant-garde art vicariously lived the bohemian lives that they imagined ‘their’ artists to be enjoying.64 Unlike the misogynist female nudes discussed by Duncan, Sintenis’s animals evoked a less strident, ‘cuddlier’ bohemianism. Avant-garde painter and collage maker Dorothea Hahn decried her boyfriend, the poet Gottfried Benn’s, philistine taste when she found that he had replaced George Grosz’s radically avant-garde engraving Night Café in his apartment with postcards of the ‘little horses’ of Sintenis: ‘I was gobsmacked!’65 Contemporaries called Sintenis’s works ‘charming’, ‘cute’, ‘pretty’ and ‘delightful’.66 ‘Charming’ and ‘cute’ things are unthreatening objects that one might well like to have in one’s home, objects that domesticate Modernism, objects that fit into an overall regime of interior decoration.

Conclusion Steger’s and Sintenis’s works afford us insights into the way that sculpture in the particular historical circumstances of Germany in the years just before and after the First World War functioned in new contexts of public and private life. Steger’s sculptures were produced at the tail end of the Wilhelmine Empire, a period enthusiastic about not only the commissioning of civic monuments but also the sculptural ornamentation of civic buildings. Sintenis’s works contended with the changed situation of sculpture in the social and political environment of the Weimar Republic, a context that rejected the pre-war cult of the monument and celebrated the new domestic contexts of small-scale, portable and touchable sculpture. Whether we believe that the divergent entanglements of Steger and Sintenis with notions of the decorative represent the ‘neural’ and ‘liberating vibrations’ of an unsentimental generation that dealt with the functionalism of modern life, as suggested by Robert Breuer, I leave for my readers to decide.

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Notes 1 Rob[ert] Breuer, ‘Dekorative Plastik’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 34 (1914): 38–40. 2 Ibid., 39. ‘Sie sind die Nervenstenogramme eines Geschlechtes, das ganz der Notwendigkeit verschrieben ist; sie sind die Befreiungsschwingungen von Menschen, die im übrigen an die Gradlinigkeit eines nüchternen Alltages sich selber banden.’ 3 Breuer, ‘Dekorative Plastik’, 38. 4 Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007), 106, 108. 5 Rosemary Betterton, ‘Women Artists, Modernity and Suffrage Cultures in Britain and Germany 1890–1920’, in Katy Deepwell, ed., Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 32. 6 Karl Scheffler, Die Frau und die Kunst (1908); Hans Hildebrandt, Die Frau als Künstlerin (1928). On these books, see Magdalena Bushart, ‘Der Formsinn des Weibes: Bildhauerinnen in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren’, in Profession ohne Tradition: 125 Jahre Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1992), 135–50, 135; Erich Ranfft, ‘German Women Sculptors 1918–1936: Gender Differences and Status’, in Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds, Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 42–61; Anja Cherdron, ‘Prometheus war nicht ihr Ahne’: Berliner Bildhauerinnen der Weimarer Republik (Marburg: Jonas, 2000), 60–5; Ute Seiderer, ‘Between Minor Sculpture and Promethean Creativity: Käthe Kollwitz and Berlin’s Women Sculptors in the Discourse on Intellectual Motherhood and the Myth of Masculinity’, in Christiane Schönfeld, ed., Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 89–119. 7 Carola Muysers, ed., Die bildende Künstlerin: Wertung und Wandel in deutschen Quellentexten (Amsterdam and Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1999). 8 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263–307, 275. On monuments, see Peter Bloch, ‘Denkmal und Denkmalkult’, in Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz and Jutta von Simson, eds, Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914 (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1990), 191–205; Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion, 1998), especially chapter 2, ‘Bismarck and the Lure of Teutonic Granite’, 56–76; Hans A. Pohlsander, National Monuments and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008).

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9 Birgit Schulte, ed. with Erich Ranfft, Die Grenzen des Frauseins aufheben: Die Bildhauerin Milly Steger (Hagen: Neuer Folkwang-Verlag im Karl-Ernst-OsthausMuseum, 1998); Birgit Schulte, ‘“Die Grenzen des Frauseins aufheben”: Die Bildhauerin Milly Steger 1881–1948’, Frauenvorträge an der FernUniversität, 29 (30 April 1998). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.fer​​nuni-​​hagen​​.de​/i​​mperi​​a​/md/​​conte​​nt​/ gl​​eichs​​tellu​​ng​/he​​​ft29s​​chult​​e​.pdf​ (with further literature). 10 Schulte, Die Grenzen; Michael Fehr, ‘Zur Geschichte der Kunst im Hagener Stadtraum’ (Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum 2001). Available online: http:​/​/www​​.keom​​ 02​.de​​/KEOM​​%2020​​01​/ra​​um​/ha​​gen​/g​​e​sch_​​ha​.ht​​ml. 11 The Hohenhof estate consisted of six houses along a street named Stirnband, all designed by Dutch architect Jan Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks and commissioned by Osthaus as a kind of artists’ collective. Steger lived in one house, Thorn Prikker in another. Carmen Stonge, ‘Women and the Folkwang: Ida Gerhardi, Milly Steger, and Maria Slavona’, Woman’s Art Journal 15, no. 1 (1994): 3–105, 101; Elisabeth May, ‘Hagen-Ernst: Keimzelle des architektonischen Wandels in Hagen’, in Tayfun Belgin, ed., Zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Jugendstil und mehr in Hagen (Hagen: Ardenkuverlag, 2011), 116–47. 12 A relief showing a mask flanked by cherubs was made by Franz Vlasdeck; Schulte, ‘Die Grenzen’, 8. 13 Letter, Osthaus 1911, quoted in Stonge, ‘Women’, 5; also quoted in German in Schulte, Die Grenzen, 5. 14 Karl Ernst Osthaus, ‘Die Figuren am Stadttheater (1911)’, Westfälisches Tageblatt 4, no. 254 (28 October 1911), reprinted in Karl Ernst Osthaus, Reden und Schriften: Folkwang, Werkbund, Arbeitsrat, ed. Rainer Stamm (Cologne: Walther König, 2002), 54–5, 54. 15 Otto Grautoff, ‘Milly Steger’, Die Kunst für Alle 41, no. 8 (July 1926): 321–8, 324. 16 Stonge, ‘Women’, 5. 17 Ernst Vetterlein, ‘Die Figuren am Stadttheater’, Hagener Zeitung (20 September 1911), quoted in Fehr, ‘Kunst’, n.p. ‘Reinhardt’ refers to the theater director Max Reinhardt. ‘Wenn sie nun diesen höheren künstlerischen Zweck erfüllen sollen, müssen sie allen naturalistischen Beiwerks entkleidet sein. Jede naturgetreue Begleit- und Bekleidform würde den Körper, der künstlerisch als Stein wirken soll, zum Fleisch machen. Das ist die größte künstlerische Leistung, die hier der Künstlerin gelungen ist, jeden Gedanken an Lüsternheit ferngehalten zu haben. . . . Und das hat die Künstlerin nur dadurch fertig gebracht, daß sie von allen individuellen Zügen Abstand genommen hat, daß die Gesichter merkwürdig fremdartig wirken, daß die Hände und der Schwung der Gewänder nicht dem lebenden Modell entnommen sind, sondern merkwürdig interessant erscheinen und den Blick des Betrachters nicht in die Erinnerung zurückleiten, wo die

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Boudoirerlebnisse aufbewahrt werden . . . Menschen, die ungescheut und ohne Koketterie, ohne Furcht ihren Leib zeigen dürfen, der edel und rein wie ihre Seele ist.’ 18 Birgit Schulte, ‘Den Wandel gestalten: Karl Ernst Osthaus und der Hagener Impuls’, in Belgin, Zwischen Tradition, 10–21, 14. 19 Karl Ernst Osthaus, ‘Gründung eines deutschen Museums für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe in Hagen’, Hagener Zeitung 184, no. 3 (9 August 1909), reprinted in Osthaus, Reden, 68–9. 20 M., ‘Die “Höhere weibliche Bildungsanstalt” in Aschaffenburg’, Deutsche Bauzeitung 41, no. 24 (1907): 165–7. 21 Carl Cremer, Carl Hartenfels and Ernst Vetterlein, eds, Festschrift zur Einweihung des Hagener Stadttheaters am 5./6. Oktober 1911 (Hagen: Verlag der Hagener Theater-A.G., 1911), 54–5. ‘Mit bewußter Absicht wurde dabei alles realistisch Banale vermieden, damit die Figuren nicht vor die Front hingestellt und einsam verlassen erscheinen, sondern wie aus dem Stoff, aus der Baukunst herausgewachsen und sich mit dieser harmonisch verbindend. Dadurch wollen diese Idealgestalten nicht verklärt, sondern mit dem Ganzen als Ornament empfunden worden! In ihrer Haltung folgen sie den dahinter aufstrebenden straffen Säulen, aber in feinen, wohlabgewogenen Bewegungen verraten sie ein inneres Leben . . . .’ 22 Grautoff, ‘Milly Steger’, 324. 23 Nina Lübbren, ‘Gela Forster’s Radical New Sculpture: Feminism, War and Revolution’, Art History 42, no. 4 (September 2019): 702–23. 24 Paul Westheim, Architektonik des Plastischen (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1923). 25 Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1893), excerpted as The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts in Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, eds, Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 1–12. 26 Westheim, Architektonik, 7. 27 Ibid., 9. 28 Ibid., 10. 29 On Steger after 1933, see Nina Lübbren, ‘Authority and Ambiguity: Three Sculptors in National Socialist Germany’, in Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto, eds, Art and Resistance in Germany (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2018), 55–74. 30 Steger, Koralle 4, no. 5 (1936), quoted in Bushart, ‘Der Formsinn’, 135. In the interview, Steger averred that she welcomed the return of large-scale architectural commissions promised by the new regime in Germany. On Steger’s position under fascism, see Lübbren, ‘Authority and Ambiguity’.

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31 Ursel Berger, ‘Renée Sintenis in der Kunst ihrer Zeit’, in Britta Buhlmann, Renée Sintenis: Plastiken – Zeichnungen – Druckgraphik (Berlin: Georg Kolbe Museum and Frölich und Kaufmann, 1983), 9–32; Anja Cherdron, ‘“Ein Vorzug ist, daß die Künstlerin nie ins Kunstgewerbliche gerät”: Renée Sintenis in der Kunstkritik’, in Cordula Bischoff and Christina Threuter, eds, Um-Ordnung: Angewandte Künste und Geschlecht in der Moderne (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1999), 44–55; Ursel Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler: Die Plastiken von Renée Sintenis’, in Ursel Berger and Günter Ladwig, eds, Renée Sintenis: Das plastische Werk (Berlin: Georg Kolbe Museum and Sammlung Karl H. Knauf, 2013), 13–20; Julia Wallner, ‘“Man kann seinen Kram nicht vertreten.” Alfred Flechtheim und Renée Sintenis: Eine moderne Handelsbeziehung’, in Sprung in den Raum: Skulpturen bei Alfred Flechtheim (Berlin: Georg Kolbe Museum, and Wädenswil: Nimbus, 2017), 247–70. 32 Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis. 33 Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler’, 15–16. 34 On Sintenis’s boxers, see Nina Lübbren, ‘Women, War and Naked Men: German Women Sculptors and the Male Nude, 1915–1925’, in Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Barbara McCloskey, eds, The Art of War (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 73–102. 35 Moritz Heimann, ‘Renée Sintenis’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 38 (1916): 191–4, photo: 196. 36 Ignaz Beth, ‘Renée Sintenis’, Kunst für Alle (1918): 288–91, photo: 289. 37 Kniendes Reh, 1915, bronze, collection Knauf, Berlin; Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis, cat. 016. 38 Heimann, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 193. ‘Man kann diese Figuren vor sich auf den Tisch stellen, man kann sie in die Hand nehmen, man kann sich daran freuen, sie haben einen Zweck.’ 39 Heimann, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 193. 40 Beth, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 289. 41 Ursel Berger suggests that the ability to be handled was the reason behind the modelling and chiselling of the sculptures’ undersides; Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler’, 16. 42 Doug Bailey, ‘Touch and the Cheirotic Apprehension of Prehistoric Figurines’, in Peter Dent, ed., Sculpture and Touch (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 27–44. 43 Milette Gaifman, ‘The Greek Libation Bowl as Embodied Object’, Art History 41, no. 3 (2018): 444–65. 44 Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence, ‘The Neglected Power of Touch: What the Cognitive Neurosciences Can Tell Us About the Importance of Touch in Artistic Communication’, in Dent, Sculpture and Touch, 107–24. 45 Hans Siemsen, ‘Renée Sintenis’, Veröffentlichungen des Kunstarchivs nr.27/28: Renée Sintenis (Berlin: Kunstarchiv, n.d. (1926/7)), 10–14, quoted in Buhlmann,

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Renée Sintenis, 121–2. ‘In meiner Hand liegt das kleine Bronze-Fohlen von Renée Sintenis, das seinen Vorderfuß so kokett und unschuldig von sich streckt. . . . Dumm und edel ist es wie ein junger Griechengott. Scheu und zärtlich. Es ist (aus Bronze) so gemacht, daß man, wenn man es in die Hand genommen hat, sich nicht entschließen kann, es wieder herzugeben. Es macht zärtlich. Man muß es anfassen! Und kein Mensch denkt daran, daß das, was er da in der Hand hält, nur ein Stück Metall, nur ein Stück Bronze ist.’ 46 I was not able to locate the bronze with one ‘coquettish’ front foot but Rearing Foal (Fohlen, sich bäumend, 1917, bronze, 10 cm, colln Knauf, Berlin, formerly colln Fritz Hess) in Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis, cat. 032, comes close. See also Paul Cassirer and Théodore Fischer, Die Sammlung Hess/Berlin: Gemälde alter und moderner Meister. Moderne Plastik (auction catalogue, Luzern 1931), partially reproduced in Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis. 47 Karl Scheffler, ‘Renée Sintenis’, Kunst und Künstler 22 (1924): 260–2, 261–2. 48 Alfred Flechtheim, letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, quoted in Bushart, ‘Der Formsinn’, 144. ‘Die Dinger sind ganz entzückend . . .’. 49 Sintenis 1936, quoted in Bushart, ‘Der Formsinn’, 144. 50 Lu Märten, Wesen und Veränderung der Formen und Künste: Resultate historischmaterialistischer Untersuchungen (Weimar: Verlag Werden und Wirken, 1949 (1st ed. 1924)), 216. 51 Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler’, 13. Also: Gerhard Rupp, ‘Gips, Zink und Bronze: Berliner Vervielfältigungsfirmen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Bloch, Einholz and von Simson, Ethos und Pathos, 337–51. 52 Scheffler, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 262. ‘Ein Vorzug, daß die Künstlerin nie ins Kunstgewerbliche gerät.’ 53 Scheffler, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 262. 54 Sandra Brutscher, ‘“Es macht zärtlich. Man muss es anfassen!” Die Arbeitsweise der Bildhauerin Renée Sintenis’, in Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis, 21–3. 55 Berger, ‘Renée Sintenis in der Kunst’, 14; Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler’, 15. 56 Scheffler, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 260. 57 Reproduced in Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis, 16. 58 Ibid. 59 Heimann, ‘Renée Sintenis’, 192. ‘Auf einem niedrigen Bord in meinem Arbeitszimmer stehen seit etwa zwei Jahren . . . zwischen Blumen, Büchern und Steinen drei Figürchen, zwei aus Gips und eine aus Bronze.’ More on domestic display in Nina Lübbren, ‘Renée Sintenis, Lotte Pritzel, Wendt & Kühn: Material Interventions in Sculptural Practice, Germany 1910–1933’, in Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Thomas Haakenson, eds, New Challenges to Conventions: Innovation in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2021).

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60 Heike Biedermann, ‘Jüdische Sammler und Mäzene zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in Dresden’, in Andrea Baresel-Brand and Peter Müller, eds, Sammeln, Stiften, Fördern: Jüdische Mäzene in der deutschen Gesellschaft (Magdeburg: Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste, 2008), 101–25, summary in English 126–8; Heike Biedermann, ‘Dresdener Privatsammlungen zwischen 1933 und 1945’, Dresdener Kunstblätter 59, no. 3 (2015): 44–55. 61 Berger and Ladwig, Renée Sintenis. 62 Ibid. 63 Rainer Marie Rilke, quoted in Berger, ‘Kunst für Sammler’, 14. ‘. . . als sehr passendes Gegenstück . . . eine lustige kleine Ziege.’ 64 Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’ (1973), in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81–109. 65 Dorothea Hahn, quoted in Joachim Dyck, Benn in Berlin (Berlin: Transit Verlag, 2010), 65. ‘Ich war platt!’ 66 ‘Liebenswürdig’, ‘reizend’ and full of ‘Reiz’ (charming, charm): W. Kurth, ‘Kleinplastik von Renée Sintenis’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (1922); Scheffler, ‘Renée Sintenis’; Hans Siemsen, ‘Neue Tier-Plastiken von Renée Sintenis’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (1925), 60–4, 57; Georg Biermann, ‘Renée Sintenis’, Cicerone (1930), reprinted in René Crevel and Georg Biermann, Renée Sintenis (Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930), 10–12. ‘Niedlich’ and ‘drollig’ (cute): Siemsen, ‘Neue Tier-Plastiken’; Hanna Kiel, ed., Renée Sintenis (Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1935), 45. ‘Hübsch’ (pretty): Siemsen, ‘Neue Tier-Plastiken’. ‘Entzückend’ (delightful): Kurth, ‘Kleinplastik’; Biermann, ‘Renée Sintenis’.

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Modernist sculpture and the decorative Henri Laurens with Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier Anna Ferrari

Modernism and the decorative The ‘decorative’ was a contested idea among modern artists and critics in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1908, in an article polemically entitled ‘Ornament and Crime’, Adolf Loos provocatively argued that ‘as culture develops, ornament disappears from objects of everyday use’.1 His essay, which associated ornament with disease, degeneracy and crime, was intended less as an indictment of non-Western societies than as an attack against fellow Viennese designers working in the fashionable decorative style of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. Loos claimed that, following his logic of progress, ornament no longer reflected the contemporary epoch and that modern architecture should be pared down.2 In 1925, Le Corbusier launched an attack against the decorative arts in a book entitled L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, which was intentionally published to coincide with the Paris Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. He took issue with the terminology itself, arguing that the expression ‘decorative arts’ was ‘not concise’, was ‘inexact’ and devoid of meaning, while the German Kunstgewerb (industrial art) was even more misleading, and arts appliqués (applied arts) was pejorative.3 Le Corbusier specifically objected to the conjunction of the words ‘art’ and ‘decorative’ and, in doing so, he identified the ambiguity of the expression. He criticized the superficial ornamentation of objects, as had Loos, and argued that the expression ‘decorative arts’, encompassing objects such as chairs and storage, should be replaced by the word outillage (tools), which implied a rational approach and

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underlined their functional purpose.4 Both architects’ writings demonstrate the range of meanings of the decorative: whereas Loos was concerned with ornament (decoration which was often two-dimensional, such as tattoos), Le Corbusier was concerned not only with surface ornament but also with the design of functional furniture which could be standardized into ‘types’ and produced industrially. Crucially, their criticisms highlight the hostility towards the ‘decorative’ in Modernist circles in the early twentieth century. The reframing of the decorative in this period challenged sculpture’s place in modern architecture. During the nineteenth century, many sculptors worked on decorative schemes, including Auguste Rodin, whose Gates of Hell were originally commissioned in 1880 for a new museum of decorative arts, while the fashionable turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau style promoted decorative sculpture as part of total environments.5 The French sculptor Henri Laurens is best known for his Cubist constructions and papiers collés (pasted papers) of the mid- to late 1910s, but he initially trained in an industrial arts school in the 1890s before sculpting decorations for Parisian buildings.6 Focusing on Laurens’s architectural sculpture, this chapter explores ideas about the decorative, sculpture and architecture in Paris between the 1890s and the 1930s. By tracing Laurens’s early training and his later collaborations with Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier, it contextualizes Modernists’ turn from the decorative and their embrace of the unity of architecture and sculpture. During Laurens’s formative years and while he was becoming a Cubist sculptor, the perception of the decorative shifted and the term acquired pejorative connotations for modern artists and critics who condemned superficial, additional decoration. In relation to painting, the term ‘decorative’ acquired conflicting and shifting meanings between the 1890s and the 1920s. In the early 1890s, when the Symbolist critic G. Albert Aurier praised Paul Gauguin as a great ‘decorator’, the ‘decorative’ was a positive quality he associated with the ‘primitive’ art of the Egyptians and Greeks.7 According to Aurier, decorative painting was not superficially appealing but expressed an idea. During the 1890s, the paintings of Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes were praised as decorative works.8 However, the term became ambivalent when the critic Louis Vauxcelles used it to describe Henri Matisse’s painting Bonheur de Vivre in 1906. As Gill Perry remarks, the term ‘was used both as a marker of the work’s modernity, and in a more pejorative sense to signify the ornamentation of the applied arts’.9 For Matisse himself, though, the decorative was essential. Speaking to the American painter and writer Clara T. MacChesney in 1912, he

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explained that his painting was not concerned with imitating nature but instead sought to express his emotion which resulted in the decorative quality of his work, thereby linking the decorative with a Modernist rejection of naturalistic imitation. He unequivocally affirmed his commitment to the decorative and stated: ‘A picture should, for me, always be decorative.’10 Although for Aurier and Matisse the decorative was a positive quality which expressed an idea or an emotion, making visible something that was internal, in the writings of Cubist painters and critics it became negatively loaded, signifying dependence and superficiality. In their influential book published in 1912, Du Cubisme, the French Cubists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger declared ‘decorative work the antithesis of the picture’ because it depended on its destination. Decorative work, they continued, ‘exist[ed] only by virtue of its destination’ and was ‘essentially dependent, necessarily incomplete’, while a painting was its own end, ‘essentially independent, necessarily complete’, suggesting a hierarchy which placed the decorative below the autonomous work of art.11 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the pre-eminent dealer of cubism in Paris and Laurens’s dealer from 1920, also despised the ‘decorative’ in painting as something superficial, added to the surface for the pleasure of the senses.12 In 1914, reflecting on the origins of cubism, he contrasted Cubist painting to earlier Fauve painting, stating that the latter ‘threatened to debase itself to the level of ornamentation; it sought to be “decorative”, to “adorn” the wall’.13 Cubist painting was not concerned with ornamenting a wall but with representing form and was both ‘descriptive’ and ‘structural’. When Kahnweiler wrote about sculpture a few years later in 1919, he argued that the very ‘essence’ of sculpture was the third dimension, by which he meant sculpture which engaged with real space and that was intended to be seen in the round unlike relief.14 Such free-standing sculpture was, by definition, autonomous. Kahnweiler distinguished sculpture and painting, autonomous works whose end was ‘representational’, from architecture and the decorative or ‘applied visual arts’, whose end was ‘utilization’.15 Kahnweiler’s definition of sculpture seemed to create an unbridgeable gap between, on the one hand, avant-garde sculpture and, on the other hand, architectural sculpture and the decorative arts. The opposition between autonomous works of art and dependent architectural or decorative works was perpetuated by Modernist artists and their critics. Histories of modern art and cubism have excluded the decorative arts, privileging instead autonomous painting and sculpture. Formalist interpretations, such as

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Alfred Barr’s seminal Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), focused exclusively on pictorial qualities of easel painting or free-standing sculpture.16 This selective interpretation of Modernism dismissed collaborations with architects or the decorative arts. For cubism, such a view was exacerbated by historians’ claims that the Cubist movement ended shortly after the First World War, before many artists’ architectural work and involvement with the decorative arts in the postwar years, when, for example Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Laurens created set and costume designs for the fashionable Ballets Russes.17 The bias against the decorative persisted until the late twentieth century, when scholars redirected attention to overlooked decorative arts. Peter Wollen highlights the way in which Modernism is constructed as a series of opposites – ‘functional/decorative, useful/wasteful, natural/artificial, machine/body, masculine/feminine, West/East’ – and calls for them to be deconstructed.18 In Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, Nancy Troy argues that ‘the decorative arts are vitally important to an understanding of the development of modernism in the early twentieth century’ and reveal important issues of nationalism, authorship and commodification.19 David Cottington addresses decoration and cubism before the outbreak of war in Paris and the gendered discourse of the decorative, examining the 1912 Maison Cubiste and the Ballets Russes to present a more complex history of Modernism, characterizing ‘cubism as a contradictory and unstable constellation of interests and practices’ and thus breaking down the opposition between Modernism and the decorative.20 Laurens too has benefited from the reassessment of the decorative in modern art. The 1992 retrospective catalogue evokes the sculptor’s incursions into the decorative – his stage set for the Ballets Russes in 1924, his carpet designs for Marie Cuttoli who sold the finished carpets in her shop Myrbor and his few reliefs for the fashionable decorator Jean-Michel Frank in the late 1920s. In that catalogue Gladys Fabre also contextualizes the debates about cubism and the decorative in Paris, and documents Laurens’s architectural sculptures with a focus on his patrons.21 This chapter further explores the debate, focusing on Laurens’s architectural collaborations with Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier to show how he negotiated many Modernists’ stated aversion to the decorative and participated in redefining sculpture’s different roles within Modernist architecture. It examines Laurens’s architectural sculpture, which I distinguish from autonomous, free-standing sculptures, and understand as site-specific sculptures created in collaboration with architects.

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The chapter will consider Laurens’s education and early training in an industrial arts school to suggest how his background influenced his later engagement with architects, and to situate him in the context of the perceived crisis in the French decorative arts industries. As shown above, the meaning of ‘decorative’ fluctuated between the 1890s and the 1920s and acquired pejorative connotations for Modernists, problematizing the place of decorative painting and architectural sculpture at a time when Laurens was shifting away from his training to become a Cubist sculptor. The chapter will then show how DuchampVillon’s Maison Cubiste and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon offered Laurens a way to rethink the association between sculpture and architecture as modern rather than decorative. Finally, it will discuss Laurens’s architectural collaborations, first with Mallet-Stevens in the early 1920s, when both architect and sculptor worked together to fuse sculpture and architecture, and then with Le Corbusier at the Paris Exposition in 1937, where sculpture remained independent from architecture but intervened in space.

Laurens’s early education and training When Laurens was born in 1885, the state of the decorative, arts in France was already a cause for concern. French critics, government officials and representatives witnessed the growing competition from Britain, Belgium and Germany at successive world fairs.22 With the decline in exports and a rise in imports in the 1860s and 1870s, improving the state of the decorative arts in France, a country which had long been associated with high-quality and especially luxury products, became not only a question of national pride and prestige but also an economic imperative.23 Many agreed that the transformation of the production processes and the disappearance of the Ancien Régime apprenticeship system were partly responsible for the decline in French decorative arts. While the Third Republic encouraged national design and educational reform, the City of Paris sought to address this problem. From the 1870s onwards, the city founded thirteen specialized professional schools, each intended to prepare girls or boys to work in specific industries. Their primary purpose was to provide a skilled workforce who could contribute to key French industries, rather than train artists who would exhibit at the official Salon – this was the role of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts.24 Following the success of the École Diderot, inaugurated in 1873, the City of Paris opened the drawing schools Germain Pilon and Bernard Palissy

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in 1882, the École Boulle for furniture design in 1886, and the École Estienne for bookmaking in 1889.25 As a teenager in the late 1890s, Laurens attended the Bernard Palissy school.26 Named after the famous sixteenth-century ceramicist, the boys’ school taught ceramics, sculpture, textile design and decorative painting. It was described as an école de dessin, with dessin signifying both drawing and design as it is understood today. Teaching focused on practical skills, including modelling and drawing from plaster casts and plants, and drawing ornaments, before students specialized in either decorative painting, textile design, ceramics or sculpture and learnt about perspective, art history, composition, drawing, anatomy and modelling.27 Laurens may not have remained for the full four years of training but he seems to have intended to earn a living from his skills, as his wife, Marthe Laurens, recorded that he then worked at a local decorator’s atelier where ‘he modelled ornaments and made architectural drawings’.28 A photograph from this period shows Laurens seated in an atelier where plaster moulds of architectural decorations hang on the wall (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Henri Laurens, photograph, c. 1903. Photo and copyright: Archives Laurens.

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Cubism, sculpture and architecture The early 1910s were pivotal years for Henri Laurens. Two events occurred which altered the course of his career: he lost a leg to tuberculosis, making it difficult to work on building sites, and he met Georges Braque who was then working in close partnership with Picasso developing cubism; Braque became one of Laurens’s closest friends. Between 1911 and 1914, when Laurens shifted to cubism and became acquainted with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, the decorative came under attack in Paris with the publication of Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme in 1912 and the translation and publication of Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime’ in 1913. With German-born Kahnweiler in exile in Switzerland during the war, Rosenberg seized the opportunity and offered contracts to artists associated with cubism, including to Laurens in 1916.29 This contract provided Laurens with a regular income, allowing him to produce most of his Cubist constructions and papiers collés, and situating him among a circle of Cubist artists. Prior to the outbreak of war, architecture and sculpture came to the fore in two prominent projects. In 1912, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon exhibited the façade for the Maison Cubiste and, in 1913, Antoine Bourdelle’s reliefs for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées were hailed by some as an example of a successful collaboration between the sculptor and the architects Henry van de Velde and Auguste Perret.30 At the time, the critics Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon articulated the relationship between avant-garde sculpture and architecture. As this section demonstrates, both critics distinguished sculpture from the decorative and framed sculpture as an art intrinsically linked to architecture rather than to the decorative. Their ideas suggest how it was possible for Laurens to reconsider the association between sculpture and architecture at a crucial moment in his career when he was shifting away from his early training. Even though he was by then no longer decorating buildings, I argue that his training and early career made him receptive to contemporary ideas about sculpture and architecture. At the Paris Salon d’automne of 1912, the Maison Cubiste, a group ensemble led by the designer and decorator André Mare, stimulated discussions about the relationship between sculpture and architecture (Figure 9.2). The ensemble, presented in the decorative arts section of the salon, included a partial plaster façade of a house by Duchamp-Villon and three rooms which showcased everything from furniture to wallpaper, as well as easel paintings by

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Figure 9.2 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Maquette for the Maison Cubiste’s façade exhibited at the Salon d’automne, photograph, 1912. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Fonds Famille Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, among others, and sculpture by Duchamp-Villon.31 Although Gleizes and Metzinger’s participation may seem paradoxical given their dismissal of decorative works in Du Cubisme, their attack was aimed at ‘the decorative work of art [which] exists only by virtue of its destination’, when in fact their works in the Maison Cubiste existed independently from the salon display.32 Mare shared their distaste for unified ensembles and his stated aim was to present a specifically French alternative to the unified Art Nouveau ensembles of the 1900 Paris International Exhibition.33 The Maison Cubiste was also a French riposte to such successful displays of interiors as those presented by the Munich decorators (the Münchner Vereinigung für angewandte Kunst), who exhibited at the Salon d’automne of 1910. At the time of the Maison Cubiste, Duchamp-Villon articulated a close relationship between sculpture and architecture in which sculpture was not merely a superficial addition to architecture but understood to be intrinsically architectural. For example, in September 1912, he responded to an enquiry in

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the daily literary newspaper Gil Blas about the proposed removal of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s weather-damaged Danse relief from the façade of the Paris Opera. Duchamp-Villon claimed that ‘the real goal of statuary, [was] first and foremost, architectural’.34 By ‘architectural’ he meant that a work ‘had to live at a distance . . . by the harmony of volumes, planes and lines, the subject being of little or no importance’.35 His response suggests that he was drawn to the architectural because it offered an opportunity to focus on the formal qualities of sculpture rather than on representation. Yet the relationship between the arts went even further for the sculptor, who set apart both sculpture and architecture as ‘arts of construction’, implying that they shared a common principle.36 Spurred on by Duchamp-Villon’s façade for the Maison Cubiste, Apollinaire and Salmon wrote about sculpture in relation to architecture and abstraction, shedding light on the rapidly changing ideas about modern sculpture. In 1913, Apollinaire published an anthology of essays, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques, which included an essay about Duchamp-Villon. Apollinaire declared that ‘as soon as sculpture departs from nature, it becomes architecture’, suggesting a progression towards abstraction from sculpture to architecture.37 Both architecture and sculpture remained distinct: architecture was abstract like monumental Pyramids, triumphal arches or the Eiffel Tower, while sculpture represented nature without necessarily being naturalistic. Sculpture also differed from ‘the merely decorative technique intended to give greater intensity to architecture (lamp posts, allegorical statues in gardens, balustrades)’.38 Apollinaire echoed other Modernists’ disparaging views of the decorative (which played no part in his theory), and sought to establish a hierarchy among the fine arts which progressed from representation to abstraction. Whereas Apollinaire saw architecture as a step towards a wholly new abstract art which was neither sculpture nor architecture, for the critic and eyewitness of cubism André Salmon, architecture was a model to follow in order to abandon the imitation of nature in sculpture. For Salmon, the architectural thus became an essential characteristic of sculpture. In La Jeune sculpture française, published in 1919 but written before the war, Salmon attributed sculpture’s perceived problems to a rift between sculpture and architecture, which he blamed for the profusion of superfluous ornament, objets d’art and works placed on mantelpieces or in public squares.39 He suggested that to avoid such pitfalls, sculpture needed to possess an architectural quality, and praised Duchamp-Villon, recognizing that even in his sculpture he displayed a ‘constant concern about being an architect’.40 Even though Salmon mentions no specific sculptor, he recounts that in around

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1911, young artists in Paris were impressed by the exposed iron frameworks of new buildings under construction which compelled them to create new works of art ‘that were no longer sculpted objects . . . no longer simulations . . . but authentically new objects’.41 Architecture and construction were thus seen to have inspired sculptors and artists to depart from the imitation of nature and to conceive objects which were not sculpted and whose purpose remained to be determined. Foreshadowing collaborations between Modernist architects and sculptors, Salmon hinted that these young sculptors could teach architects and decorators who were too concerned with ‘the picturesque and the camouflage of broad surfaces’ to renew tradition.42 Salmon could not discuss Laurens in his book because when he wrote it before the First World War Laurens had yet to become known as a Cubist sculptor. Only after the war was Salmon able to add a note acknowledging Laurens’s and Jacques Lipchitz’s recent contributions to sculpture. However, the Maison Cubiste, and the responses it prompted before the war, provide the background to Laurens’s collaborations with architects and reveal how sculpture’s connection with architecture was reasserted, separating it from the decorative.

Laurens and Mallet-Stevens: ‘Composing as architects’ If Laurens no longer decorated new buildings, architecture remained central to his practice. When writing about his mixed-media three-dimensional works, Laurens always referred to them as ‘constructions’, a term which evokes building and implies a concern for structure and space, unlike the compound word ‘sculpto-painting’ invented by Alexander Archipenko to describe his painted mixed-media sculptures of the early 1910s.43 Medieval architecture and sculpture also became a lifelong passion for Laurens. On visiting Chartres Cathedral for the first time in 1918, Laurens, who was usually restrained, gushed to his thendealer, Léonce Rosenberg, that ‘it was a pure joy and reality surpassed what [he] had imagined. Especially in its Romanesque parts.’44 Laurens certainly knew medieval sculpture and architecture before 1918, at least from photographs and from the Musée de la Sculpture Comparée in Paris which held plaster casts of parts of important medieval churches. Laurens collected photographs and pinned some to the walls of his atelier, many of which represented medieval architecture. He was also likely aware of Les Cathédrales de France, a book published in 1914 by Rodin, in which the sculptor admires

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Chartres Cathedral’s sculpted figures and their ‘lines of architecture’, by which he seemed to suggest their vertical lines and formal restraint.45 The architect Robert Mallet-Stevens shared Rodin’s and Laurens’s reverence for Chartres Cathedral and the belief that sculpture was related to construction. In an article written in 1911 for the Belgian review Tekhné, he suggested that the sculpture of Chartres Cathedral and figures by the French Renaissance sculptor Jean Goujon became part of the architecture: The saints, who form the portals of Chartres’ transepts for example, draped in robes with long vertical pleats and their elongated bodies, seem to be part of the rib vault, they are more pieces of architecture than statues. Jean Goujon’s Nymphs, low-reliefs and caryatids, with their synthetic lines . . . are established as elements of construction.46

Mallet-Stevens’s choice of canonical examples of French art implied that such a relation between the arts was grounded in the French artistic tradition. Both Chartres and Goujon became particularly relevant to Laurens, especially during the years when he worked with Mallet-Stevens. Laurens’s and MalletStevens’s references to French medieval and Renaissance sources in the 1920s reflected a long-standing fascination with the relationship between sculpture and architecture, but also participated in a nationalist rhetoric. France was shocked by the German bombing of Reims Cathedral, the coronation site of French kings, and in 1917 the medievalist Emile Mâle published L’Art allemand et l’art français au moyen-âge in which he argued that medieval art was a French creation, denying the contribution of German-speaking artists and craftsmen. The war thus intensified medieval art and architecture’s nationalist symbolism.47 Laurens’s and Mallet-Stevens’s interest in medieval sculpture laid the foundation for their four collaborations between 1921 and 1925, when they sought an alternative to what Mallet-Stevens evocatively called the ‘debauch of ornament’.48 Writing in the review Gazette des sept arts in 1922, Mallet-Stevens argued that architects should call upon sculptors and painters ‘to establish a close and intimate collaboration’ so that these arts worked together organically.49 He claimed the novelty of this approach when he described how architect and sculptor worked separately before the war, with the sculptor intervening after a building’s completion to ‘clad’ (plaquer) a façade with motifs chosen from a repertoire of existing forms, with no other consideration than the available budget. Mallet-Stevens deplored the ‘debauch of ornament’ in apartment blocks where ‘sculpture swarmed from top to bottom, disordered, tormented, over

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abundant, ridiculous’.50 In contrast, in 1923 he praised Laurens and sculptors who ‘composed as architects’, whose ‘art is architecture’ and is ‘closely linked to “construction”’. He distinguished their art from ornament, understood as an unconsidered, superficial and later addition, and suggested that architects and sculptors were near equal collaborators who mutually influenced each other.51 For Mallet-Stevens, Laurens counted among the New Sculptors who worked with – rather than for – the architect. Over several years, they conceived sculpture which was carefully planned as part of the structure of the architecture, rather than what Mallet-Stevens saw as haphazard, later additions, and, I will suggest, they looked to medieval architectural sculpture as a source to emulate. Laurens and Mallet-Stevens first worked together in 1921 on a villa outside Paris for the successful couturier Jacques Doucet. At the time, Mallet-Stevens, who had trained as an architect, was better known as an architecte-décorateur, responsible for interior design and for creating the film set of Raymond Bernard’s Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920). Doucet was an avid collector who had amassed an extraordinary collection of eighteenth-century art and furniture before auctioning it off in 1912 and re-fashioning himself as a patron of the avant-garde. From the mid-1910s, Laurens was among the artists whose work he collected.52 Doucet was sensitive to the perceived disjunction between modern life and architecture, and so commissioned Mallet-Stevens and Paul Ruaud to design a modern villa that would be an appropriate setting for his growing collection of modern art. When he commissioned his villa, Doucet named Laurens among the artists he admired most, together with the bookbinder Paul Legrain and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and added that Laurens was ‘a sculptor full of invention’.53 Laurens was therefore central to Doucet’s vision of a radically modern environment where contemporary art and architecture came together coherently in a manner suitable to his perception of a modern lifestyle. Doucet’s villa was never built but Mallet-Stevens created a model of the façade (Figure 9.3) and part of Laurens’s designs were completed, revealing their approach to modern architectural sculpture.54 The architect conceived a threewinged villa whose pared-down walls were strikingly blank and smooth save for abstract patterns. Laurens created a columned portico (Figure 9.4) intended to frame the villa’s entrance as well as the sculpture of a bird jutting out from the steps leading to the entrance (Figure 9.5).55 The portico’s historiated capitals feature Cubist musicians and still lifes but, in form and proportion, evoke medieval examples such as those from the nave at Notre-Dame-du-Port – an eleventh-century basilica in Clermont-Ferrand. Laurens knew this building

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Figure 9.3  Robert Mallet-Stevens, Maquette for Jacques Doucet’s villa showing the entrance by Henri Laurens, photograph, 1921. © Musées de la Ville de BoulogneBillancourt.

from the Musée de la Sculpture Comparée in Paris, which held several casts of its capitals, and the sculptor also owned a photograph of one of these in his image collection.56 In referencing a medieval basilica he was likely paying homage to the French tradition. Laurens’s other sculpture for Doucet’s villa was also part of the architecture and represented a gliding bird projecting from a flight of steps. In form, the sculpture echoed an aviator’s tomb, which Laurens had recently completed, and could suggest the modernity of an aeroplane in flight, somewhat jarring with the neo-medieval portico.57 Despite remaining unrealized, Doucet’s villa provided an opportunity for Laurens and Mallet-Stevens to explore a new ‘sculpture as architecture’, drawing on the French medieval tradition. With their next collaboration, at the Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club at the 1922 Salon d’automne, they further developed the idea of a sculpture embedded in architecture. The salon featured a new section devoted to ‘urban art’ (art urbain) which was intended to promote urban renewal after the ravages of the First World War and was organized by the architect Marcel Temporal with MalletStevens and Le Corbusier.58 Mallet-Stevens and Paul Ruaud exhibited an aviation pavilion with stained glass windows by Louis Barillet and a sculpture by Laurens which consisted of a bird-like form seamlessly fused with the Aéro-Club’s watchtower, as if soaring into the sky (Figure 9.6). It was deemed particularly

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Figure 9.4  Henri Laurens, Portico for Jacques Doucet’s villa, 1921–4. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

successful by the critic Waldemar George who reported in L’Amour de l’art that Mallet-Stevens had sought an ‘architectural equivalent to the idea embodied in and personified by his building’.59 In fact, because Laurens’s sculpture was fused ‘organically’ with the architecture, George did not initially realize it was by Laurens and the result of a collaboration between architect and sculptor.60 Tellingly, he wrote that Loos would approve, claiming that such sculpture was

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Figure 9.5 Maquette for the entrance of Jacques Doucet’s villa, showing Henri Laurens’s portico and sculpture, 1921–4. Photo Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, collections Jacques Doucet, 268 U 1. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

not superfluous decoration that was inappropriate for the modern age. He advocated decoration that was integral and organically part of architecture, rather than an addition, and praised the absence of mouldings and ‘unnecessary ornaments’ in Mallet-Stevens’s pavilion, noting the stained glass and Laurens’s sculpture.61 By invoking Loos, George suggests that Laurens’s sculpture was perceived as intrinsic to the architecture, highlighting the new direction taken by Laurens and Mallet-Stevens’s collaboration. The Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club was so admired by Louis Metman, the director of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, that he recommended the architect to the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles in 1923.62 The aristocratic and extremely wealthy couple lived in a grand eighteenth-century hôtel particulier in Paris but longed for a smaller and simpler house in which they might lead a modern life.63 They instructed Mallet-Stevens to build a house perched on a rocky hill near Hyères, overlooking the Côte d’Azur.64 Artists and designers were employed, including

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Figure 9.6 Robert Mallet-Stevens and Paul Ruaud, Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club at the Salon d’automne, 1922, showing Henri Laurens’s sculpture fused with the watchtower. Photo Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, collections Jacques Doucet, 4 Per Res 47. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

Louis Barillet for the stained glass windows, Djo-Bourgeois for the furniture and Laurens who sculpted three site-specific sculptures. The first, which is most likely to have reflected Mallet-Stevens and Laurens’s vision of architectural sculpture, was a shallow Cubist relief built into a pillar in the villa’s entrance. It represents a Venus-like nude standing amid lapping waves (Figure 9.7).65 This sculpture was a further essay in uniting sculpture and architecture and evoked examples of French architectural sculpture: the medieval trumeau and Goujon’s shallow reliefs depicting classical nymphs. At the Villa Noailles, Laurens’s relief was placed in the hall on a pillar that separated two corridors, thus behaving like a medieval trumeau, a frequently sculpted pillar that supports the tympanum of a church’s entrance and which creates a double doorway. Since Laurens and Mallet-Stevens were both fervent admirers of medieval architecture, it is likely that such a reference to a traditional form of sculpture which is inherently part of the architecture was

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Figure 9.7  Henri Laurens, Relief in the hall of the Villa Noailles, Hyères, photograph by Thérèse Bonney. © The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

deliberate. Although Laurens’s relief seems to have been added to an existing pillar and was therefore not actually part of the fabric of the building, it behaved like a trumeau and could still be seen as architectural sculpture. Laurens and Mallet-Stevens also looked to the French Renaissance sculptor Jean Goujon who gained new currency in the post-war ‘Call to Order’ and return to national sources. Writing in 1926 about Laurens’s relief for the Noailles, the critic Paul Fierens invoked Goujon, asserting that Laurens had maintained the ‘architectural sense’ so that the ‘figure’s lines echoed the pillar’s dynamics’.66 In both technique and subject, if not in the Cubist abstracted style, Laurens’s nymph for the Noailles is indebted to Goujon who was renowned for his very shallow reliefs such as those on the Fontaine des Innocents in Paris. As with his neo-medieval capitals, Laurens explicitly paid homage to the French tradition and placed himself within a national lineage. During the 1920s, Laurens was far from alone in invoking the French tradition and returning to the human figure, and artists such as Picasso and Braque who engaged with the past were not necessarily retrograde.67 Rather, the relief was the result of Mallet-Stevens and

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Laurens’s attempt to marry the French medieval and Renaissance traditions of architectural sculpture with which they were both well acquainted, and revealed a renewed pride in French heritage which had been attacked during the war. Reinterpreting these sources, they created an architectural sculpture that was rooted in France’s past while being suited to a modern pared-down architecture in its fusion with the building and its abstracted Cubist style.

Figure 9.8  Henri Laurens, Relief in Mallet-Stevens’s hall for an ambassador’s house at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, 1925. Paris, musée des Arts décoratifs © MAD, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

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Shortly after, Laurens and Mallet-Stevens adapted the motif of the Noailles Villa relief for the 1925 Exposition. Mallet-Stevens was invited by the Société des artistes décorateurs (the Society of Decorative Artists) to design the hall for its pavilion conceived as a French embassy. Mallet-Stevens’s hall featured Laurens’s abstracted monumental relief of a nude, Fernand Léger’s Composition abstraite and Robert Delaunay’s La Ville de Paris, La Femme et la tour as well as stained glass windows by Louis Barillet and a garden by Gabriel Guévrékian (Figure 9.8).68 The embassy’s remaining rooms were designed by a host of other architects or decorators, including Paul Follot, André Groult and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann who represented a more conservative and luxurious tendency in French decorative arts. Compared to these rooms, Mallet-Stevens’s hall revealed an uncompromisingly modern style. It caused a scandal among the organizers who called for the removal of Léger’s and Delaunay’s paintings, although not of Laurens’s relief.69 While the 1925 Exposition was widely hailed as the triumph of the luxurious and decorative style which became known as Art Deco, the significant contributions of architects such as Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier demonstrated the vitality of the Modernist approach to decoration in the context of architecture.

Laurens and Le Corbusier: ‘A new theory on monumental sculpture for modern architecture’ Twelve years later, at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie moderne, Le Corbusier invited Laurens to create a monumental mixedmedia figure of a reclining nude (Figure 9.9) for his pavilion, the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux. Laurens’s sculpture was radically different from the two other commissions he received for the exposition and recalled his Cubist construction technique of the 1910s.70 Made of relatively lightweight materials, such as wood and corrugated sheet-metal which was fitting for the canvas structure of the pavilion, it hung in the double height of the near-cubic tent.71 In 1925, Le Corbusier’s attack against the decorative arts and the superficial ornamentation of everyday objects was unequivocal. In L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, the architect contrasted decorative arts or, in his words, ‘tools’ which fulfilled functional needs, to the work of art, ‘a disinterested passion that elevates us’.72 His Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Exposition illustrated both types of objects with unornamented furniture and storage which could be standardized, as well as paintings by Fernand Léger and sculptures by Lipchitz.73 Sculpture remained

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Figure 9.9  Henri Laurens, Suspended Figure for Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, 1937 (L2-13-118-001). © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

significant in his 1937 Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux which argued for the rational organization of the city and its dwellings. According to Le Corbusier, architects, furniture designers, inventors and different industries each had a role to play in achieving his urban plan, but artists and poets also contributed a ‘complement’ which he explained as ‘the spirit of creation, emotion, intimacy of conscience’.74 In the contract outlining the expenditure of the state’s 130,000 francs granted for the pavilion’s decoration, Laurens’s work was described as ‘a sculpture in wood 2m50 × 7m50. Experiment of sculpture in Modern Architecture’.75 Le Corbusier insisted on the work’s theoretical underpinning when he wrote to his mother in February 1937 and reported that he had ‘just explained to [his] friend Laurens . . . a new theory on monumental sculpture for modern architecture’.76 Le Corbusier did not expand on this theory in his correspondence, but other writings from the period offer an insight into his discussions with Laurens about sculpture’s role in architecture. In July 1935, Laurens exhibited recent sculptures at Le Corbusier’s home in his newly completed Molitor building and, around the same time, the architect published an article entitled ‘The Holy alliance of the major arts or the birth of the great art’ discussing the association of architecture,

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painting and sculpture.77 Le Corbusier categorically rejected any decorative purpose or a pleasing, surface ornamentation. Instead, he advocated a deeper relationship between the arts. He personified the work of art as ‘a guest’ entering a house and suggested that, like people, the arts played active roles and engaged with each other. Architecture, painting and sculpture remained distinct but were in dialogue. He explained that in rationally designed modern architecture there existed precise points or ‘mathematical knots’ where sculptures should ‘speak’.78 A sculpture was to be placed as precisely as a sound transmitter positioned to create the best acoustics, so that the work resonated throughout. Le Corbusier’s writings suggest that he intended the sculpture to play an important role in focusing the attention of the visitors entering his pavilion. Photographs show a pavilion densely packed with texts and didactic photomontages, while the sculpture hangs above a text evoking urban and social utopia and close to a display of the 1933 ‘Charte d’Athènes’, an urbanism charter drawn up by members of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM), of which Le Corbusier was a founding member. Hung above head-height, the sculpture left floorspace clear for visitors while its construction technique was suited to the temporary structure of Le Corbusier’s pavilion. Made of mixed media, gigantic and intended to be suspended, the sculpture was certainly the result of conversations between sculptor and architect as Laurens produced no other similar sculpture. However, it is not clear whether placing the sculpture at such a height let the sculpture ‘speak’, or effectively privileged the text and Le Corbusier’s social agenda. For Laurens the appeal of this commission no doubt lay in Le Corbusier’s suggestion that sculpture could articulate space. In the 1930s, he created sculptures which were intended to be seen in the round.79 Although the 1937 construction could not be seen from the back, the use of corrugated iron and of different planes of wood intersecting each other generate a highly three-dimensional effect. Whereas Mallet-Stevens and Laurens had sought to create sculpture that was part of the architecture, Le Corbusier saw them as distinct and although he wrote they were equal arts, in practice he and Laurens may have had different aims. After the war, Le Corbusier developed his idea of an alliance or synthesis between three spatial arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, citing painters and sculptors including Picasso, Braque, Léger, Laurens, Giacometti and Lipchitz.80 Expanding his theory on the alliance of the arts from 1935, Le Corbusier claimed that painting could pierce walls and that sculpture did not need to be rooted to the ground –

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an idea which he may have discussed with Laurens for the 1937 pavilion. While working on the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille in 1948, Le Corbusier drew a hasty sketch of a sculpture of a reclining figure suspended on the first two pilotis of the south façade of the Unité (Figure 9.10). Next to it, he scribbled: ‘(no money!) To be executed on site or in Paris by Andréou and H. Laurens as an (honoured) consultant’.81 Despite Le Corbusier’s claims that the arts were equal, his sketch of a suspended monumental reclining figure, in a similar pose if not style to Laurens’s 1937 Suspended Figure, suggests he may have reused the idea as a shorthand for sculpture, without involving Laurens. Ultimately, whether Laurens disagreed, or money ran out, the sculpture remained unrealized. The Modernists discussed in this chapter spurned the decorative for its perceived commercialism, superficiality, lack of autonomy, appeal to the senses and inability to reflect the style of modern times. Just before the First World War, Apollinaire, Salmon and Mallet-Stevens re-envisioned sculpture as ‘architectural’ rather than decorative, either because of its formal restraint and abstraction or a perceived common origin with architecture. These ideas

Figure 9.10 Le Corbusier, sketch relating to the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, December 1948 (5435). © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

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became important to Laurens and the architects he collaborated with as they sought modern alternatives to architectural sculpture, where sculpture did not appear secondary or superficial, and was not subsumed into an Art Nouveau total environment but remained distinct. Neither architecture nor sculpture overwhelmed the other; architecture was not overcome by surface decoration applied arbitrarily and the architecture’s austerity privileged sculpture. Laurens and Mallet-Stevens conceived architectural sculpture as part of the fabric of the building with which it was frequently fused and looked to French sculptural tradition to situate their works within the lineage of a national tradition that reached back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Their architectural sculpture came to reflect French identity during the 1920s, just as the decorative arts had done in the 1900s. The question of appropriate Modernist architectural sculpture remained important when Laurens met Le Corbusier in the 1930s. Le Corbusier conceived an association between sculpture and architecture, where, he claimed, they interacted as equals. Together, Laurens and Le Corbusier proposed a new relationship between sculpture and architecture where sculpture intervened and articulated threedimensional space.

Notes 1 ‘A mesure que la culture se développe, l’ornement disparaît des objets usuels’. Adolf Loos, ‘Ornement et Crime’, L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 2 (November 1920): 159–68, 160. The essay was first published in French in June 1913 in Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui. In 1920 it appeared in the review Action and in L’Esprit Nouveau, and in 1926 it was partially reprinted in L’Architecture vivante. 2 This did not mean that Loos eliminated all ornament. For example, his Goldman and Salatsch Building in Vienna provoked indignation when it was completed in 1910 because its walls were smooth and unadorned, but it featured Cipollino marble in the two lower storeys which was decorative even if understated. Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1966), 111. On Loos see also Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (London: Phaidon, 1975). 3 Le Corbusier, L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Arthaud, 1996 (1925)), 79 and 86 fn.1. 4 Ibid., II.

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5 Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900–1945: After Rodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12–16. 6 Anna Ferrari, ‘Moving into Space: The Art of Henri Laurens (1885–1954)’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014; Henri Laurens: Rétrospective, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992); Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Brigitte Léal, Henri Laurens: Le Cubisme, constructions et papiers collés, 1915–1919, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1985). 7 G. Albert Aurier, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’, 9 February 1891, in Pierre-Louis Mathieu, ed., Le Symbolisme en peinture: Van Gogh, Gauguin et quelques autres (Caen: L’Echoppe, 1991), 26–7. 8 Katherine M. Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle (Farnham, Surrey, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 2. 9 Gill Perry, ‘The Decorative, the Expressive and the Primitive’, in Gill Perry, Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1993), 46–62, 53. Perry’s emphasis. 10 ‘Interview with Clara T. MacChesney’ (1912), in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (New York: Phaidon, 1973), 67. The interview was first published in The New York Times Magazine, 1913. Matisse did not waver in this belief and made similar statements throughout his long career, see Dominique Fourcade, ed., Henri Matisse: Ecrits et propos sur l’art (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 308 n. 31. 11 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, ‘Cubism’ (1912), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 (1992)), 187–96, 189. 12 The term ‘cubism’ does not reflect the heterogeneous nature of the movement and the different aims and practices within it. While Gleizes and Metzinger wrote and exhibited at the Paris salons, Kahnweiler championed artists such as Braque and Picasso who pursued a different path and exhibited in his gallery. 13 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ‘The Rise of Cubism’ (1914), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 203–9, 203. 14 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ‘L’Essence de la sculpture’ (originally published in German in 1919), in Confessions esthétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 84–102, 84–5. 15 Ibid., 85. 16 Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986 (1936)). 17 Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow, The Essential Cubism, 1907–1920: Braque, Picasso & Their Friends, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1983).

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18 Peter Wollen, ‘Out of the Past: Fashion/Orientalism/The Body’, Raiding the Ice-box: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 29. 19 Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 1. 20 David Cottington, Cubism and the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in France, 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 6 and 211 fn. 73. For further discussions of the decorative and Modernism see Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 1–6 and Kuenzli, Nabis and Intimate Modernism. Recent exhibitions at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris have also focused on the decorative arts including the Eileen Gray retrospective in 2013. See Cloé Pitiot, ed., Eileen Gray: L’exposition, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2013) and Olivier Cinqualbre, Frédéric Migayrou and Anne-Marie Zucchelli, eds, Union des Artistes Modernes: Une Aventure moderne, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2018). 21 Gladys Fabre, ‘La Sculpture architecturale de Laurens face au cubisme et aux arts décoratifs ou comment affirmer son autonomie?’ in Henri Laurens, Rétrospective, 54–69. 22 In 1851, Comte Léon de Laborde wrote a report on the International Exhibition of 1851 in London bringing attention to a perceived crisis in French decorative arts. To alleviate the crisis, he proposed a programme of reforms which included establishing industrial arts schools. Suzanne Tise, ‘Between Art and Industry: Design Reform in France, 1851–1939’, PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1991, 10. 23 Tise, ‘Between Art and Industry’, 41. 24 F. Lavergne, Ville de Paris. Les Écoles et les œuvres municipales d’enseignement, 1871– 1900 (Paris: Société Anonyme de Publications Périodiques, 1900), 234 and 270. 25 Cérémonie d’inauguration, le 1er juillet 1896, par la municipalité de Paris, des nouveaux bâtiments de l’École Estienne (Paris: Imprimerie de l’école municipale Estienne, 1898), 20. Monographie de l’École Estienne: école municipale professionnelle des arts et industries du livre . . . (Paris: Typographie de l’École Estienne, 1900). Charles R. Day, Schools and Work: Technical and Vocational Education in France Since the Third Republic (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 13 and 178–9 fn. 19. Stéphane Laurent, L’Art utile: Les Écoles d’arts appliqués sous le Second Empire et la Troisième République (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 195–202. 26 Marthe Laurens, Henri Laurens, sculpteur, 1885–1954 (Paris: P. Berès, 1955), 7. Other students from the École Bernard Palissy shifted to the fine arts including Gaston Lachaise, who was born in 1882 – three years before Laurens. 27 Lavergne, Ville de Paris, 272.

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28 Laurens, Henri Laurens, sculpteur, 7. 29 Contract between Laurens and Rosenberg, 18 April 1916, Fonds Léonce Rosenberg, CONTRAT 10422.497, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris. In 1916, Rosenberg also signed contracts with Braque, Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz who were followed by Fernand Léger in 1918, when Rosenberg opened the Galerie de L’Effort Moderne in Paris. 30 According to André Salmon, however, Bourdelle’s reliefs merely pretended to be modern as he recalled the sculptor managing his team of praticiens – implying a traditional technique. André Salmon, La Jeune sculpture française (Paris: Société des trente, 1919), 49. 31 Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts, 80–95. 32 Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, 189. 33 Cottington, Cubism and the Shadow of War, 173. 34 Raymond Duchamp-Villon in Louis Vauxcelles, ‘Enquête sur la sculpture en plein air’, Gil Blas, 17 September 1912, 4 (emphasis in original). 35 Ibid., emphasis in original. 36 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, ‘Notes manuscrites’, undated, Raymond DuchampVillon: Sculptures and Drawings, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Galerie Tokoro, 1979), 59. 37 ‘Dès que la sculpture s’éloigne de la nature elle devient de l’architecture.’ Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques, presented and annotated by LeRoy C. Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier (Paris: Hermann, 1980 (1913)), 112–15. 38 ‘Dès que la sculpture s’écarte du portrait, elle n’est plus qu’une technique décorative destinée à donner de l’intensité à l’architecture (réverbères, statues allégoriques des jardins, balustrades, etc.)’. Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 114. 39 ‘La sculpture divorcée d’avec l’architecture ne produit guère autre chose que des objets d’art’; ‘Toutefois reconnaissons que la rupture est plus que jamais profonde entre la sculpture et l’architecture.’ Salmon, La Jeune sculpture française, 26–7. 40 ‘dans les œuvres purement sculpturales de Duchamp-Villon, ou considérées comme telles, ce constant soin d’être un architecte.’ Salmon, La Jeune sculpture française, 93. Translated in Beth S. Gersh-Nešić, André Salmon on French Modern Art (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 145. 41 Salmon, La Jeune sculpture française, 11. Translated in Gersh-Nešić, André Salmon, 100. 42 Salmon, La Jeune sculpture française, 27. Translated in Gersh-Nešić, André Salmon, 109. 43 Critics, including Maurice Raynal in 1919, adopted Archipenko’s neologism as a convenient shortcut to describe a novel art form. Maurice Raynal, Art moderne: Tournée de l’exposition de sculptures, sculpto-peintures, peintures (et) dessins de Alexandre Archipenko (Genève: Impr. Vollet, 1919). Alexander Archipenko, Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years, 1908–1958 (New York: Tekhne, 1960), 40.

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44 ‘Ce fut une pure joie et la réalité dépassait ce que j’avais pu imaginer. Surtout dans ses parties romanes.’ Laurens to Rosenberg (1918), Fonds Léonce Rosenberg, LAURENS C63. 9600. 554, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris. 45 Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1914), 113. 46 Robert Mallet-Stevens, ‘Lettre de Paris – La Sculpture et l’Architecture’, Tekhné, revue belge de l’Architecture et des Arts qui s’y rapportent 35 (23 November 1911): 402–3. 47 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 28–30. 48 Robert Mallet-Stevens, ‘L’architecture moderne’, Gazette des sept arts, no. 1 (15 December 1922), 8. 49 Ibid. 50 ‘Et sur la façade quelconque [l’architecte] semblait venir plaquer des modèles quelconques. Pour les immeubles à loyers élevés la sculpture grouillait de bas en haut, désordonnée, tourmentée, trop abondante, ridicule. Les exemples sont malheureusement nombreux de cette débauche d’ornements.’ Ibid. 51 Robert Mallet-Stevens, ‘L’Architecture au Salon des Indépendants’, Gazette des sept arts 3 (10 February 1923), 8. 52 Félix Fénéon and Jacques Doucet, ‘Les Grands Collectionneurs’, Bulletin de la Vie Artistique 11 (1 June 1921), 313–18, 313. 53 Ibid., 316. 54 The project may have been too ambitious for Doucet who turned sixty-eight in 1921. Instead, he housed his modern art collection in his studio in Neuilly which was furnished by decorators such as Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Paul Iribe and Eileen Gray. 55 Fabre, ‘La Sculpture architecturale de Laurens’, 60. 56 Capital from the choir of the Basilica of Notre-Dame-du-Port, Combat des Vices et des Vertus, Inv.MOU.00014, Cité de l’architecture, Paris. Laurens’s photographic collection, private archive, Paris. 57 The tomb was commissioned by milliner and art collector Suzanne Talbot for her son, Jean Tachard, who had died in action during the First World War. Fabre, ‘La Sculpture architecturale de Laurens’, 62. 58 Claire Maingon, L’Âge critique des salons, 1914–1925: l’École française, la tradition et l’art moderne (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publ. des Univ. de Rouen et du Havre, 2014), 83. 59 Waldemar George, ‘L’Art Urbain’, L’Amour de l’art (1922): 358–62, 358–9. 60 Ibid. 61 ‘Nous pensons qu’elle [la décoration] doit en faire partie intégrante et former non pas un complément mais une fonction organique du cadre architectural.’ Ibid., 358.

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62 Charles de Noailles in Cécile Briolle, Agnès Fuzibet and Gérard Monnier, La Villa Noailles: Rob Mallet-Stevens (Marseille: Parenthèses 1990), 12. 63 Charles de Noailles in Briolle, Fuzibet and Monnier, La Villa Noailles, 22. 64 The villa was built between 1923 and 1928. 65 Laurens also sculpted a fireplace mantel and a life-size nude, Femme à la draperie (commissioned c. 1927) which was intended for the rooftop. The Noailles became great patrons of Laurens and acquired more than fifteen of his works in the second half of the 1920s. 66 Paul Fierens, ‘Henri Laurens’, Cahiers d’Art 4 (1926): 41–5, 42. 67 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 11. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 104 and 112 n. 46. 68 Une ambassade française: Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris 1925 (Paris: Editions d’Art Charles Moreau, (1925?)), 12. 69 Anne-Marie Zucchelli, ‘UAM: Chronique d’une aventure moderne, 1922–1958’, in Cinqualbre, Migayrou and Zucchelli, Union des Artistes Modernes, 96–115, 99. 70 In subject, however, the suspended figure was similar to his studio work and his other commissions for the exposition (L’Eau and La Terre, for the Manufacture de Sèvres’ pavilion, and Le Jour ou La Vie and La Nuit ou La Mort for the Palais de la Découverte). 71 If the final suspended figure was painted the same way as the model, it was painted in white, black and red ochre, the latter reflecting both his use of terracotta and evoking the ancient Greek painted vases which I believe were a source for his redochre drawings. The model is reproduced in Henri Laurens, 1885–1954: 60 oeuvres, 1915–1954, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Louise Leiris, 1985), 35. 72 Le Corbusier, L’Art décoratif, II. 73 Ibid. 74 Le Corbusier, ‘1937, Expo. Int. De l’Habitation Paris, Le Plan’, in Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret, Œuvre complète 1934–1938 (Zurich: Girsberger, 1939), 141. 75 From the Technical advisor of the 1937 exhibition to Charlotte Perriand, contract, 24 March 1937, F/12/12173, Archives Nationales, Paris. 76 Le Corbusier to his mother, 19 February 1937, R2-1-149, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. 77 The So-called Primitive Arts in Today’s House, which took place in Le Corbusier’s home, presented casts of archaic Greek sculptures and non-European art together with modern art. Le Corbusier, ‘La Sainte alliance des arts majeurs ou le grand art en gésine’, La Bête noire 4 (1 July 1935), repr. Cahiers Renaud-Barrault 51 (November 1965): 15–19, 16–18. 78 Ibid., 18.

Modernist Sculpture and the Decorative 79 Ferrari, ‘Moving into Space: The Art of Henri Laurens’. 80 Le Corbusier, ‘L’Espace Indicible’, Art, numéro hors-série de L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1946): 9–17, 17. For an extensive discussion of Le Corbusier and the synthesis of the arts see Cäsar Menz, ed., Le Corbusier, ou la synthèse des arts (Geneva: Skira, 2006). 81 Note dated December 1948, Archives, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, 5435.

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The decorative arts as found object Converging domains for contemporary sculpture Lisa Wainwright

The inclusion of everyday things in works of art was one of the most radical artistic strategies of the twentieth century. From Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup (Figure 10.1) to Damien Hirst’s cows (Some Comfort Gained from our Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything, 1996), the found object in art remains as startling now as it was many years ago, and its remit to play with the ontological nature of art continues to excite scholars and viewers alike. Found object art disrupts our expectations of what we think art to be, and more generally confounds our sense of how things in the world work. Art made from quotidian items challenges prevailing norms by reshuffling the trappings of everyday experience. Such a strategy emerged as a means of grappling with a growing industrial and mass consumer society and it fixed on commercial detritus, machines, junk and commodities as its raw material. But in the abundance of stuff that spoke to a range of ideas artists projected through the play of twentieth-century things, very rarely did the decorative arts object appear as a poignant possession to deploy in sculpture. Not until the end of the century do traditional glasswork, metalwork, ceramics and porcelain, textiles and furniture emerge as found objects in art, as if the ornamental cast of much older, premodern decorative arts could return as compelling form. Cornelia Parker, David Hammons, Ai Weiwei, Nick Cave, Anne Wilson, Mark Dion, Danh Vo, Mounir Fatmi and Fred Wilson are but a few of the artists for whom the decorative object as found sculptural material finally surfaced as a persuasive shorthand for unpacking the symbolic claims of material culture. Lending aesthetic lustre to otherwise ordinary structures and utilities, the beauty of these decorative arts objects became the hook artists employed to captivate and then unveil broader

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issues of race, class, gender and ethnicity.1 For the decorative arts, as national products, collaboratively produced and distributed, spoke most directly to the collective values of their particular place and time. It is axiomatic that Marcel Duchamp set the terms for found object art. His proffering of an anti-aesthetic for art and his commitment to the machine-made, mundane readymade runs counter to the character of traditional decorative arts with its emphasis on applied ornament. So it is no surprise that this class of object was not invited to the party until the end of the century when postmodernism’s promiscuous interchange of images, symbols and styles gave permission to a wider array of visual forms, including the decorative.2 The lacunae of traditional decorative arts objects in a history of the found object was an aspect of twentiethcentury Modernism’s claim to purity. The economy of form, art for art’s sake, Modernist abstraction, design’s sleek efficiency, the machine-inspired line, this Modernist utopic platform dominated practice and theory. From Mondrian, Malevich and International Style architecture to Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd, ornament was anathema to Modernism. Traditional decorative arts were considered too ornamental and too culturally laden to be able to speak to the universality of expression that many Modernists hoped to achieve. Even modern design itself had shorn surface ornament in favour of an attention to sleek form.3 But in the 1990s, spurred by postmodern theory and its deconstruction of ‘universal’ authorial privilege (white, male European predominately), when multiculturalism, globalism and identity politics in art came forcefully into the fore, a closer scrutiny of the range of objects and images that perform diverse cultural meanings in society was underway, and it was at this moment that certain decorative art objects became valuable allies in unpacking distinctive social and cultural beliefs.4 In most origin myths of the found object, Picasso and Braque and their use of found materials usher in the century of the readymade. Guilliame Apollinaire in his defence of cubism, ‘The Cubist Painters’ (1913), wrote: ‘You may paint with whatever material you please, with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oil cloth, collars, painted paper, newspapers.’5 Although the candelabra and the collar are notable citations in Apollinaire’s list, it would be decades before such decorative objects made their way into sculpture as found objects. Similarly, Dada and surrealism, which follow cubism in the western canon of the found object, brought forth provocative and playful objects, intended to startle in the former, and yield unconscious associations in the latter. But these objects tended towards items found on the street or in the

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Figure 10.1 Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) © ARS, NY. Object, Paris, 1936. Furcovered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4 3/8” (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8” (23.7 cm) in diameter; spoon 8” (20.2 cm) long, overall height 2 7/8” (7.3 cm). Purchase. The Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

general store: coatracks, hat racks and bicycle wheels (Duchamp), mannequins and flat irons (Man Ray), and taxis and telephones (Salvador Dalí). There were exceptions as in Wolfgang Paalen’s 1937 Ivy Chair, as well as in Meret Oppenheim’s sculptural oeuvre, where the decorative arts object played centre stage. A dainty teacup, saucer and spoon overlaid and lined with fur (Figure 10.1) and a fine silver tray presenting a pair of women’s high heels trussed like a turkey dinner (Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, 1936/67) stand out as decorative objects from the home, from a woman’s world of hostessing – the arena Oppenheim hoped to unsettle with her feminist interventions. But she was an outlier in deploying what may be classified as the decorative arts object, and exploiting its reading as a quick signifier of gender and class. This tactic would not be widely adopted until much later. The decorative arts’ association with the domestic sphere – as in so many teacups, candlesticks and linens – and its homey familiarity kept it out of the domain of high Modernism with its grand utopic aims.6 For to sample the decorative arts was to assert domesticity as a

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powerful public statement in contrast to the ambitious universal claims of the prevailing avant-garde. By the mid-century, Jean Dubuffet borrowed the term ‘assemblage’ for sculpture, describing an additive practice utilizing natural and manufactured material as seen in the work of Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Richard Stankiewicz, Ed Kienholz on the West Coast and others, and then secured by William Seitz’s exhibition in 1961, The Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art.7 Concurrently in France, there was a burst of found object activity with the Nouveaux Réalistes – Arman, César and Daniel Spoerri. And while textiles appear in early Rauschenbergs, lamps and furniture in several Kienholz dioramas, drinking glasses in Joseph Cornell’s boxes, dirtied tableware in Spoerri’s assemblages and timepieces in a few of Arman’s accumulations, the idea of using the decorative arts as a means of pushing another kind of investigation about ornament and beauty, craft, domesticity and cultural identity does not yet surface in any consistent way.8 Rather, it is the plethora of junk off the street – anti-art – as possible material for high art that is still being chased as an idea. Similarly, with Fluxus in the 1970s, and the use of found materials in the work of George Brecht or Wolf Vostell, for example, the objects are typically mundane with an eye to making life perform as art and art as life. And by the 1980s, found objects explode with the precipitous rise of the art market and commodity fetishism. Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach in the United States showcase spanking new commodities, while Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow and Richard Wentworth in Britain, as part of the New British Sculpture scene, disperse plastic detritus and recycled material attending to the issue of postindustrial waste, among other things.9 By the end of the century, found object art was now as common in sculpture as modelling, carving, casting, constructing or 3D printing. Found object art had begun to turn up in spades around the globe. In the wake of postmodern theory, a key moment for the entrance of the decorative object emerged around the discourse of so-called institutional critique.10 Artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Peter Greenaway, and later Mark Dion and Barbara Bloom, among others, sought to expose and critique the implicit power of museums and academies in determining hierarchies of knowledge and history. In an effort to rewrite the canon, these artists creatively reimagined and restaged museum holdings as their art. Standard museological categories that traditionally defined displays by country, chronology and typology were busted open, forsaken objects were taken out of storage, and everything was rearranged around new taxonomies determined by the creative

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conceits of the artist. Institutional critique began to disassemble the worn categories separating so-called fine art from the decorative arts. Joseph Kosuth, for example, rummaged around the Brooklyn Museum collection in The Play of the Unmentionable from 1990, juxtaposing works of art, decorative arts objects and text in an effort to address the hot topic of censorship in the United States at the time. In one particularly striking installation, the atrocity of slavery was interrogated by positioning several photographs and paintings (including Thomas Hovenden’s stereotypical grinning black youth with watermelon in Ain’t that Ripe from the late nineteenth century) with porcelain figurines and an American porcelain tea set (Figure 10.2) whose finials included an ‘Oriental head on the teapot, an African sugarcane-picker on the sugar bowl, and a goat on the creamer’.11 Under a banner text by Ruth Benedict from her 1945 Race: Science and Politics, the decorative arts and the fine arts came together to narrate the

Figure 10.2  Union Porcelain Works (1836–c. 1922), Cup and Saucer, 1876, porcelain, 6 x 12.7 x 12.7 cm. Sugar Bowl and Cover, c. 1876, porcelain, height 11.4 cm. Cream Pitcher, 1876, porcelain, 9.8 x 8.9 cm. Cream Pitcher, 1876, porcelain, 9.8 x 8.9 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Franklin Chace, 1968, 68.87.29a-b, 68.87.30a-b, 68.87.31, 68.87.32a-b. Photo: Brooklyn Museum. © Brooklyn Museum 2018.

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pernicious system of slavery, one plainly revealed by reorganizing the holdings of a major American museum.12 Around the same time in Rotterdam in 1992, Peter Greenaway as guest curator at the Museum Boymans von Beuningen organized ceramics and porcelain, glassware, furniture, metalwork, machines, works of art and live models for a study of the human imprint, titled The Physical Self.13 Part of the exhibition, composed around the theme of touch, saw Greenaway pairing a vast collection of cutlery, nineteenth-century table settings and an array of twentieth-century furniture (objects touched by the body) with works of art referring to food and the mouths that eat it: Oldenburg’s ‘Meats’ and a selection of ‘portrait heads’ including those by Jacob Epstein, Salvador Dalí and Nancy Grossman.14 Here was another moment of freely breaking the traditional taxonomic segregation of the fine arts and the decorative arts within the modern museum as a means of delivering an alternative set of ideas to the museum’s standard knowledge array. Mark Dion has made a career reasserting the format of the wunderkammern – the early Renaissance practice of showcasing wondrous oddities along with works of art and decorative objects. The wunderkammern or curiosity cabinet was a precursor to the modern museum, albeit here objects of all kinds were mixed together as so many fascinating things to behold, before the specialization and categorization of the modern period when works of art and decorative arts objects were cordoned off into their own groupings. In any number of his installations, Dion returns to the model of the wunderkammern, creating rich dioramas and tableaux with all sorts of objects: scientific instruments, art, decorative objects, natural things and discarded junk, seeking to explore the nature of museology, science and archaeology.15 In the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in 2001, for example, Dion fixed nine ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ around different headings including a ‘Cabinet of the Allegory of Vision’, a ‘Cabinet of Humankind’ and a ‘Cabinet of Allegory of Sound and Time’, to name only three. Drawn from fifty different collections across the university campus, Dion assembled such items as nineteenth-century decorative clocks, French porcelain figurines, Japanese fans and shoes, scientific models and instruments, books, taxidermied birds, skeletons and more. Like object-poems, the motley collection of stuff was mixed and matched to illustrate the artist’s imagined themes.16 Barbara Bloom has taken a similar approach in a number of museum interventions, unpacking inherent biases in the display of material culture.17 Bloom draws on an abundance of decorative objects to demonstrate the extent to which ceramics, furniture, lamps and stemware, for instance, can be used for

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personal artistic expressions. Like Dion, the unusual adjacencies of objects as well as Bloom’s own adjustments, sometimes printing images onto pieces, widens the conceptual reach of the decorative objects she chooses. In the 1998 exhibition At Home in the Museum, Bloom was invited to work with the decorative arts collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. She rummaged in storage pulling out objects, some stained and broken, and some intact, and displayed all their vulnerabilities in an effort to humanize the seemingly idealized and untouchable museum apparatus.18 But the watershed event in the realm of institutional critique through artistic intervention, where the decorative arts object was tapped for its pointed cultural meaning, was Fred Wilson’s ‘Mining the Museum’ (1992).19 In this now landmark exhibition on the history of race in America, Wilson rearranged the contents of the Maryland Historical Society, making correspondences between objects that would typically never have seen such pairing in a museum setting. Using the museum holdings, Wilson brought out an antique baby carriage and nestled inside it a Ku Klux Klan hood; he curated a whipping post encircled by Victorian chairs, and in the display that garnered the most public attention, labelled ‘Metalwork, 1723–1880’ (Figure 10.3), Wilson arranged a series of Baltimore repoussé silver goblets, teacups and pitchers next to a pair of iron

Figure 10.3 Fred Wilson, Metalwork exhibit from ‘Mining the Museum’, 1992–3. Silver service: pitchers, steins and goblets, Baltimore repoussé style, c. 1830–80, Iron slave shackles, c. 1793–1872. © Maryland Historical Society 2008.

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slave shackles.20 Proximity was everything in this condemnation of racism in American history. Wilson’s startling juxtaposition of decorative objects with other kinds of devices and tools recalls a major precursor to the advent of the found object as art, and the decorative object as found object, in the world’s expositions beginning in 1851. At the famous Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition in London, sculptural works were displayed next to machines, inventions and decorative art objects for the very first time. It was the first international display of the decorative arts and the popularity of this material launched the founding of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert) in 1852. As an example, located in the Medieval Court designed by A. W. N. Pugin were ‘ceramics, jewelry, rich textiles, gilded statuary, and brass candelabra in particular, all of which are eagerly sought by modern collectors’.21 This international display of such diverse types of object in the same exposition continued well into the twentieth century. And it was those exhibitions featuring both art and design (industrial goods) in the early twentieth century that conceivably contributed to artists seeing everyday objects as potential works of art in themselves. Wilson’s attention to issues of race through an art form of appropriated historic and often decorative arts objects landed him the 2003 Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States, but unpacked the racial ethos of local Italian culture. In this instance, Wilson decided to focus on the decorative object of the ‘blackamoor’, a popular black Venetian figurine often wielding a lamp, fraught with racist overtones of slavery and subjugation (Nick Cave’s lawn jockeys discussed below would be analogous).22 The blackamoor proved a decisive element to juxtapose with other objects and with renowned Venetian paintings that included images of black servants. Again, the decorative arts evinced an effective means of exposing cultural belief. Later, in a 2005 work, Love and Loss in the Milky Way (Figure 10.4), Wilson set forty-seven white milkglass vessels and plates, several plaster busts (two African and one Greek), a reproduction of a Roman statue and a ceramic mammy type cookie jar across a white table top. In a sea of whiteness delivered by the many pristine milkglass objects, black figures confront white figures, who return the gaze, in a tense narrative puzzle about race and beauty. The protagonists and their setting all spring from found decorative arts objects and sculpture. These objects already exist in our cultural landscape, but Wilson vivifies their agency as symbolic markers by jamming them together in this still life tableau. Wilson asks us to look more closely at the veiled social codes that surround us – much of which

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Figure 10.4  Fred Wilson, Love and Loss in the Milky Way, 2005. One table with fortyseven milk-glass elements, one plaster bust, one plaster head, one standing woman statue and a ceramic cookie jar. 197.5 x 233.7 x 111.4 cm. Private collection. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Gallery.

are embodied in found things which the artist then reframes as art – choosing carefully and using aesthetics as a strategy. He claims, ‘I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas.’23 Wilson’s racialized objects and installations were in keeping with the burgeoning identity politics of the 1990s, but his reliance on the decorative arts object and sculpture in this endeavour was just emerging more broadly in the art world. Across the pond in Britain, but in the same vein, Cornelia Parker turned to fine English silver as found objects in her art. Like Wilson’s decorative pieces, Parker’s objects were redolent of craftsmanship, class, aesthetics and taste, a far cry from the banal objects that had driven the practice and discourse of found object art history up until that time. Parker is a great admirer of Duchamp and many of her conceptual games bear his influence, but the artists part ways in Parker’s sustained examination of English silver. Parker hunted for English silver in the Brick Lane markets, thrift shops, estate sales and antique stores of London and its environs, amassing a varied collection

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of platters, tea services, candlesticks, silverware, goblets and the like. The height of English silver manufacturing in Sheffield and Birmingham was from 1870 to 1920 with a lessening of production around the Second World War, but there was plenty of silver made for the upper class and for notable occasions for the middle class.24 Parker collected such objects of memory, sentimental relics of past moments – marriages, anniversaries, promotions – and then dramatically crushed them with a steamroller she hired for the deed. ‘Silver is commemorative,’ the artist explained. ‘[T]he objects are landmarks in people’s lives. I wanted to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth, that is why I flattened them, consigning them all to the same fate.’25 In Thirty Pieces of Silver (Figure 10.5), she assembled the smashed silver objects into thirty rounded shapes and suspended the shimmering discs from metal wires in a grid hovering five inches off the floor. The objects held on to their original beauty, their utility destroyed, but their ornament and silver lustre, fashioned by so many different hands across time, served as rich sculptural material. Such is the nature of the decorative arts

Figure 10.5  Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1988. Tate, Purchased with assistance from Maggi and David Gordon, 1998. Photograph by Edward Woodman. © Tate, London 2018. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

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object that distinguishes it from the Modernist readymade and its anti-aesthetic orientation. And yet there was also something dark about Thirty Pieces of Silver, like a cemetery of relics whose memorializing status had been violated. Like Wilson perhaps, Parker deploys the decorative object as an explicit reflection of cultural norms, in this case, the class structure of England. Born in a farming community on a smallholding with working-class parents, Parker’s appropriation of fine English silver is conspicuous.26 She said, ‘silver is a wonderful substance; it’s a complex material with beautiful associations. I love it because it has got pretensions to grandeur; especially when it’s just silverplate, which is just a thin skin on top of another more base metal. It’s all about an outward appearance, which has to be maintained; otherwise it tarnishes, showing its dark side.’27 In another instance, the artist described her fascination with silver as follows: I play with cliché and nostalgia and romanticism and all those things we rather like but don’t want to admit to. You know, ‘I rather love this Georgian teapot but I’d rather have it damaged because it’s okay for me to like it then.’ So it’s my fear of the bourgeois, perhaps. There’s definitely a thing about class but again it’s a subtext, not the main issue.28

For Parker, silver tea sets, candlesticks and serving spoons were a hallmark of a certain cultural positioning that she could appropriate and then reassemble on her own terms as a revisionist expression. The decorative arts as contemporary sculpture was a powerful form of cultural critique for an artist highly conscious of the class implications associated with such goods. Parker leads us back to Meret Oppenheim and her use of the silver tray and the ceramic teacup. Parker carries a certain Dada strain, like Oppenheim, in her gutsy disregard for convention that leads to crushing silver tea sets where Oppenheim dresses them in fur. Both engage with objects from the home and in so doing address traditional roles for women. Parker said that in using silver, she ‘was trying to find a domestic equivalent to the monument’.29 Indeed, the use of the decorative arts as sculpture may shift the ground around traditional notions of what constitutes the monument and the monumental, for hers is a far cry from the massive plinth and statue format. In Parker’s example, one might even claim she allied with a tendency called the ‘unmonumental’ in sculpture at the time.30 So many smashed signifiers of the proper home reflect an uncertain position towards this arena still gendered as female. She creates a monument of critique rather than adulation. And then there is the title, Thirty Pieces of Silver,

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which Parker, raised as a Catholic, describes as an allusion to the betrayal of Christ by Judas, ‘the ultimate cliché of betrayal’, she explained.31 Parker is the feminist betraying the social condition of her sex, refusing to enact its rituals of display. Instead she makes fine silver bend to her rules. The dispersal of the objects in Thirty Pieces of Silver recalls the accumulations of her British predecessors, Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth, to whom she claims her work owes a debt. Both Cragg and Wentworth assembled multiples of man-made objects and detritus into sculptures for much of their careers. And in work of the 1990s, such as Cragg’s Cumulus (1998) with its sandblasted stack of glass vessels or Wentworth’s Spread (1997) a round, floor dispersal of hundreds of fine china plates, the debt is repaid as they echo Parker’s fascination with turning the decorative arts into sculptural material. Like Cragg’s or Wentworth’s works, Parker’s installations also rely on the precedent of minimalism as a framing device. This is common for found object art as minimalism’s geometry instils a sense of order in what can appear as unruly. As a foil to the brutal act of crushing silver objects, Parker lays out the ruined parts in a logical gridded array. Still Life with Reflection (Figure 10.6), from 2004, installed at St Bartholemew’s Hospital, London, as a public sculpture in the women’s breast care centre, is another version of the decorative object in a post-minimalist frame. Parker installed on the ceiling two rows of English silver, one item crushed opposite a similar item (its reflection) intact. All cast arabesque shadows on the ceiling above. In a topsy-turvy, Mary Poppins meets Plato’s Allegory of the Cave installation, the still life (of the title) recalls a longer history of decorative objects painted into traditional Dutch still life paintings as treatments of the vanitas or memento mori theme. In such paintings, silver goblets and trays brim over with succulent foodstuffs beginning to decay so as to remind viewers of how all that is sensually rich will ultimately materially fade. With her exquisitely damaged goods, Parker embraces this tradition of vanitas – a tendency towards the decadent shared by a number of artists at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a metaphor for a space given over to breast cancer care. Parker said of her work, I want to describe something that is in flux, that isn’t grounded, stable, or has a fixed position. I’m interested in the idea of harnessing the friction that’s out there in the world. . . . Subjecting an object to an act of controlled violence or putting it under extreme pressure might be perverse, but it also is liberating, and meaning can be relinquished to create space for projection.32

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Figure 10.6  Cornelia Parker (b. 1956), Still Life with Reflection, 2004. Eleven pairs of squashed and intact silverware, metal wire. Installation at St Barts Hospital, London. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Parker’s call to arms recalls the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei who has also taken the decorative arts object and manipulated its historic value for his own ‘space for projection’. Ai Weiwei is another artist interested in Duchamp but one who moves beyond the readymade to engage with more culturally loaded artefacts.33 Using Chinese pottery and antique furniture, Weiwei has built, among many other things, an oeuvre of found object art that relies on the deep resonance of China’s decorative traditions. Like Wilson and Parker, his turn to the decorative arts as strategic purveyors of national identity was in keeping with the art world’s renewed interest in cultural and identity politics in the 1990s, and its concomitant critique of centralized power. And as Chinese art exploded on the art market at the time, Weiwei’s manipulated decorative objects took centre stage.34 In a now well-known triptych photograph from 1995 called Destroying One’s History, Weiwei, clad in work clothes standing against a monotonous brick wall, gingerly handles a Han dynasty urn, then lets it go; it hovers in free fall, finally shattering on the ground at the artist’s feet. Weiwei’s expression never changes in

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all three shots. Such a succinct statement on the fragility of tradition undergirds his other decorative found object work. In 1994, and again in 1997 and 2007, he emblazoned a Han dynasty urn, a Tang dynasty vase and a Neolithic vase with Coca-Cola logos, updating the vases to address the ubiquity of American consumerism against the presumed obdurate hallmarks of Chinese tradition. In 1993 through 2000, using industrial paint, he whitewashed antique Chinese pots dating from the late Stone Age, essentially disappearing their original decorative veneers and bleaching them of history. And in 2003–6, Weiwei dipped more of his collected Neolithic vases into brightly coloured thick paint, again making a mockery of historical authenticity while issuing forth more ‘modern’ versions that he sold in the escalating market for contemporary Chinese art.35 As pottery is one of China’s most traditional artistic formats, ceramic work ‘connects the artist .  .  . with the classical Chinese cultural identity’.36 Weiwei is known for his political agenda attacking what he sees as the authoritarian policies of his home country, a position that landed him house arrest from 2011 to 2015, so his wilful manipulations of traditional Chinese pottery proved a quick means of mining an index of cultural power only to misappropriate its relevance. Weiwei’s critique of China’s unabated centralization of authority, no doubt, began with his family history. His father, Ai Qing, was regarded as one of China’s greatest modern poets, but during the Cultural Revolution he was exiled in 1958 with his family to Northwest China. Weiwei was one year old. Such an event stayed with the artist and was furthered by the censorship he encountered when he returned to Beijing as a young man and later in his adult life. Weiwei’s highly symbolic choice of desecrating the original integrity of the decorative arts object as a form of cultural critique again demonstrates the value that traditional decorative arts could play once released from their banishment under Modernism’s watch. Weiwei drove this home, on the world stage. Chinese porcelain and earthenware were potent cultural signifiers for repurposing, but so were the fragments of fourteenth-century furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties that Weiwei used in many other sculptures. For Documenta 12 in 2007 in Kassel, Germany, the artist staged a three-part project titled Fairytale that included selecting 1,001 Chinese people to come to Kassel to live for the three-month period of the exhibition, utilizing 1,001 doors and windows of destroyed Ming and Qing dynasty houses to erect a massive construction, Template (it ultimately collapsed), and arrangements of 1,001 Qing dynasty wooden chairs (Figure 10.7) dispersed in clusters across the exhibition.37 As in Parker’s work, the ornamental embellishments of all the antique doors,

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Figure 10.7 Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, 2007. Photograph of 1,001-chair installation in Kassel, Germany/ documenta 12. Courtesy of the artist.

windows and chairs in the Kassel project were prominent, even heightened through the sheer accumulation of so many of these decorative things. Smaller more discrete objects made from found furniture had been part of Weiwei’s practice, but the event in Kassel was a tour de force of the found decorative object as installation art. That parts of dynastic houses and antique chairs were made available to Weiwei as a result of the government’s demolishing ancient sites to build new architectural projects, underscores the artist’s choice as a deliberate political engagement with specific found objects redolent of China’s history, then and now.38 Furniture as decorative object makes its way into a number of other artists’ works at the end of the century as the decorative arts begin to emerge from under their blanket of exclusion. Kosuth, Wilson and Bloom had featured vintage chairs in their museum interventions, but artists as diverse as Jannis Kounellis, Doris Salcedo, Danh Vo, Courtney Smith, David Hammons and Marc Andre Robinson continued to draw out this kind of object as familiar mementoes of home, identity, class and even politics. Kounellis hung twenty-odd armoires with steel cables from the ceiling in several different sites from 1993 to 2019. The cabinets, arrayed on a grid, their massive solidity made weightless, were both comical and treacherous.

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Salcedo buried armoires and other found furniture into minimalist, cement ‘graves’ memorializing the disappeared persons from the violence of her home in Colombia. African American artist Marc Andre Robinson’s Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement) from 2007, one of many of his found furniture assemblages, is a mass of swirling chairs upended and askew, a metaphoric upheaval of diverse types together as a turbulent, but heterogeneous community of things. Courtney Smith muses on feminism and domesticity through her reassembly and subtle material interventions into found vanities and armoires. David Hammons deploys elegant free-standing mirrors and armoires as parts of installations addressing, among other things, the play of class in a highfalutin art world in which he ambivalently participates. And Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo’s Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Chairs (2013), from the estate of Secretary of State Robert McNamara, with only the upholstery flayed and displayed on the wall, is a powerful rumination on the politics of his home country. Part of the significance of Danh Vo’s use of the decorative arts is that he draws from highly specific sources. In another work, 08:43, 26.05, from 2009 (Figure 10.8), he dismantled the actual Gagneau Frères chandelier from the room where the Paris Peace Accords between the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong was signed on 27 January 1973.39 This charged synecdoche of a historic interior space was laid out on the floor, its parts disassembled, its ornamental bits scattered. The deconstruction proved a haunting allegory for the complicated affair of putting the pieces of a country back together. But the idea of using the chandelier as the core of his ruminations on this very personal political story tells of the power of the decorative object as a striking conveyer of signification. Another major category of the decorative arts, chandeliers and light fixtures had entered the found object art lexicon by the end of the century as well. Light had always played a powerful role in the visual arts as painted symbol of the divine in the Renaissance, as vanitas motif in the smouldering candles of Dutch still lifes, in the futurist’s celebration of the new electric street light or later in minimalism’s effort to use light to frame space. But ornamental light fixtures only appeared in contemporary sculptures once the decorative arts began to be taken seriously as found art material late in the century. An outstanding example of the decorative fixture as found object is Chris Burden’s collection of found street lamps in Urban Light (Figure 10.9). Recalling Minimalism’s spatial gridding and light play (such as Dan Flavin’s 1960s industrial fluorescent tube installations), Burden took 202 1920s and 1930s restored lamps from the

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Figure 10.8  Danh Vo (b. 1975) © Copyright. 08:43, 26.05, 2009. Late nineteenthcentury chandelier, Dimensions variable. Gift of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art and the Fund for the Twenty-First Century. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

streets of Los Angeles and arranged them as a public sculpture outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Most of the seventeen styles represented are in the Art Deco style, including Outpost, Hollywood, Pacific Twin types and the largest, most ornate, Rose Poles, all once dotting downtown Los Angeles. Of varying heights but distributed evenly across a grid, the lights cluster together as a forest of repeating ornamental stations – the repetitive assembly makes the decorative objects sculpture. Urban Light emits a soft ambience for crowds that

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Figure 10.9  Chris Burden (1946–2015) © ARS, NY. Urban Light, 2008. (Two-hundred and two) restored cast iron antique street lamps. 320 1/2 x 686 1/2 x 704 1/2 in. (814.07 x 1743.71 x 1789.43 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Gordon Family Foundation’s gift to ‘Transformation: The LACMA Campaign’ (M.2007.147.1-.202). Digital Image © 2019, Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

meander around this sculptural installation made from appropriated, decorative things. The street lights are familiar – harkening back to a time past, and yet unfamiliar in their new arrangement as art – making one look again. Ornate chandeliers also feature in David Hammons’s work, but his returns us to a more political address in terms of issues of class, race and privilege, as noted in his use of the armoire above. Applying chandeliers and fancy sconces to adorn basketball hoops (a major signifier of African American culture), Hammons metaphorically imbricates spaces typically assigned to distinct classes and races. In Basketball Chandelier (1997) and Untitled (2000), the ballroom and the basketball court jam together side by side through emblematic objects that signal distinct class identities but only in the symbolic imaginary where they coexist. Not unlike Fred Wilson’s mix of silver repoussé and slave shackles, the proximity of two radically different signifiers in one piece attests to the expected division of privilege around us and the unease that comes when those boundaries are crossed. Boundary crossing is a recurring theme here that the decorative object as sculpture readily instantiates: in Hammons and Wilson, class and race boundaries break down; in Weiwei’s, Burden’s or Parker’s assemblages,

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boundaries of time collapse. The decorative object as sculpture allows such conceptual folds. Like the identity politics visualized through the association of ornate light fixtures and basketball hoops in the Hammons, Nick Cave sourced numerous chandeliers for his installation Until at MASS MoCA in 2017.40 In this three-part piece, the central element, which he refers to as ‘the cloudscape’, rises up above viewers’ heads, lined underneath with magnificent chandeliers that sparkle like a starry night. Cave’s Until is a decadent mix of luscious found props and haunting icons of the epidemic gun violence in America. Best known for his ‘Soundsuits’, Cave largely drew on found materials to adorn the carnivalesque dancing costumes that hid the body beneath extraordinary layers of embellished materials. He speaks of coming to the idea of the soundsuit after the brutal police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, when, as a black man, he felt the need to disguise his identity. Cave describes Until as now going inside the soundsuit, of splitting open its constituent parts and inhabiting its furrows of tokens, bobbles, trimmings, ornaments and other material flourishes. Like the violent reshaping of the decorative art object in Parker’s Thirty Pieces of Silver or the incisive disassembly of Danh Vo’s Paris chandelier, Cave brings together decorative objects excessively en masse. In so doing, all these artists defy Modernism’s claim to universality and purity, and offer instead highly idiosyncratic appropriated arrangements. Cave’s central form, ‘the cloudscape’, framed by ‘the forest’ on one side and ‘the mountain’ on the other, are all made from artificial materials although intended to connote natural things – a mélange of nature and culture in keeping with postmodernism’s moment of freewheeling stylistic and ideological medleys. The ‘cloudscape’ lined with the elegant chandeliers requires ladders to allow viewers to ascend to its top. Once there, one beholds a cornucopia of found decorative paraphernalia piled high like the Dutch still lifes referred to earlier (Figure 10.10). In this array of things is a profusion of kitsch objects from middle-class homes that Cave remembers from his own childhood and that he mines around the country’s flea markets and antique malls: ceramic birds, bundles of glass fruit, brightly coloured artificial Christmas trees, metal wall sconces, beaded shapes, artificial flowers, old-fashioned vitrola horns and lawn jockeys that he has holding badmintons. Cave’s ceramic birds and glass fruit are the ubiquitous adornments of middle-class America, and their excessive abundance with a host of other common holiday frills sets a bizarre stage for the lawn jockeys who occupy the assemblage wielding their upright rackets. It is a strange moment of

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Figure 10.10  Nick Cave (b. 1959), Until, 2016. Mixed medium, dimensions variable. Photo by James Prinz Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

recognition that destabilizes the black stereotype. The surreal juxtaposition of the jockey with the badminton is uncanny – both are familiar, but together, and in this context, completely unfamiliar. Here is not your typical lawn ornament with lantern in hand but a sabotage of the racist artefact bearing a new accoutrement. It performs what Cave describes as ‘renegotiating its power’.41

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The lawn jockey is a decorative, figurative sculpture with a long, misunderstood provenance.42 Cave has used the object in a number of other works beginning in 2009, including in a major show in 2014 called ‘Made by Whites for Whites’. While clearly a racist symbol, Cave deploys it in a kind of exorcism of its oppressive servitude. In Until, he lends the jockeys badmintons as so-called dream catchers in his version of what he hopes his cloudscape of heaven allows.43 ‘Is there racism in heaven?’ Cave asks.44 Like Wilson’s mammy cookie jar and the Venetian blackamoor, or the Aunt Jemima figure the artist Betye Saar used in her work from 1972 called The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, such decorative objects speak most directly to the stinging presence of racism under our noses, in those ornaments from the domestic setting.45 While Cave’s soundsuits were intended to shield the artist from overt racism by masking the body, the more recent use of the lawn jockey is meant to expose this insidious belief system and turn it on its head. Cave has said about the original objects: ‘Racism is reinforced in these regressive objects, which became signifiers aiming to indicate and keep place in society. They influence the general population, demoralizing a race through design.’46 Cave appropriated objects that relate to his identity in the context of a wider discourse on multiculturalism that ensued at the end of the twentieth century. Concerns about race and gender drew many artists to reset objects from their domestic world so as to understand the values embedded in some of the personal things that surrounded them. Cave grew up amid the tchotchkes and ornaments he then assembled into his work. Anne Wilson, like Cave, turned to another cache of personal things that also spoke to her particular biography. Using aged handkerchiefs, table linens and lace collars, many from her own family collection, Wilson set her needle to these worn cloths to work into the damaged areas with ‘repairs’ of her own design (Figure 10.11).47 With thread and sometimes human hair, Wilson stitched arrays of marks, dots and lines into the blemishes of the crisp white linens of her family’s heirlooms and then arranged the new textiles in repetitive minimalist displays. Like Cave, Parker or Weiwei, Wilson resuscitates a tradition and then shifts the terms. The linens are souvenirs of the decorum and propriety of her European protestant background, entrenched with the long-standing tastes and values she then seeks to interrogate through her hairy punctures into the decorative articles. She has said of the linens, ‘I do think of materials as cultural constructions having a range of social meanings and cultural implications.’48 In Wilson’s use of the decorative object, there is a turn of the abject in using hair on fine linen and this is exactly the space of discomfort Wilson seeks to engage through her object inversions. From another part of the

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Figure 10.11  Anne Wilson (b. 1949), Dispersions no. 7, detail, 2013. Thread, hair, cloth, white frame, 64.1 x 64.1 x 3.8 cm overall. Collection of Gail and Tom Hodges. Courtesy of the artist and Gail and Tom Hodges. Photo: Adam Liam Rose.

world, but equally redolent of place and identity, Mounir Fatmi also works with found textiles that demonstrate the symbolic directness of the decorative arts with their long and complex cultural traditions. As a Moroccan artist, his use of Muslim prayer rugs echoes Wilson’s use of starched family linens; both textiles are related to home. In Maximum Sensation from 2010 (Figure 10.12), Fatmi used Islamic prayer rugs to decorate fifty skateboards, thereby commingling extreme sports culture with objects of religious devotion. Through the simple assemblage of found objects, Fatmi suggests a correspondence between exercising belief and practicing a discipline. This peculiar, yet optimistic, alliance of actions is Fatmi’s gig. The global jamming of high and low, old and new (prayer rugs and skateboards) – the strange juxtaposition of otherwise ordinary things – is again a surrealist strategy adopted by any number of these contemporary artists including Fred Wilson, Nick Cave and David Hammons. Indeed, Hammons has actually used textiles in precisely this way. In his Flying Carpet (1990), he attached fried chicken wings to a Persian carpet that hangs on

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Figure 10.12 Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970), Maximum Sensation, 2010. Plastic, metal, textile, each skateboard 12.7 x 20.3 x 80.5 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia and John and Barbara Vogelstein, 2010.67 © Mounir Fatmi. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

a wall, once again mixing issues of class, race and myth in a visual pun about things that might fly, made from pairing distinctly different signifying agents. As entities collide in the hands of these artists, new ways of garnering meaning emerge. And the decorative arts contribute to these conceptual plays by lending their deep connection to national traditions as a basis for refreshing systems of beliefs. It is the shorthand of meaning in the decorative object, recontextualized as contemplative art, that allows this broadcast. Textiles are a category within the decorative arts with a long and weighty history. Anne Wilson early on in her career curated historic textile shows, and her knowledge of their history informed her practice. And while textiles hold an important position in museums around the world, and were prominently displayed at the international world’s fairs noted above, by the twentieth century weaving, stitching, sewing and quilting were considered so-called ‘women’s craft’. As decorative arts objects, they were already relegated to a secondary status behind the fine arts, but as a woman’s practice they were then doubly passed over and out of serious circulation in the masculinized high art arena of Modernism. Wilson’s,

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Fatmi’s and others’ forays into the medium as elements in sculptural installations opened up the medium differently. Certainly Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago in the 1970s, and even Robert Rauschenberg before them, had collaged and assembled fabrics into their work as symbols of home in the latter and as feminist assertions in the former, but it was not until the end of the century that textiles re-emerged as a critical medium.49 The reintroduction of a textile discourse into art history at the end of the century corresponded with the rise of the decorative arts as an interloper into high art. The more recent study of craft, as in Glenn Adamson and others championing so-called craft theory, proves an important ancillary agent in this rise of the decorative object as found object.50 The post-disciplinary moment of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, brought all material culture into consideration and traditional decorative arts, shunned for so long under high Modernism, arrived with all its ornamental flare and expressive declarations about class, gender, identity and nationhood.51 Found object art, with its mandate to bring the world onto the pedestal of art, finally positioned the decorative arts object as another key element in our bounty of things to more closely regard. Institutional critique’s breakdown of dominant canonical categories, postmodernism’s freely mixed styles and identity politics’ call to engage more specific symbolisms, all made space for the decorative arts as a vital branch of contemporary sculpture. Towards the end of the twentieth century, artists reclaimed the decorative arts for their ability to cross time, allowing past traditions to inform present concerns. Unlike the industrial readymade within the Duchamp trajectory of found object art, the decorative object wielded ornamental beauty, cultural traditions and domestic familiarity – seductive elements that drew artists and audiences to ponder the meaning of the artefacts that surround us all. As Nick Cave put it, the decorative arts are ‘where we can collectively find common ground’.52 As the boundary between sculpture and the decorative arts collapsed, so opened up the possibility for deeper cultural engagement within this nexus of art and design.

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my two research assistants who did extraordinary work on this project in the midst of completing their own Masters degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Heartfelt thanks to Daisy Charles,

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Research Associate at Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC, and Jacob Zhang, Writer and Independent Curator, Berlin.

Notes 1 At the end of the century, beauty had returned as a powerful convention in art, bringing with it the splendour of the decorative arts. See Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750–2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 194. 2 See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007); Eleanor Heartney, Postmodernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Charles Jencks, ‘The Post-Avant-Garde’, in Charles Jencks, ed., The Post-Modern Reader (London: Academy; New York: St Martin’s, 1992), 215–24. 3 See Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 4 The advent of material cultural studies in general also played a role in the return of the decorative arts as an area of study. See Deborah L. Krohn, ‘Beyond Terminology, or, the Limits of “Decorative Arts”’, Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014): 1–13. 5 Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: Wittenborn, 1944), quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 232. 6 See Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson), 1996. 7 William Chapin Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). 8 Robert Rauschenberg proves an exception in this regard. See Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Constructing Domestic Space’, in Not at Home, 193–205. 9 Steinbach used some traditional decorative objects as in nineteenth-century fine china plates in Bel Canto (1987) or ancient pottery in Stay with Friends (1986), but the vast majority of Steinbach’s material has been in the realm of common household goods. 10 See Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 11 David Freedberg, ed., The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation of Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum (New York: New Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1992), 81.

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12 Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1945). 13 Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self: A Selection by Peter Greenaway from the Collections of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, 27/10/91–12/1/92 (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1991). 14 Ibid., 79. 15 See for example, Dion’s WeltWissen, Walter Gropius Haus, Berlin, 2010, or The Wondrous Museum of Nature, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, 2017. 16 Colleen J. Sheehy, ed., Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, in association with the Weisman Art Museum, 2006). 17 See The Seven Deadly Sins, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands, 1987, or Artistic Intervention: Barbara Bloom, MAK, Vienna, 1994. 18 Lisa Norton, Frances Whitehead, and Lisa Wainwright, curators, At Home in the Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, no catalogue. Referenced in Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman, The Collections of Barbara Bloom (New York: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 21. 19 Judith E. Stein, ‘Sins of Omission: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum’, Art in America (October 1993): 110–15. 20 Ibid. 21 Charlotte Gere, ‘European Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs: 1850–1900’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (Winter 1998–1999): 16–56, 18. 22 See Adrienne L. Childs, ‘Sugarboxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain’, in Michael Yonan and Alden Cavanaugh, eds, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 159–77. 23 Fred Wilson, Jered Sprecher, and Amy J. Elias, ‘Objects and Identities: An Interview with Fred Wilson’, ASAP Journal 2, no. 1 (January 2017): 3–28, 3. 24 Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, eds, History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 401. 25 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘Metamorphoses’, in Cornelia Parker (Torino: Galeria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 2001), n.p. 26 Lisa Tickner, ‘A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker’, Art History 26, no. 3 (June 2003): 364–91, 365. 27 Andrea Jahn, Cornelia Parker: Perpetual Canon (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber, 2005), 18. 28 Tickner, ‘A Strange Alchemy’, 372. 29 Jahn, Cornelia Parker, 19. 30 See Richard Flood, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon, in association with the New Museum, 2005). 31 Antonia Payne, ‘Neither from Nor Towards’, in Avoided Object (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1998), 43.

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32 Jessica Scarlata, ed., Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary (New York: Museum of Arts and Design), 164. 33 Sue-An van der Zijpp, ‘Unbreakable’, in Mark Wilson, Karen Smith and Sue-An van der Zijpp, ed. (Groningen and London: Groninger Museum, 2008), 8–11, 8. 34 Chen Zhen is another important Chinese artist to use found antique Chinese furniture, working at the same time as Ai Weiwei. 35 ‘When asked by Philip Tinari if the historical vessels the artist has used were real, Ai seemed “astounded that anyone would think otherwise”, adding that “they’ve gotten much more expensive in recent years, but that for whatever reason they are not museum-quality pieces”. Answers such as this express what Charles Merewether described as reluctance to confirm or deny the provenance of any urn or vase. This ambiguity fuels an instinctive anxiety about the construction and perception of value that is one of the intended consequences of Ai’s project.’ Gregg Moore and Richard Torchia, ‘Doing Ceramics’, in Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn (Glenside, PA: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2010), 1–16, 12. Thanks to my research assistant, Jacob Zhang, for pointing out how Weiwei also made fake ceramic vessels, particularly in 1996 with his ‘Blue-and-White Porcelain’ series. They are almost indistinguishable replicas of Kangxi-era (1661–1722) blue-and-white porcelain. Ibid., 14. 36 Van der Zijpp, ‘Unbreakable’, 8. 37 It has generally been assumed that the architectural fragments were collected after the architecture was razed for new building projects. They likely went through antique markets before reaching Weiwei. Ai Weiwei and Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Ai Weiwei Interviewed by Daniel Birnbaum’, in Lionel Bovier and Salome Schnetz, eds, Ai Weiwei: Fairytale, a Reader (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 106–13. 38 ‘As in other works by Ai Weiwei, we return not to the idea of nostalgia for things past but rather, that of its meaningless destruction for reasons of profit by those in favor with the state, or the state itself. The bitter historical irony is, as the artist points out, that after 1949 the land was taken away from the landowners and given to the people under the control of the state. Now the land is being auctioned off by the developers with the authorization if not complicity of the state.’ Charles Merewether, ‘At the Time’, in Urs Meile, ed., Ai Weiwei: Works 2004–2007 (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2008), 173–81: 174. 39 Provenance on the chandeliers found in ‘Hotel Majestic at Paris’, The Spur 30, no. 7 (1 October 1922): 59. While at a residency in Paris, Vo went to visit this historic site of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. He discovered that the furnishings were for sale and arranged to buy the three chandeliers. Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Whole Thing Is Crazy’, The New Yorker, 29 January 2018, 46–53: 51. 40 Cave has also recently turned to using furniture as found objects in his mixed-media installations. See his 2018 exhibition at Jack Shaiman Gallery titled If a Tree Falls.

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41 In conversation with the author, 30 July 2018. 42 See George English Brooks, ‘Little Helpers: Doormen, Gatekeepers, and Racial Trespass in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress’, Pacific Coast Philology 47 (2012): 17–33. 43 In conversation with the author, 30 July 2018. 44 Denise Markonish, David Byrne, Carl Hancock Rux, Lori E. Lightfoot, and Claudia Rankine, Nick Cave: Until (North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA; Munich, New York: DelMonico Books), 112. 45 Betye Saar is another major artist who has used a number of racist figurines and other decorative objects in her work for decades. See her Dark Monument (2011), Sock It to Em (2011) or the much earlier Record for Hattie (1975). 46 Markonish et al., Nick Cave: Until, 108. 47 See Lisa Wainwright, ‘Anne Wilson’s Taxonomy of Memories’, Fiberarts (Fall 1997): 46–50. 48 Anne Wilson, ‘The Decorative Impulse and the New Aesthetic Democracy’ (panel, College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, 13 February 2014). 49 Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics’. 50 See Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007); M. Anna Fariello and Paula Owen, eds, Objects and Meaning: New Perspectives on Art and Craft (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2005); and Marla Elena Buszek, ed., Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 51 See Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, eds, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice, eds, The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work, Antennae Series (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009). 52 In conversation with the author, 30 July 2018.

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Gross domestic product Contemporary British ceramics and the subversion of the monument Laura Gray

This chapter is an account of contemporary British ceramics practice and its partial alignment with sculpture. It explores what experimentation with the sculptural monument might mean from the perspective of ceramics practice. It examines how ceramicists and potters take on the idea of the sculptural monument while remaining committed to their medium, and draws attention to how clay offers a material boundary, which, though breached at times, remains a crucial element underpinning the identity of artwork and maker.1 Despite – or in conjunction with – this commitment to material, the adoption of the distinctly sculptural form of the monument reveals ceramicists as outward looking and receptive to extra-disciplinary ideas. Indeed, this taking on of the forms and concepts of the monument expands the possibilities and potential of ceramics by allowing ceramicists to employ the visual language of sculpture while remaining intellectually and materially engaged with clay. In addition, the ceramic monuments that result from this intersection of ideas, processes and forms are not operating with an uncritical adulation or reverence for this aspect of sculptural practice. Instead, the ceramic works detailed here subvert or offer alternative meanings and possibilities to the concept of the monument, casting a new sidelight on a distinctly traditional form of sculpture. Identifying the monument as a locus of the intersection between ceramics and sculpture, this chapter reveals how ceramicists are profitably mining the tensions between the monument and the counter-monument. Rather than using the monument to distance their work from domestic and functional associations, a number of leading British ceramicists have used the characteristics of the

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monument to criticize or reflect upon the monument itself. Inside the home, ceramics not only sport decoration but have been used as decoration – perched on plate racks, mantelpieces and kitchen dressers. But this history of being present in the home means that there is an intimacy between viewer and ceramic that sculpture cannot access. Ceramics are able to use their homely associations to symbolize the kinds of cultural experience that are simply not accessible to authoritarian public sculptures. When ceramicists use a familiar decorative language to communicate in, for example, Paul Scott’s blue and white Spode transfers (see Figure 11.2), the conversation with the viewer is started much more easily than with the silvery surface of a Robert Morris sculpture. The presence of decoration does not mean that a Paul Scott plate has something less profound to communicate, rather that Scott has used decoration for its directness. In art, the association between decoration, domestic space and function is both close and pejorative. The home can be a space in which decoration reigns supreme, and where divisions are enforced and maintained: between men and women, between products of consumer culture and high art, between frivolity and seriousness.2 Ceramics can be functional or decorative in such a space; in either case, they are not usually believed to be the focus of serious contemplation. With mid-century Modernism came a renewal of the separation of art forms. Those works with decorative and domestic associations were positioned as the antithesis of ‘fine’ art. Naturally, this divorce of art from decoration had a considerable impact upon the perception of ceramics. Elissa Auther analyses how the highly influential American art critic Clement Greenberg ‘used the decorative as a critical device to distinguish “high” abstract painting from “decoration” defined as a form of surface attractiveness masquerading as art’.3 The decorative was condemned by Greenberg as superficial and inauthentic: as concerned only with the surface of things, and appealing to a less discerning market. High art, in contrast, Greenberg identified as an autonomous, cultural achievement. Greenberg’s position – in which the painter performed a traditional role ‘as a visionary creator of high art’ – was an influential one (in sculpture as well as painting), and led him to forcefully articulate a distinction between art and design.4 Greenberg’s view was that ceramics belonged within design, along with other useful objects of decoration such as furniture, which were produced in demand to consumer taste. Yet all art commands a price in the marketplace, and an artwork’s price tag can offer another useful method of distinguishing between what is generally considered high or low culture. Thinking in terms of Adorno and Horkheimer,

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it could be suggested that the hierarchical triumph of sculpture over ceramics is only the triumph of invested capital.5 Yet the development of (and market interest in) contemporary British ceramics has produced a situation in which the price gap between ceramics and sculpture is lessening, in some instances at least.6 Furthermore, the role of ceramics in the ornamentation of the home and their subordination to interior decorating, once a marker of intellectual weakness, has been turned on its head by ceramicists such as Edmund de Waal and Clare Twomey, who have recaptured domestic space as a legitimate site to encounter intelligent, autonomous works in clay. And in mining sculpture’s traditional forms and functions, contemporary ceramicists manage to disrupt distinctions between high and low art while remaining committed to clay and traditional pottery forms. Considering these negative associations of domesticity and functionality, it is interesting to observe how certain ceramicists have deliberately courted these associations. Scott, Twomey, Neil Brownsword and Stephen Dixon have all made work in which the decorative is given a centrality that, whether consciously or not, is tempting to interpret as an act of defiance against the art world’s values and norms. Their work is a seditious challenge to the usual dismissal of decorative elements as being in some way supplemental. In the critical literature that surrounds ceramics, attempts to divide work along ‘functional’ and ‘sculptural’ have failed, in large part because ceramicists at the leading edge of creative practice in Britain have refused to ignore decoration and decorative techniques. Rejecting the standard view that decoration is without value, they have placed decoration, decorative processes and decorators at the intellectual heart of the work. Refusing to collaborate in preserving a ‘privileged position for art based on the cultural authority of male vision’, ceramicists have embraced decoration with all its associations of femininity, consumerism, mass manufacture and market-driven production, and instead of suppressing these associations, they have confidently brought decoration and functional forms into contact with sculpture.7 Using the monument as an impetus to creative action, ceramicists have explored ideas relating to scale, materiality, death and mourning, the plinth (or lack of it), examinations of labour (including named and anonymous makers) and the monument’s democratic dimensions. Their experimentation with potential areas of divergence from monumental sculpture, fragility versus durability and fragment versus monolith, for example, offers a compelling route into understanding something of the nature of exchange and opposition

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between sculpture and ceramics. As Martina Droth has suggested, the qualities of autonomy, creative freedom and aesthetic intent that are ordinarily associated with sculpture ‘can very often be traded with those traditionally linked to decorative work, such as craftsmanship, contingency, and function’.8 In the monumental ceramics discussed in this chapter, decoration, function, smallness and fragility appear ‘not so much as a constraint but rather as a challenge to creation’.9 This chapter probes the following questions: Why is ceramics particularly well suited to engaging with the sculptural monument? How does analysing ceramics from the perspective of sculpture and the decorative open up new ways for thinking about the monument? How do contemporary ceramicists develop a dynamic relationship between material and meaning as they draw concepts from sculpture into their practice in clay? This chapter tracks the metamorphosis of ceramics practice in relation to the monument in Britain in the twenty-first century, articulating the role of sculpture in this transformation. It demonstrates that Britain, home to a historic ceramics industry and originator of factory-produced ware, has fostered a strong seam of concept-driven, highly intellectual contemporary ceramics practice while also providing a very specific social and historical underpinning around the labour of production, industrial manufacturing methods and the associations of traditional patterns, clays and forms for ceramicists to question in their work.10

Defining monuments Dawn Ades, in the introduction to her essay ‘Art as Monument’, sets out a clear definition that addresses the function of monuments and distinguishes between a monument and the monumental. A monument in the classic sense of the term commemorates a person, event or action. . . . ‘Monumental art’, on the other hand, can be taken simply to mean sculpture or painting that is huge or stupendous; in other words, the term’s significance as reminder – celebration or memorial – may be emptied out.11

Ades draws attention to the flexibility of a term that at first glance seems to be firmly fixed. Further widening the understanding of what a monument can be, Richard Taws makes the case for functional objects behaving like sculpture. In his essay on the guillotine, Taws argues that the guillotine frequently behaved

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like a sculpture during the French Revolution. Raised on a dais in order to create a spectacle, this machine was a ‘living Trajan’s column parading the defeated enemy in person’, that ‘threatened conventional sculpture, literally and symbolically . . . even as it borrowed from it’.12 A monument to regicide, the social cleansing of France and the founding of the Republic, the monumental capacity of the guillotine was achieved through its constant use and the circulation of its image via prints and newspapers. For Taws, however, it is in the repetitive and destructive action of the guillotine that its monumental status is disrupted, giving way to anti-monumentality. The function of the object – mechanized butchery – means that it is both a political monument and a ‘deflating, antiheroic event-structure’ that disturbs the rules ‘that govern the meaning of the monument even as it participates in them’.13 Together, these accounts indicate the scope that the monument offers artists. From these two brief overviews of Ades’s and Taws’s writing we gain an understanding of traditional monuments that commemorate a person, event or action; of art that is simply on a huge scale (monuments without the memorializing); unexpected objects engaging in monumental activity; and the monument as concept as well as – if not more than – a form. Perhaps the most influential essay to tease out the difference between commemorative and abstract monuments is Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’.14 The editors of the Modern Sculpture Reader, in their introduction to their reprint of the essay, observe that for Krauss, sculpture is ‘no longer about the medium used, but about the logical moves of artists and art works in relation to sculpture as a cultural construct’.15 As Ades and Taws implied, the monument has ceased to be only a certain type of object and has also become a concept. In doing so it has become accessible to artists whose practice takes in many different forms and materials. In defining this altered landscape Krauss observes two stages of change in sculpture: adherence to the ‘logic of the monument’ and the fading of this logic during the late nineteenth century. Krauss writes, ‘The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.’16 Yet this bond between sculpture and the monument falters: ‘It is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential.’17 Krauss emphasizes how sculpture and the concept of the

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monument are bound together, but not to the extent that they cannot be teased apart. Indeed, once the monument is separated from sculpture and its usual materials, patrons and subject matter, its versatility as a vehicle for giving form to all sorts of ideas – including its more traditional connection with memories – becomes apparent. While Krauss is primarily concerned with the impact of this rupture for sculpture (i.e. allowing it to move out into an expanded field), the concern in this chapter is to explore how this separation of sculpture and monument also allows the monument to move into a different kind of expanded field where it is co-opted into many different forms of artistic practice, in this instance, ceramics. Previously, ceramicists’ material had excluded them from making monumental works beyond coronation cups and slipware platters with their piped-icing style dedications. While ceramics’ engagement with specifically sculptural aspects of monumentality is more recent, this role of traditional pottery in commemorating a wide variety of people and events is well established. Ceramic commemorative ware ranges from seventeenth-century delftware dishes celebrating the coronation of new monarchs to printed mugs marking politically significant (but not necessarily ‘official’) events such as the 1984 miners’ strike. Made for selling, these items were widely accessible, and so carry the taint of ‘commerce’ that so appalled Greenberg. Ceramics are often thought of by both practitioners and critics in terms of how they have been made. Processes, materials and other technical considerations such as methods of decoration have generally been central to the contemplation and analysis of works in clay. Yet one important area of British ceramics showed signs of change in the late 1990s, as some ceramicists shifted their gaze away from studio pottery towards installations and concept-driven work. Critical responses similarly developed a more conceptual approach to ceramics. In the introduction to Thinking through Craft, Glenn Adamson ponders what craft ‘could be made to mean, if thought through in extra-disciplinary terms’.18 This chapter follows Adamson’s provocation, by seeking to demonstrate the effect of the critical stimulus of monumentality – both form and concept – on contemporary British ceramics practice. The works selected for close study in this chapter provide insight into the various ways in which ceramicists have worked with the idea of the monument. This chapter argues that co-opting the monument into ceramics practice expands the possibility of ceramics in terms of concept not material, and that the use and manipulation of this sculptural trope creates opportunities for alternative meanings and possibilities to arise. Disrupting the classical monumental

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conventions of scale, material, labour, plinth and subject, ceramics demonstrates an intellectual robustness that Greenberg strenuously denied could be present in such ‘design’ objects.

The abandonment of permanence If the term ‘monumental’ connotes massiveness, timelessness and public significance, the neologism ‘un-monumental’ is meant to describe a kind of sculpture that is not against these values (as in ‘anti-monumental’) but intentionally lacks them.19

If we accept Laura Hoptman’s argument here, it follows that ceramics’ disruption of the monument need not necessarily be viewed as oppositional or hostile to the values that monuments embody and express. Ceramicists can be thought of as translating into clay the rhetorical technique of praeteritio, that is, drawing attention to a subject by not discussing it. In 2006 British ceramicist Clare Twomey was commissioned to create a work to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of English lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson. Twomey’s site-specific work Scribe was displayed as part of the exhibition House of Words at Dr Johnson’s House in London (Figure 11.1). In this work an even and uninterrupted layer of pale blue clay dust, of a distinctive Wedgwood blue, rests gently on books, paper and quills. Twomey created this installation in the garret room of the house to pay homage to the six assistants who supported Johnson in his work on A Dictionary of the English Language. Gathered in a thick layer, the dust suggests a lengthy passage of time. But this sense of stillness is deceptive. The blue jasper dust has a dynamic relationship with the surface that it accumulates on and the site for which it has been commissioned. Taking the form of the objects that lie beneath, the dust transforms an ordinary desk-scape of books, paper and pens into a mysterious, pulverulent terrain. In the ordinary way mundane, familiar and unwelcome, dust is regularly removed from household things and museum objects; its undisturbed presence is a sign of neglect, objects forgotten and inactivity. Ever accumulating, it is nothing and yet it is everywhere. Twomey, familiar with working within the opportunities and boundaries of institutional commissions, makes good use of ‘museum effect’.20 In Scribe there is a neat inversion of the usual; the dust is inside the museum cabinet rather than gathering on its outside surface, transforming it from a nuisance to be wiped away into an exhibit to be protected and left undisturbed.

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Figure 11.1  Clare Twomey, ‘Scribe’, The House of Words, Dr Johnson’s House, London, 2006. Photography – Clare Twomey Studio.

Placing dust inside the glass case suggests the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of material in the history of display, as well as the inclusion and exclusion of people in historical narrative. At the same time as gently critiquing the construction of history and the artificial nature of the canon of art, Twomey makes a tribute to Johnson’s unnamed amanuenses – a tribute that tests the formal and intellectual capacity of clay in its most unstable and transitory form. Twomey’s use of site as an element that contributes to the meaning of a work is a device central to traditional monuments. Paul Usherwood, in his article ‘Monumental or Modernist? Categorising Gormley’s Angel’, makes use of Krauss’s distinction between two types of sculpture, adopting her definition of monumental sculpture, understood as offering a commemorative representation, and her definition of Modernist sculpture, understood as monumental in scale and not tied to a particular location.21 For Usherwood, scale and an appropriate site are vital signs that a sculpture is a monument: ‘what matters is whether or not one can imagine it sited satisfactorily somewhere else, and generating much the same meaning if it were’.22 Scribe uses the surroundings of Dr Johnson’s House as a conceptual and physical anchor that makes the work an active projector of meaning in that specific space. The dictionary project itself, a monumental task undertaken by Johnson and his assistants, is both inclusionary and exclusionary.

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Scribe plays with monumental conventions; it is commemorative, a confrontation of time, representing the absent, but not, as a traditional monument is, intended to endure into the future. Even Scribe’s containment in a museum case points to the inherently unsustainable task that museums give themselves of halting time and preserving objects indefinitely into the future. There is no attempt to outflank mortality; instead, there is acknowledgement that transience is part of life, that time passes, and that to try to fix memories forever is an ultimately futile endeavour.

New labour: Skill and deskill The 2011 exhibition Modern British Sculpture (Royal Academy of Arts, London) began by presenting visitors with a model of the sculpture that perhaps best embodies the emotional impulse to fix certain memories. This work was a reconstruction of Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph. The iconic monolith was positioned by the curators as a work that embodies one side of the sculptor’s choice between figuration and abstraction. Harnessing the power of nonrepresentational sculpture as a memorial to absence, the full-scale Cenotaph (literally, ‘empty tomb’) was immediately recognized as a success when it was unveiled in Whitehall, London in 1920. Its meaning was ‘readily taken up by the bereaved, the vast majority of whom were mourning those buried in battlefield cemeteries overseas’.23 Despite (or perhaps because of) its emptiness, those in mourning were able to make the sculpture a focus of both individual and collective grief, representing the absent bodies never sent home as well as a sense of national loss. The commemoration of loss and absence so successfully achieved by the Cenotaph (and cenotaphs in towns and cities across the world) is a central and well-established function of the monument. Ceramics have a long history of being used for commemoration (eighteenth-century slipware chargers commemorating marriages, for instance) but the sculptural monument’s approach to fixing and embodying memory, while related, is distinct. Outward facing, intended for public display, authoritarian, the public monument embodies primarily collective memory, and often constructs a very particular narrative around that memory. The year 2009 proved a tipping point in ceramics, with a number of works from this point onwards adopting and incorporating the public and narrative aspect of monumentality into domestic-scale ceramic-ware.

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Ceramicists recognized the potential power of communicating big ideas through accessible forms. A familiar object, a vase will never intimidate the viewer as the blank and uncommunicative surface of purely non-representational sculpture may, such an encounter leaving you feeling less like an urbane savant, and more like someone who does not speak the language in a foreign country. Instead of ceramics’ sense of familiarity being a sign of intellectual weakness (due to its associations with some of the more prosaic aspects of daily life), ceramicists have turned this ease between viewer and artwork to their advantage, making thoughtful and accessible works that draw productively on their social, historical and geographical contexts. When it comes to representing loss and absence and the desire to ‘fix’ memory in ceramics, it is Stoke-on-Trent, the heartland of the British ceramics industry, that recurs again and again as the subject. The collapse of the ceramics industry in the city and the resulting loss of skills is a thread running through the work of a number of prominent British ceramicists such as Brownsword, Scott, Twomey and Dixon. All of these artists have produced pieces that mark the absence of industry in Stoke. Their works operate in much the same way as the Cenotaph, using non-representational form to represent the absent, in this case, the skilled workers of the potteries. Clay communicates the losses that Stoke has suffered more effectively than any amount of stone or bronze could. The Cenotaph, while highly effective in its own sphere, also embodies the reasons why contemporary artists might want to make works that both use and subvert the conventions of the public monument. Authoritarian, powerful and representing a questionable truth, the Cenotaph’s smooth surface conceals difficult alternative narratives about the conflict whose war-dead it marks. Paul Scott is a ceramicist based in Cumbria (northern England), best known for his blue and white transfer printed ceramics. Glanced from a distance, his plates and tureens could be any of the usual blue and white English transfer printed wares so typical of the Stoke-on-Trent factories. Look a little closer, and you will be treated to a dose of sharp political commentary delivered in crisp blue and white from the bottom of a soup bowl. Spode Works Closed is a series of objects found and reworked by Scott, all of which comment on the fate of the historic pottery company Spode, founded in Stoke in 1776 and renowned for producing perhaps the finest transfer printing in the world. By the close of the twentieth century the highly skilled but slow and costly process was replaced by computerized design. The pieces produced by the new methods were almost indistinguishable from their predecessors, and the effect was to deskill the manufacturing process and to shift

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Spode’s wares from artisanal pieces to products of mechanized mass production. From 2007 the bulk of Spode’s manufacture was outsourced to the Far East, rapidly leading to the closure of the historic factory. Spode Works Closed Casserole No. 2 (Figure 11.2) is made with a casserole dish found by Scott during a visit to the decommissioned Spode factory. A kiln waster, damaged during its final firing, it is doubly forlorn. Scott plays with various technical elements to build a rich commentary around the piece. He has repaired the firing cracks with gold, in reference to kintsugi – a Japanese method of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold so that the repaired vessel is left with gilded cracks that emphasize rather than disguise the break. Scott plays with the traditional Spode patterns and also imbues the object with a precise sense of time and place. The reverse of the dish, as well as declaring itself microwave proof and made in the Czech Republic, now also bears the stamp ‘Spode Works Closed’ as well as the artist’s signature. The accumulation of stamps – the standard marker of authenticity – is testament to a simultaneous upturn and downturn in the fortunes of this casserole. Scott

Figure 11.2 Paul Scott, Spode Works Closed Casserole No: 2, 2009–10. Porcelain, in-glaze decal, gilding, 39.3 × 29.3 × 7.3 cm. V&A Collection, C.93-2011. Photo: V&A.

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extends the backstamp remit: from identifying mark to a factual, but emotive, declaration of ‘the end’. The direct, unadorned statement ‘Spode Works Closed’ echoes the simplicity of the memorial inscription ‘The Glorious Dead’ carved on each end of the Cenotaph in London. Scott, using a combination of restraint and decoration, has taken this undesirable piece of domestic pottery and invested it with the gravity of a monument. In doing so, he has transformed the casserole dish from unwanted, abandoned object to coveted artwork in the collection of a national museum (the V&A). The very human scale and function of the casserole dish is at odds with what we might expect from a monument. Traditional sculptural monuments are generally large and overwhelming because of their physical size, but also because of the significance of the ideas and the weight of the ‘establishment’ present in their very fabric. With size conflated with importance and significance, as Eva Díaz states, ceramics can mostly be found at the wrong end of the ‘monumentsculpture-object declination’.24 Scott’s work demonstrates that despite the casserole dish having a precarious place in Díaz’s triangulation, his selection and removal of it from mothballed factory to artist’s studio, where the surface decoration has been altered, has resulted in its final move to national museum. Progression along the object-sculpture-monument continuum is therefore possible even for recognizably functional ceramics. Perhaps ceramics’ tendency towards the domestic, human scale is not the disadvantage that it first appears. The absence of the conventions of immense scale, expensive materials and state-approved commemorative commissions means that ceramicists are free to critique as they choose, to create mobile and portable monuments that can be accessed by a wider audience, to tap a broader range of ideas and emotions and to expose certain narratives that are beyond the scope of a typical public monument. Neil Brownsword began his career as an apprentice modeller at the Wedgwood factory in Stoke. The city’s industry and workers remain a constant point of reference in his work; he challenges the marginalization of craft skill in industry and draws attention to the danger of losing specialist knowledge. Brownsword’s works, which sometimes combine film with ceramic pieces, try to fix the intangible cultural heritage of Stoke-on-Trent in the public memory. Brownsword’s alarm at the decay of the Staffordshire ceramics industry was first aroused in the late 1990s, when the region was transformed by mass redundancies, factories being torn down and the collapse of an industry that had employed the people of Stoke for generations. Placing value on the unwanted, in

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Factory (2017) (Figure 11.3), Brownsword takes as his subject the workers who once deftly crafted dainty porcelain flowers that filled little porcelain baskets on every grandmother’s window sill, and which are now so decidedly out of fashion. Exploring what it means to have tremendous skill to make something that the market does not want, to have a skill that no new use can be found for and remembering a time when Stoke was a place filled with skilled workers, Brownsword pushes the viewer to remember Stoke-on-Trent as a different place

Figure 11.3  Neil Brownsword, Factory, 2017. Courtesy of Korea Ceramic Foundation.

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to the one it is today, positioned as the twelfth-most deprived district in England in 2019.25 Brownsword is not the first ceramicist to be fascinated by these porcelain flowers. Clare Twomey commissioned twenty female artisans in Stoke-on-Trent to produce 10,000 handmade unfired china clay flowers for her Eden Project installation Blossom (2007). Stephen Dixon’s Monopoly (2009), based on the battleship counter of the popular board game, was made from 30,000 handmade bone china flowers that the artist found in a derelict factory in Stoke. As well as displaying this work in the courtyard of the Gladstone Pottery in Stoke as part of the 2009 British Ceramics Biennale, Dixon curated a complementary exhibition The Floralists (Figure 11.4), which celebrated the craft skills of Staffordshire’s remaining bone china flower makers. The exhibition documented the flower makers’ processes and techniques and lifted the flower makers from anonymity by making them the subject of a series of photographic portraits. Indeed, this emphasis on the unnamed maker – as opposed to the unnamed soldier – resonates throughout the memorial works explored in this chapter. Brownsword’s Factory (Figure 11.3) was a performative work that incorporated the skills of artisans once employed in the ceramics industry in Stoke. In the performance, each artisan worked under Brownsword’s instruction. Rita Floyd, a flower maker for over forty-five years, is part of the last generation of workers who still have this skill, yet are unable to pass it on. During the performance, Floyd deftly makes the flowers, but at Brownsword’s request she rejects each piece, dropping them onto a growing heap on the floor in front of her workbench. Showcasing a high form of craftsmanship with no current value to the ceramics industry, the performance places a new conceptual value upon the discarded roses and marigolds. Factory demonstrates Brownsword’s central preoccupation with craft skill and the decline of British ceramic manufacturing in his home town. Like Scott, who repeatedly chooses to work with industrially produced blue-and-white wares, he draws attention to the impact of globalization on traditional industries, techniques and skills while communicating his great passion for the discipline and traditions of craft practice by foregrounding and naming the skilled ceramics workers, Rita Floyd and Anthony Challiner, for example, who collaborate in his performative works. Brownsword and Dixon use the china flowers to construct a narrative and personal history in opposition to the factory histories, stamps and marks, and anonymized labour of ceramics history. In Factory and The Floralists, we see monuments that celebrate named and present workers who are unlikely

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Figure 11.4  Stephen Dixon, The Floralists (Jeanette), 2009. Photo: Gavin Parry and Dave Penny.

to be commemorated in bronze sculptures in the city’s squares. Brownsword and Dixon have effectively raised fitting monuments to these workers while mourning the demise of the industry that cultivated their skills. In place of the standard monument’s demonstrations of financial, political or military triumph, these works have an ambivalent relationship with the idea of a massive, enduring monument. Relatability and empathy take the place of authority and power. These works reflect the (in)tangible heritage of individual people’s skills and knowledge underpinning British industry. Running in parallel is an implicit comment on the tradition of monumental sculpture and an attempt to question and subvert the hierarchical power structures and illusion of permanence that are part of its history.

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If we understand a monument as the manifestation of the impulse to remember, it seems that these works by Scott, Brownsword and Dixon are deeply connected to concepts of loss, memory and commemoration, aligning them closely to the tradition of the monument even as they reject that tradition’s standard forms. Of course, sculpture’s own discontent with traditional monuments has been present for many decades. In the 1960s, Robert Smithson turned his attention to monuments after he bought a bus ticket to Passaic. In this New Jersey city he saw monuments ‘in the overlooked detritus of decaying rust belt areas – drainpipes, slag heaps and over grown rail yards all had their wasted splendour’.26 In the material evidence of Passaic’s industrial decline Smithson saw ‘monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures’.27 Smithson’s article about his journey through the post-industrial landscape of New Jersey is freshly invoked by Brownsword, Twomey, Scott and Dixon’s works, which try to find an appropriate expression for a place that has been abandoned by the industry that gave it identity and employment. Smithson’s term ‘memorytraces’ is perhaps the perfect term for the abandoned flowers found by Dixon, the unwanted Spode used by Scott, and the pot shards and kiln wasters that Brownsword dug out of the ground near his home in Stoke when he was making his early works. What Amy Dickson has written about Twomey’s towering pile of factory seconds, Monument (2009), can be applied (to a degree) to all the ceramic works presented in this chapter. For Dickson, this piece ‘hovers between monument and counter-monument . . . a monument in name and physicality but a countermonument in potential’.28 Factory, Spode Works Closed and Scribe have rejected the scale and physical impact of monumentality – opting for time-based performance, a domestic scale and an ephemeral form respectively – and they are also conceptually counter-monumental. These works have repurposed the notion of memory that is essential to the function and concept of a monument, and disrupted the political, economic, social and cultural contexts in which monuments are usually located. These clay monuments are implicitly critical of the people and events usually subject to commemoration, replacing war heroes with ordinary workers whose industries, craft and skilled work have been pulled from beneath their feet or been unrecognized by the historical, academic and curatorial record.

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Where public monuments are a focus for mourning and collective memory, they can, as Gill Perry describes, ‘easily idealise or evoke nostalgia, producing a glorifying or propagandist historical narrative’.29 The rejection of the conventional form representing historical, national and social narratives can be found in the field of contemporary British ceramics, which has instead seen a greater emphasis on and celebration of skill, and a new sense of value placed on traditional materials such as blue jasper clay. Yet Perry’s warning about idealization and nostalgia should be heeded. In works that eulogize various aspects of the ceramics industry, there is a danger of ceramicists having an undue reverence for their own history. Will these ceramicists turn Stoke into a self-conscious city, filled with a sense of wistful longing for its recent past? Is the ‘smokestack nostalgia’ for the factories and skills of industrial Stoke a symptom of cultural stagnation, or does it empower ceramicists to claim their own particular history and lineage, even as they reach into other disciplines to borrow from them?30 Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell draw a distinction between ‘reactionary nostalgia’ and ‘progressive nostalgia’, suggesting that a ‘nostalgia for the future’ can emerge from memories and memorials.31 It remains to be seen how ceramicists’ concerns with recent history will develop. Are these works futile laments for skills that cannot be passed on in a new era of 3D printing? Or are these ceramicists tapping a desire for authenticity that has helped spur the recent British craft revival? In blending monumentality and ceramics, combining broader narratives with individual ones, these three artists have managed to achieve a successful unity of the conventions of ceramics and sculpture, subtly manipulating those conventions to create memorials simultaneously about the everyday (work) and wider collective memory (the social and economic impact of industrial decline) more akin to the function of a public memorial, but deploying the kind of narrative (failure rather than triumph) left untold by public monuments. In Scribe, the reference to Stoke is present but less emphatic. In this work, Twomey unites two great figures of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson and Josiah Wedgwood, while not allowing either of them to take the spotlight. That is reserved, at last, for the lexicographer’s assistants who worked for eight years standing at desks in the garret of Johnson’s House at 17 Gough Square. Her impermanent memorial to those who did not instigate but instead assisted in a great endeavour treads the same line between monument and counter-monument that is the hallmark of the ceramicist’s approach to fixing and recalling memory.

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Notes 1 ‘Material boundary’ refers to how ceramicists define their practice by medium (clay) in a way that sculptors (who may work in many media) do not. 2 For further reading on the relationship between art and domestic space see Colin Painter, ed., Contemporary Art and the Home (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Colin Painter, At Home with Art (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999); Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Gill Perry, ‘Dream Houses: Installations and the Home’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood, eds, Themes in Contemporary Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 231–76. 3 Elissa Auther, ‘The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg’, Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 339–64, 339. 4 Nancy Troy, ‘Abstraction, Decoration and Collage’, Arts Magazine 54, no. 10 (June 1980): 154–7, 155. 5 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944) reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, eds, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 41–72. 6 A total of £100,000 was raised to fund the purchase of Edmund de Waal’s Wunderkammer for Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in 2008. 7 Cecile Whiting, ‘Pop at Home’, in Reed, Not at Home, 222–36, 222. 8 Martina Droth and Penelope Curtis, eds, Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2009), 4. 9 Penelope Curtis, ‘Foreword’ in Droth and Curtis, Taking Shape, 1. 10 For example, Livia Marin has reimagined the willow pattern drifting across molten teapots, while Michael Eden has experimented with 3D printing, creating, among other things, his Wedgwoodn’t Tureen (2010). 11 Dawn Ades, ‘Art as Monument’, in Dawn Ades, Neal Ascherson, Eric John Hobsbawm, et al., Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators 1930–45 (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995), 50–6, 50. 12 Richard Taws, ‘The Guillotine as Anti-Monument’, Sculpture Journal 19, no.1 (2010): 33–48, 34. 13 Ibid., 46. 14 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 15 Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, editors’ introduction to Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in Wood, Hulks and Potts, eds, Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 333–42, 333.

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Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 33. Ibid., 34. Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 2. Laura Hoptman, ‘Unmonumental: Going to Pieces in the 21st Century’, in Eva Díaz, Richard Flood and Massimiliano Gioni, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New York: Phaidon in association with New Museum, 2007), 128–39, 138. The ‘museum effect’, a term coined by art historian Svetlana Alpers, refers to the separation and elevation of an object by a cultural institution though the act of putting it on display. The selection of one object over others implies a hierarchy of inclusion and exclusion, as well as positioning the institution as a cultural arbiter and authority. See Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 25–32. Paul Usherwood, ‘Monumental or Modernist? Categorising Gormley’s Angel’, Sculpture Journal 3 (1999): 93–101, 95. Usherwood, ‘Monumental or Modernist?’, 95. Catherine Moriarty, ‘The Cenotaph’, in Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson, eds, Modern British Sculpture (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 46–51, 46. Eva Díaz, ‘A Critical Glossary of Space and Sculpture’, in Díaz, Flood and Gioni, Unmonumental, 206–9, 208. Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, ‘The English Indices of Deprivation 2019 – Statistical Release’ (26 September 2019), 14, www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2019. Díaz, ‘A Critical Glossary of Space and Sculpture’, 208. Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, Art Forum (1967): 52–7, 55. Amy Dickson, ‘A Fragile Existence’, in Liesbeth den Besten and Amy Dickson, Monument: Clare Twomey (The Netherlands: Zuiderzee Museum and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2009), 10–19, 17. Perry, ‘Dream Houses: installations and the home’, 249. See Tim Strangleman, ‘“Smokestack Nostalgia”, “Ruin Porn” or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation’, International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013): 23–37. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell, ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 7 (2017): 612–27, 612.

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Fabrication and failure Hacking the decorative in contemporary British art Bridget O’Gorman

Contemporary artists exist in an era where skills are necessarily transferrable. A predominant requirement for most is the ability to negotiate projects across a range of platforms in order to facilitate a livelihood and practice. Contemporary practitioners are a part of what artist Marc Camille Chamoiwicz refers to as the ‘slash/slash/slash generation’.1 Artists can be, among many other things, designers/makers/teachers. Speaking as part of a public discussion at Tate Britain’s retrospective of the work of Paul Nash, Chamoiwicz was addressing Nash’s multidisciplinary approach across fine art and the decorative, and how this resonates with contemporary practice. During this discussion, curator Inga Fraser quoted Nash in 1927: In England, we are still prone to cling rather sentimentally to the idea of the Fine Arts, and we think it a little undignified, or at least unusual, for artists to concern themselves with anything but painting and sculpture, with the result that, for the most part, such arts as interior decorations, stained glass work, theatre decor, textile designing, are left in the hands of [the] competent, but uninspired . . . we should begin to consider patterns as important as pictures.2

Although remnants of those hierarchical preconceptions still exist, within our current system we can see evidence that artists are increasingly, as Nash was a century ago, unwilling to be categorized in such a divisive manner. The British Art Show in 2016 described itself as providing a comprehensive overview of the ‘most exciting’ contemporary art being produced in the UK. Curatorial themes pertained to ‘the changing role and status of the physical object in an increasingly digital age. While some artists engage with this question through traditional craft-based techniques, others experiment with modes of industrial

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Figure 12.1 Charlie Billingham, Delft Dancer, 2016; Untitled (Plant Pots), 2017; Untitled (Wall Print), Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2017. Photograph © RBGE/Tom Nolan. Courtesy: the artist and Supportico Lopez, Berlin.

production.’3 Running concurrent to this curatorial vein, and reflecting this wider trend towards craft-based approaches and industrial fabrication, British artists such as Edward Clydesdale Thomson and Charlie Billingham also employ decorative elements such as wallpapers, furnishings and functional objects as installation devices (Figure 12.1). Others, such as Aaron Angel, whose practice promotes ‘ceramics as a material for sculpture’, has stated, ‘I like craft best when it is art which “nobody made”.’4 Author of Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, Ellen Mara De Wachter, points out that the Turner Prize was recently awarded to the interdependent group Assemble – a collective of eighteen practitioners working across the fields of art, architecture and design.5 The tendency to overlook the collaborative and the relinquishing of authorship in art practice is comprehensively explored by De Wachter. In a broadcast on British radio in 2017, she summarizes her research into collaborative production and the work of practitioners she describes as ‘co-artists’: In fact, artists have always collaborated. Think of the workshops and the guilds producing arts and crafts during the middle ages. .  .  . It’s taken us centuries to tackle our cultural obsession with artists as romantic loners, and instead to recognize them as dependent on support networks, friendships and creative

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exchanges with like-minded people. For some artists, admitting the social and collaborative nature of art production is still urgent. There is a frustration, not least among co-artists, with the general disregard for collaborative strategies.6

De Wachter illuminates a significant point: artists who practice today (particularly those who work across disciplines) can rarely, if ever, do so alone. Their practice relies upon interdependence. In this chapter I speculate upon how, when the myth or ego of the ‘lone artist’ is muted and collaborative mechanisms acknowledged, the cross-fertilization between disciplines reveals hidden truths around the nature of contemporary practice. In light of this, I question what is exposed when contemporary sculpture is accessed through the decorative specifically. By reflecting upon various working practices, I will consider ways in which the decorative informs sculpture in Britain today to highlight the divide between the disciplines of the ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts as a fabrication which is becoming increasingly redundant. In doing so, I will provide key examples of how this progression is emulated in contemporary exhibition making. In order to identify conflations between sculptural and decorative approaches, I explore three distinctive artistic practices that exploit the possibilities of perceived failure through blind spots in training, approach or expertise. As such, this essay meditates upon the multiple associations inherent to the words fabrication and failure. I consider the influence of the artist as ‘amateur’ artisan and collaborative input upon the evolution of the work of Emma Hart. I speculate upon the employment of multi-authored approaches by sculptor Alice Channer. Finally, by focusing on The Grantchester Pottery, I introduce a working example of artists who relinquish authority by working collaboratively. I use these case studies to consider how contemporary sculpture, mediated through the decorative, might reflect wider societal concerns through the often precarious, lived experience of artistic production. In an essay which discusses attitudes towards the arts throughout eighteenthcentury Europe, Barbara Bloemink writes, ‘Fine art and the decorative arts in Europe became increasingly segregated. Government-sponsored art academies began to position painting and sculpture as the highest form of art, defined as sources of aesthetic pleasure uncontaminated by the squalor of practicality.’7 Today we can see artists readily employing materials and methods which expand their language of making beyond this remit. Craft processes, once associated exclusively with the decorative, are now permissible (even fashionable) agents in conveying sculptural narrative. Alison Britton describes the blurring of expectation and the associative power inherent to craft as follows: ‘Craft is

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absorbing and stimulating and weird because it is marginal, unfenced and up for grabs. It gets interesting, it seems to me, when things and disciplines cross over or slip out of their conventional category, and open to various readings.’8 This chapter considers the kind of slippage to which Britton refers – when the conventional contexts for ‘sculptural’ and ‘decorative’ languages are merged and mutually activated. As Bloemink states, the crafted and decorative object has long been annexed as ‘lesser’ than the fine art object. It is perhaps more accessible, by its very nature unconcerned by the exclusivity of the contemporary art world and its hierarchical paradigms. Crafted things can speak of indigeneity, domestic experience, a vernacular of the hand passed down through generations, often outside of academic structures. Sculpture gains, by absorbing those associated materials and processes, such as embroidery, for example, a potency of human association ranging from formative memories of the home to colonial and cultural references.9 The decorative, although not always utilitarian, is often essential to architectural design and is therefore associated with it in its fellowship with function. It bears connection with the hand that constructs it and the body which utilizes it, sparking sensorial narrative. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how for him, ‘a delicately coloured polished stone surface is subliminally sensed by the tongue’.10 Despite this, Pallasmaa argues that rather than accounting for the holistic sensory experience, architectural design is often concerned only with sight or an ultimately reductive visual aesthetic. This ‘ocular bias’ might be usefully disassembled by proposing that utilitarian materials and methodologies associated with the decorative can enable the sculptor to relate complex dialogues by sensory engagement.11 When artists make porous the conventional boundaries between sculpture and the decorative through their mode of production and material, it is possible to trace how they open up the ‘various readings’ or alternative stories highlighted by Britton. In her essay, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, Esther Leslie describes how ‘storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays a part which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures of learnt work.’12 It could be said that Emma Hart employs varying devices for storytelling through her earlier installations (Figure 12.2 and Figure 12.3), often presenting disparate and unexpected media alongside crafted objects which make evident multiple ‘gestures of learnt work’ in expressive, haptic narratives. Hart employs scripted anecdotes extracted from everyday experiences, accompanied by hand-built, glazed ceramics. The rudimentary aesthetic of these works, presented alongside

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Figure 12.2  Emma Hart, Installation detail from Dirty Looks, 2013, Camden Arts Centre, London. Glazed ceramic, wood, photography, video. Photo: Andy Keate.

Figure 12.3 Emma Hart, Installation detail from Spread, 2015, Art Exchange, University of Essex. Glazed ceramic, fabric. Photo: Douglas Atfield.

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slick digital screens and sound recordings relating the artist’s own habitual and often stressful experiences of balancing work and motherhood, for example, exacerbate a sense of the grotesque drawn from the quotidian. It is, perhaps, precisely the artless, sometimes ungainly bodily experience (what Bloemink highlights in eighteenth-century terms as the ‘squalor of practicality’) inherent to everyday life, that Hart wishes to engage. Hart has expressed that she is interested in spillage as a form of evidence or trace of past events.13 In the creation of semi-figurative, quasi-functional objects she exploits the often unforgiving, plastic memory of clay. For an artist not formally trained in its use, it can, like bodily function, be unpredictable. In this way, the artist permits the material to speak to the viewer in its own language, presenting us with compelling, often uncanny forms replicating warped tongues, recoiling strands of hair, weeping breasts, communicating an overriding narrative of corporeal awkwardness. The artist has described her initial experience of handling the medium as a struggle ‘to get the clay to do what I wanted’.14 Visceral appendages sag, protrude and appear suspiciously moist. Their glazed, often unrefined surfaces, appearing to sweat, salivate or leak, are suggestive of a certain loss of control or impotence. What might be considered poorly rendered in the eyes of the artisan relates as poetic, uncomfortable and expressive within Hart’s sculptural vocabulary. Individualistic mark making or evidence of the artist having bitten and scratched the clay further allows for the communication of a bodily gesture and the idea that ‘material things are, in philosophical terms, understood to mediate the internal and external world of human beings’.15 Sculpture conversant with the decorative is particularly pertinent to a body of work entitled Mamma Mia in the appropriation of forms referencing domestic measuring jugs, revealing internally glazed stylized imagery. The large-scale installation at London’s Whitechapel Gallery is described as an exploration of the ‘design and rupture’ of pattern from the visual to the psychological.16 While researching Mamma Mia, Hart observed family therapy sessions in Milan, Italy, fabricating the pieces while on residency with expert input and specialist facilities at Faenza (famous for its pottery and the majolica jugs, upon which her forms are based). Considering their heavily patterned interiors, we are reminded of Nash’s assertion about the importance of patterns discussed earlier. Hart explains that for her ‘both [aspects of her research] are driven by patterns, the psychiatrist is trying to unravel human behavioural patterns, and the studio to generate a visual pattern’.17 The audience is presented with a series of what appear

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to be gigantic, overturned, ceramic jugs or animated human heads (the spout representative of a severed nose) pendulously hanging from the ceiling (Figure 12.4). Each of their interiors is adorned in a different, brightly glazed decorative design, while their exteriors bear marks resembling the graduated scale of the measuring device – those ‘heads’ presented as having a limit to how much they can hold. Contemplating the human mind as a repository, the works operate as sculptural speech bubbles, the shape of which is projected through a light source from within the suspended structure onto the floor below. In discussing her process, the artist speaks of discovering ‘the potential of a decorative pattern . . . [in communicating] some of the negative or detrimental effects of human behavior that I’d seen in the clinic’.18 In one such pattern devised for a work entitled I want what you’ve got, even when I’m asleep the artist explains how she wished to communicate the idea of jealousy – thus employing the use of vibrant greens due to their symbolic association with the emotion. Alison Britton comments upon the emotive and sensory sentiment often latent within the domestic object such as a seemingly benign jug: ‘Always a home includes objects that furnish your life beyond function; other needs are met: stimulus, selfrepresentation, sensuality, recollection. . . . Crockery is a fundamental category, a baseline of ceramic understanding, and perceived through touch and use as

Figure 12.4  Emma Hart, Installation of Mamma Mia, 2017, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Glazed ceramic, lighting, mixed media. Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

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well as sight.’19 As with all of Hart’s sculptures, these works, ominously perched overhead, are far from benign. The size and detailed technical realization of the objects, paired with the concept of the jug as both a functional receptacle and sculptural intervention, brings to mind Tanya Harrod’s assertion that ‘jugs, platters and vases . . . offering a repertoire of familiar forms . . . therefore have the capacity to act as inspirational objets trouvés, ripe for re-representation’.20 Hart engages this potential for re-appropriation of the decorative through her earlier works by exploiting a feeling of psychological stress or bodily embarrassment through spillage, lack of control and technical failure. Departing from this, in Mamma Mia it is evident that the artist’s vision is furthered in consultation and co-production with a team of skilled artisans in a traditional, ceramic studio setting. Alice Channer also embraces technique across function and discipline. Employing slippage between handcrafted, multi-authored and manufactured structures, the artist has stated that she concerns herself with ‘finding out how things are made’.21 As such, crafted things are presented in conversation with industrially and post-industrially fabricated elements. In the 2012 exhibition Out of Body at the South London Gallery, mass-produced, high-street spandex clothes, hand-cast in aluminium, were industrially rolled and flattened (Figure 12.5). The sculptures are static yet imply movement in their undulating curves, their stasis punctuated by water-jet cut and mirror-polished stainless steel forms, bound in elastic fibres. These elements were anchored by machined and handcarved polished marble components, reminiscent of disembodied limbs or tools. The titles allow for further corporeal association; Amphibians and Reptiles embody ideas of skin stretched over cold-blooded creatures. As the sculpture appears to creep and stretch, the sensual qualities of materials such as polished stone (discussed earlier in reference to Pallasmaa) are exposed through smooth, refined finish – yet, as we instinctively know, remain cool to the touch. The artist’s preoccupation with co-production, reproduction and re-appropriation (so essential to her output) is indicative of a desire for transparency, or a multifaceted gesture seemingly motivated towards the demystification of artistic production. Through her applied investigation, Channer’s practice enables us to view sculptural works on the same terms as the handcrafted decorative object, the industrially designed structure, the functional, bespoke and mass-produced tools that our bodies connect with every day. In Breathing (Figure 12.6) casts of elastic waistbands cut from highstreet clothes are industrially powder-coated and dangle out of context upon

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Figure 12.5  Installation view from Alice Channer: Out of Body at the South London Gallery, 2012. Photo: Andy Keate. Image courtesy the artist and the South London Gallery.

wooden dowelling – the once utilitarian object now operating as sculptural component. Its reincarnation denies the practical stretch of the original material and its connection to the flex of the diaphragm. Out of Body ranges from the minute to the monumental, a sculptural language of expansion and contraction, employing many hands and multiple means (the manufacture of high-street clothing, the artist as consumer, and the process of casting and powder coating). Channer’s working experience in embracing multi-authored methodologies has exposed subtle yet embedded variations in value systems between contemporary sculptural and artisanal approaches. In an interview, she refers to her dialogue with technicians in casting her sculptural constituents: The foundry that makes casts for me now mainly casts figurative sculptures of world leaders to an incredible degree of accuracy. When I first brought them a wax cast of a waistband with an air bubble left in the top they were surprised that I saw enough value in it to want to cast it in metal. But I wanted to keep the bubble as a memory of that part of the process when it was liquid.22

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The foundry’s reported curiosity at Channer’s request imparts a level of insight; that the borders defining the disciplines of the fine and the decorative or applied arts are ambiguous and contested. Our attention is drawn to a simultaneous interdependence and a level of dissonance between the sculptor and the artisan fabricator. For Channer, the substantive act of replication is essential to the agency of the work, impossible without the employment of skilled artisanal input. Yet that which concerns the artist does not always hold the same importance for the maker. Channer’s approach negates the myth of the lone artist by acknowledging a shared conversation with the people who physically realize her work. She is the instigator; her practice engages and ratifies a dialogue of co-production between the artist and the maker. What was seen as failure in the eyes of the skilled artisan is, for Channer, part of the overriding message she wishes to transmit via the act of fabrication – the trace evidence of the multiple hands and states involved in her sculpture’s physical reiteration. When infiltrating disparate processes of fabrication, Channer emphasizes her vision around shared authorship and what this reflects for her. She explains,

Figure 12.6  Alice Channer, Breathing, 2012. Installation view from Alice Channer: Out of Body at the South London Gallery, 2012. Photo: Andy Keate. Image courtesy the artist and the South London Gallery.

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at the bottom of the digital fabric prints the manufacturers write my name, and then some notes about the production. I see that very much as the signature of the process, because this was written in the place where it was made. But it is also my signature, because it has my name in it.23

The act of the technician hand-signing Channer’s name (and not their own) upon the textile, concurrent with her decision to retain this mark as part of the sculpture’s identity, is both charged and ambiguous. Despite her emphasis upon co-production, within Channer’s process and output the individuals who physically generate the objects she devises are largely unattributed. Materials and processes oscillate between the industrial, the crafted and the multi-authored, providing us with an interrogation or levelling of hierarchies between the hand and the machine, the natural and the man-made. In practice, this co-production speaks of a chain of events, engagements and processes choreographed by the artist towards a moment of realization and exhibition. It could be said that the anonymity of those individuals responsible for the production of her sculpture activates a sense of presence through a perceived absence. The act of adopting a sculptural phraseology such as this, a vocabulary of objects hewn through handcrafted, industrially fabricated and mass-produced techniques, is deliberate, inferring wider connotations concerning our relationship to the material world with which we surround ourselves. The artist states, ‘In my experience of making art, I have found that there is no such thing as anonymous “mass production”. For example, an iPhone is put together by people, and in a similar way so is my work, and that has direct political and social implications that are not necessarily apparent on its surface.’24 The implications alluded to here signal a recognition within the work that, ultimately, there are levels of skill, lived experiences and stratified layers of human input which are not outwardly recognizable upon the objects we connect with in our daily lives. Participating in the discussion about Nash’s legacy mentioned earlier, Channer explains that ‘Like Nash, we do not see ourselves as separate from these things, but deeply implicated and embedded within them. I cannot work with plastics .  .  . for example, without knowing and feeling that they are part of many different human and non-human bodies, geological ones included’.25 Channer’s sculptural range is emphatic in its dependence upon a network of individuals, materials and processes. Just as objects associated with the decorative are often co-authored and unattributed, she exploits the anonymity of producers within her sculptural practice as a means of interrogating broader

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societal concerns around how bodies are made visible or invisible and ultimately how we interact with the material world we have constructed around us. She has stated that ‘this has huge implications for authorship, intention, what it means to have a body, to be an artist. I would describe my works as authored by many different beings, only one of which is me.’26 Questions around ‘authorship, intention, what it means to have a body, to be an artist’ are explored explicitly through decorative languages by The Grantchester Pottery. Producing exhibitions which often operate as physical pinboards, the individual’s hand is routinely obliterated and untraceable. In a continual overlay of references, designed interiors appear as potential showrooms or implied sets. Decorated panels behave sculpturally, often suspended within and dividing the space, guiding the viewer’s eye and physical negotiation of the overall composition (Figure 12.7). Murals, wallpapers and wall paintings provide backdrops which are pasted over with disparate image references, punctuated, anchored and interrupted by functional objects. Embellished walls provide a backdrop from which clusters of blank ceramic-ware, upholstered furniture or plant pots pop

Figure 12.7  Installation view Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage, 2015, Jerwood Arts, London. Courtesy the artist and Jerwood Arts, London. Photo: Anna Arca.

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– a symbolically operational, physical still life. Motif and colour reference the palette of the latest season’s catwalk, 1980s knitwear, abstracted images of famous interiors and a replication of David Hockney’s appropriation of a Hokusai. In many cases, objects are re-appropriated as part of other exhibitions, or for use in the artists’ own homes. Designs for wall drawings or paintings are passed to gallery technicians to render by their own hand. Founded by artists Phil Root and Giles Round in 2011, The Grantchester Pottery is not actually a pottery, but a collaborative, conceptual practice. Rather than being duplicitous, the title of the collective sets out to posit multiple and multi-layered associations. The capital ‘T’ in the ‘The’ suggests an identity with a distinctive ethos, while the word ‘Pottery’ implies that it involves more than one person. Conversely, if one considers the word ‘potter’, this also suggests that it is about musing and doing, that it is playful. There is a projection of awareness around the historicized, romanticized preconception of the maker and a suggestion of the contemporary artist in dialogue with the decorative. Conceived during a residency near Grantchester, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridgeshire, the collective models itself upon the ethos of the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops founded in 1913 by Roger Fry with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. These artists came together for a time to produce a range of decorative, functional works under a collective identity. They were often chastised as being members of an aristocratic elite and for attempting to produce and trade objects without having developed sufficient skill in their realization. Despite this, Tanya Harrod asserts that, for their time, ‘[they] were transgressive, mixing fine art and design, using high art in a domestic context, decoratively’.27 Harrod references Christopher Reed’s Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture and his view of the Omega Workshops’ experimental approach as a ‘provocative, early model of coalition’.28 Employing a collective approach towards an ambitious output, one might consider The Grantchester Pottery as a kind of revised ‘model of coalition’. Co-founder Giles Round states, ‘We feel that it’s within our remit as artists to make things for the home .  .  . for us, work and life are so intertwined that this approach makes sense.’29 During a studio visit in 2017, he expands upon this, explaining that ‘the first ever project we worked on was [the design and production of] a coffee service. This was a way of positioning artwork into people’s hands’ (Figure 12.8).30 The undertaking of the fabrication of an object such as a coffee cup by the artist, as opposed to the craftsperson, with the intention for audiences not just to regard it but potentially to drink from it, not only confronts embedded ideologies around sculpture and the decorative

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Figure 12.8 The Grantchester Pottery, A Coffee Service, 2011. Glazed stoneware, mahogany, painted floorcloth, electrical components and fixings. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire. Photo: N. Smallbone.

but also exercises a mindful oscillation between ideas of function and preconceived expectation. Objects presented as a contemporary art installation are made available to audiences by way of being both physically accessible and conceivably affordable. For example, ranges of bespoke wallpaper or functional ceramic-ware can be acquired for the home through purchase or commission. The Grantchester Pottery propositions the audience, inviting new dialogues between the object and the art viewer’s assumed engagement with it. Installations incorporating curated, decorative and domestic components invite use, thus entreating a renegotiated interaction between the audience and the ‘art object’ in its gallery setting. The sphere of domesticity transgresses the natural habitat of the exhibition space – a space which usually forbids touch, let alone the prospect of use or decorative embellishment. The collective is made up of numerous practitioners who share in the authorship of the design and production of installations and related events, featuring not just ceramic-ware and wallpapers but also textiles, furniture, lighting and other functional, domestic objects. Invited participants (a fluctuating group of about eleven creative professionals including artists, designers and craftspeople) are based internationally, their connectivity enabled

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through internet-based, file-sharing technology. That The Grantchester Pottery consists of participants with multiple skill sets is significant. There is pragmatic intention in conversing with practitioners of diverse backgrounds in fulfilling its myriad objectives. For example, in reference to the development of a range of multi-use textiles with menswear designer Olivia Hegarty (Figure 12.9), Round states, ‘When you need technical help it’s best to just ask for it.’31 The dialogue cultivated within this network facilitates The Grantchester Pottery in adopting wide-ranging skills and processes – knowledge extending far beyond the scope of one individual – yet they do not engage every contributor on every project. Each participant realistically balances the collaboration alongside their own practice and income-generating roles. As such, concerns such as geographical location, budget or time-based constraints (as well as conceptual requirements for specific projects) are all factors which restrict or manifest desired outcomes. Essential to this is a core and active gesture of will – a practice of proposition by doing. In tandem with the obvious benefits mined

Figure 12.9  Image from Lookbook A/W 2015, 2014. Courtesy Olivia Hegarty and The Grantchester Tailors Guild.

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through the collective, by practicing in this way there exists the simultaneous tendency to agitate established dividing attitudes between contemporary art and decorative art practice. Round explains that ‘[it has been put to us in the past, that] it was preposterous that artists make these bad ceramics. [My response was] that’s all we can do.’32 If we consider the question of failure as a generative tool in this sense, it is conceivable that working across sculpture and the decorative allows contemporary artists to expand upon different languages of making, as well as to exploit associations inherent to the decorative in accessing a set of complex narratives. When questioned about the validity of contemporary artists adopting traditional, applied art or design-led techniques without formal training, Round states, ‘For me, the challenge in the work is not that I’m a craftsperson. I’m not in any way trying to diminish the value of craft, but there is always in my work a sort of proposition: I don’t know that I particularly like how the world is designed. I also believe that people should “do it themselves” more.’33 Round expresses dissatisfaction with a throwaway culture and the demand for mass-produced chipboard furniture made by Ikea, when one might fabricate something oneself, or purchase something solid, second hand. Harrod has observed a similar sentiment in stating that ‘the desirability of recycling and up-cycling is currently central to our emotional responses to materials, with the world’s waste dumps becoming sites of horrified fascination and inspiration’.34 The premise that people might ‘do it themselves more’ (by making one’s own coffee service without formal training, for example), inevitably introduces the potential for failure, yet perhaps repeated failure increases the possibility of developing a proficiency with materials and an amplified awareness of the things that we use habitually in our daily lives. This implies a level of desire for autonomy, self-sufficiency or self-expression and for proposing alternate economies through the decorative. While anxieties stemming from political, environmental and economic uncertainty might be attributed to a perceived drive to reuse, recycle and appropriate, Harrod’s reference to our ‘emotional response’ to materials holds significance in a consumerist era. The Grantchester Pottery, having described their work and life as being intertwined, establishes the position of divergent realities – that hacking the decorative through collaborative engagement facilitates a level of autonomy within a neoliberal context. As such, the romanticized, lone artist is increasingly irrelevant in Round’s experience. In reference to how this relates to The Grantchester Pottery, he poses the following question:

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How do you pay your rent? Many people [artists] have strategies. If they worked in a conventional manner they would sell their artworks. I don’t know anyone working in a conventional manner now. The way artists exist, and what they are producing is changing out of necessity.35

As well as the growing recognition for collaborative strategies in creative production today, most artists exploit a range of transferrable skills to maintain their existence. Contemporary artists are, after all, trained to be adaptable and adept in the use of a range of techniques and media, to multitask and devise creative solutions which can be applied across multiple industries. In 2011 (the year of The Grantchester Pottery’s inception), a selection of essays from E-flux journal examined the artist in relation to how they live: ‘it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness.’36 This pronouncement recalls the idea of the ‘slash/slash/ slash’ generation mentioned earlier. Artists, as Round describes, rarely survive upon the sale of work produced alone in the studio, supplementing their income by fulfilling varying roles within ‘gig’ and ‘friend’ economies. The broad range of skills and abilities fundamental to the survival of most contemporary artists forge conditions from which hybrid approaches may emerge. Round argues that Richard Sennet’s exploration of the telecommunication company Motorola’s collaborative engagement in the race to invent the mobile telephone has provided a working model of cross-pollination for The Grantchester Pottery. In The Craftsman Sennet describes, ‘finding that cooperation and collaboration within certain companies allowed them to make headway. .  .  . Motorola, a success story, developed what it called a “technology shelf ”, created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future.’37 The pooling of information in this way has directly informed how The Grantchester Pottery operates. By creating their own version of a ‘technology shelf ’, members of the group are invited to upload images, designs and references through an open file-sharing folder. This collation of data is appropriated and translated into compositions for paintings, wall drawings, formats or subject matter for new styles and exhibition identities. The transparency of this methodology advances a deconstruction of the elusive mechanisms often associated with the fine art process. Traditionally, the artist’s studio, along with the activities and conversations which take place within it, has remained largely a covert space. The final output (e.g. a sculpture) does not

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necessarily speak outwardly of the various bodies and minds which authored or impacted its final form. This idea could be compared with De Wachter’s depiction of collaborative creativity existent in other art forms: ‘In music, collaboration is obvious and celebrated, bands and orchestras perform on stage and everyone can observe their interactions. It’s clear who is doing what and it’s also clear that the end result of their combined efforts transcends individual performances.’38 In terms of visual art, the collective mining of information offers exciting and alternative possibilities for the artist. De Wachter’s assessment of the orchestra as combined effort could lend itself to further understanding of how The Grantchester Pottery operates: as co-founder Phil Root has stated, for them, the collaboration ‘creates a kind of harmony in the design [that] nevertheless allows it to pull in more than one direction’.39 The Grantchester Pottery embraces what has been largely denied in discourse around creative practice for centuries: that the worlds of fine art, sculpture and design are not as divisive and divided as often portrayed. Giles Round proposes, ‘art is perpetually recycled into the world of design . . . why don’t we invert this?’40 A world of inversion, accelerated consumption and reuse is apparent when considering The Grantchester Pottery’s engagement with multiple references, speaking to an innovative language of authorship through co-authored assemblage. In an interview, Root concurs that often participants’ work gets distorted to a point that ‘the [artist] doesn’t recognize it anymore’.41 If we look to writer, art critic and activist Lucy Lippard’s text The Pink Glass Swan, she references the hierarchy of fine art objects produced exclusively by one hand – championed by the art world as signifiers of taste, wealth and status, as distinct from ‘lesser’ decorative ornaments with which many people affordably surround themselves in their homes. Making the argument that the artist possesses an innate power in interrupting established systems, she states, Looking at and ‘appreciating’ art in this century has been understood as an instrument (or at best a result) of upward social mobility, in which owning art is the ultimate step. Making art is at the bottom of the scale. This is the only legitimate reason to see artists as so many artists see themselves – as ‘workers’. .  .  . For years now, with little effect, it has been pointed out to artists that the art-world superstructure cannot run without them.42

The relinquishing of authorship by The Grantchester Pottery, its preoccupation with the decorative paired with the notion of rapidly changing style or seasonal range (as can be seen within the worlds of fashion or design), seems counterintuitive. Yet the act of embracing multiple authors and a continual reinvention

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or corruption of a distinctive aesthetic alludes to the direct challenge of an exclusive, established art market which benefits only a few (a business dependent upon the lone artist’s signature – and signed – oeuvre). This could therefore be viewed as a transgressive act within the context of what Lippard refers to as ‘the art-world superstructure’. The ways in which The Grantchester Pottery chooses to document its output also interrogates function blurred within a fine art premise. In Figure 12.10 taken during a residency at Camden Arts Centre in 2016, we are presented with a hand posed in the placement of a mug by The Grantchester Pottery. The fact that the hand is gloved implies association with the conservator; it suggests that this object should not be tainted by the residue of direct handling. Equally, the presence of the handler in its gesticulation is essential to the image, leading us to question whether this is the documentation of a performance or the representation of a fabrication process. There remains a pervading ambiguity around the depicted object and its function. In light of this, Round refers to the influence of Franz West upon the practice. The work speaks specifically to West’s ‘Adaptives’ or sculpture which invites interaction categorically through touch and useable association – as potential prosthetic or appendage. West’s sculptures are ‘suggestive of physical human forms, yet are ambiguous enough to conjure up a range of possible gestural associations. Others are based upon a utilitarian object: clothing, bags, brooms, walking sticks or bottles.’43 In direct reference to this, if The Grantchester Pottery includes a bespoke chair within the context of an exhibition, the audience is likely being invited to sit in it. Although The Grantchester Pottery does not categorize the work as sculpture, this emphasis suggests that the decorative provides a device or lens through which to playfully convey multiple messages, one of which could be situated within sculptural discourse. In an essay from 2013, British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, in conversation with Elizabeth Fisher, refers to the experience of encountering an object as ‘walking around something, or turning something over in one’s hands and forgetting what was . . . seen or felt a few seconds ago’, concluding that sculptural language ‘despite its physicality, refutes a static image’.44 In this way, The Grantchester Pottery engages the viewer in a haptic conversation between the object and the body, a sensory story of scale, mobility and presence. In terms of exhibition making, The Grantchester Pottery affirms, ‘It [the decorative] allows people to literally inhabit spaces.’45 The object confronts us not only by fulfilling a potentially practical function within the gallery but also by propositioning the habitual gesture and our instinctual, physical negotiation of it.

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Figure 12.10  The Grantchester Pottery, poster image for ACID TEST, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Camden Arts Centre, London. Photo: The Grantchester Photographic Society.

By considering contemporary British art practice which allows us to contemplate sculpture and the decorative simultaneously, it is possible to recognize the futility of discounting works that do not fit precisely into one particular field. It is possible to trace how shared authorship allows for alternative methodologies, a broadening of visual languages and experimental aesthetics to emerge in sculptural practice. The work of Emma Hart demonstrates poetic

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slippage between disciplines; her earlier use of clay pushes the material beyond its conventional setting – her struggle to control the substance apparent and exploitable. As crafted works her earlier objects might be described as rudimentary, as sculptural works they are sophisticated palimpsests. They appear pockmarked, unsettlingly moist and animate, overworked; her worried textures create a sense of somatic experience. It could be argued that this alchemical failure is generated through an experimental openness towards the material via the lack of formal training, conversant with her skill as an experienced visual artist. This enables her to deliver a nuanced narrative, allowing the material to behave in ways which are aesthetically troubling yet viscerally arresting. In contrast, her later works enable us to observe how consultation with a traditional pottery studio, collaboration with skilled makers and the employment of multiple hands facilitates a progression of this practice which would be otherwise impossible. Within Alice Channer’s practice, there is a heightened awareness, sense of responsibility and call for recognition around how the things that we connect with in our daily lives are authored. Her embrace of technical failure and the marks made upon her sculptural components through fabrication (incidental or otherwise) spotlight a concern to speak of the many (often unattributed) hands, processes and stages involved in its material production. Furthermore, her practice deconstructs the myth of the lone artist in sculptural production through an espousal of the multi-authored object. For The Grantchester Pottery, the decorative provides a model through which is generated a kind of activism, democratization and furthering of possibility. Giles Round states, ‘[It] gave us the freedom to work with an expanded group of artists in a collaborative way.’46 This freedom facilitates the coming together of like-minded creatives – reflective not just of aesthetic but also of economic, environmental concerns – as well as the fact that artists today rely upon social support networks. Its sometimes failed or roughly hewn aesthetic does not set out to diminish the decorative but infers possibility by gesture, generating income and the dissemination of work outside of conventional, institutional frameworks. Within this, we can see a proposition for mobilization and self-sufficiency in looking to alternative modes of working or living. In 2011, Christopher Frayling published an interview with the late intellectual and craft expert David Pye. According to Pye, ‘the criterion of fine art . . . is that it is absolutely useless. It may be highly valuable, but it’s quite, quite useless . . . It’s meant for contemplation – it’s not meant for use.’47 In light of how artists practice today, we might review this annexing definition by quoting Round in the assertion

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that ‘if art did not function there could not be an economy around it’.48 As the artists foregrounded in this chapter demonstrate, practitioners are producing work which actively blurs the question of function in response to their own lives and backgrounds. If artistic production depends upon many hands and multiple networks, alternate economies emerge, indicating that the alchemical embrace between sculptural and decorative languages resonates far beyond preconceived categorization and into the complexity of the lived experience.

Notes 1 Michael Bracewell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alice Channer, and Inga Fraser, ‘From the Surreal to the Decorative’, Tate Etc. Issue 38 (Autumn 2016). Available online: http:​/​/www​​.tate​​.org.​​uk​/co​​ntext​​-comm​​ent​/a​​rticl​​es​/su​​rreal​​​-deco​​rativ​e (accessed 30 September 2017). 2 Paul Nash (1927) quoted by Fraser in Bracewell et al., ‘From the Surreal to the Decorative’. 3 British Art Show 8 exhibition, ‘About’ (2016). Available online: http://www​ .britishartshow8​.com/ (accessed 30 September 2017). 4 Tom Morton, ‘In Focus: Aaron Angell’, Frieze​.com​, 16 June 2013. Available online: https​:/​/fr​​ieze.​​com​/a​​rticl​​e​/foc​​us​-aa​​​ron​-a​​ngell​ (accessed 30 September 2017). 5 Ellen Mara De Wachter, Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration (London: Phaidon, 2017). 6 De Wachter, on ‘Four Thought’, (radio programme) BBC Radio 4, 18 January 2017. 7 Barbara Bloemink, ‘Sameness & Difference’, in Barbara Bloemink, Design Does Not Equal Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread (London: Merrell, 2004), 17–33, 19. 8 Alice Britton, Seeing Things – Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design (London: Occasional Papers, 2013), 9. 9 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984). 10 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley, 2005), 59–60, 59. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 5–13, 6. 13 Kathy Noble, Emma Hart: Dirty Looks, File Note 80 (London: Camden Arts Centre, 2013).

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14 Hettie Judah, ‘Freudian Slips: The Secrets Hidden Inside Emma Hart’s Ceramic Art’, The Guardian, 6 July 2017. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/ar​​tandd​​ esign​​/2017​​/jul/​​06​/ma​​mma​-m​​ia​-em​​ma​​-ha​​rt​-ce​​ramic​​-art (accessed 30 September 2017). 15 Karen Richmond and Maiko Tsutsumi, ‘Thingness Essay’ (2011). Available online: https​:/​/th​​ingne​​ssoft​​hings​​.word​​press​​.com/​​thing​​ness-​​bookl​​et​/th​​in​gne​​ss​-es​​say/ (accessed 30 September 2017). 16 Emma Hart, Mamma Mia! exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, 2017. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.whit​​echap​​elgal​​lery.​​org​/e​​xhibi​​tions​​/emma​​-hart​​​-mamm​​a​-mia​/ (accessed 30 September 2017). 17 Judah, ‘Freudian Slips’. 18 Emma Hart, ‘Emma Hart: Mamma Mia! At the Whitechapel Gallery’ (2017). Available online: https://youtu​.be​/9TGyCRoXDzs (accessed 1 April 2018). 19 Britton, ‘Things & Work’, in Britton, Seeing Things, 236–41, 237. 20 Tanya Harrod, ‘A Secret History of Clay’ (2004), in Tanya Harrod, The Real Thing – Essays on Making in the Modern World (London: Hyphen Press, 2015), 88–91, 88. 21 Line Ellegaard, ‘Artists at Work: Alice Channer’, Afterall (1 March 2012). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.aft​​erall​​.org/​​onlin​​e​/art​​ists-​​at​-wo​​rk​-al​​ice​-c​​hanne​​​r#​.XJ​​EN9BP​​ 7TOQ (accessed 19 March 2019). 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Bracewell et al., ‘From the Surreal to the Decorative’. 26 Ibid. 27 Tanya Harrod, ‘The Omega Project’ (2009), in Harrod, The Real Thing, 27–30, 28. 28 Ibid. 29 Catriona Gray, ‘Modern Romance’, Town & Country (Winter 2015). 30 Giles Round, personal communication with the author, 2017. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Tanya Harrod, ‘Visionary Rather than Practical: Craft, Art and Material Efficiency’ (2015), in Harrod, The Real Thing, 327–38, 327. 35 Round, personal communication with the author, 2017. 36 Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood, E-flux Journal: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity and the Labor of Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 6–7. 37 Richard Sennet, The Craftsman (London: Penguin, 2009), 19–52, 32–3. 38 De Wachter, Co-Art.

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Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Phil Root, personal communication with the author, 2017. Round, personal communication with the author, 2017. Root, personal communication with the author, 2017. Lucy Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (New York: The New Press, 1995), 117–18. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, ‘Franz West, Early Work’, exhibition, 2014. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.hau​​serwi​​rth​.c​​om​/ha​​user-​​wirth​​-exhi​​bitio​​ns​/51​​44​-fr​​anz​​-w​​est​-e​​ arly-​​work (accessed 30 September 2017). Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Unidentified Foreign Objects: Phyllida Barlow in Conversation with Elizabeth Fisher’, in Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, eds, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013), 98–109, 102. Root, 2017. Gray, ‘Modern Romance’. David Pye, ‘Things Men Have Made’, quoted in Christopher Frayling, On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus (London: Oberon Books, 2011), 43–52, 45. Round, personal communication with the author, 2017.

Index Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes; ‘bold’ refers to illustrations. Abels, Maren  24 Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels  127, 128 Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen  52 Adams’ History and Description of St George’s Hall  96 Adamson, Glenn  6, 13, 264 Thinking through Craft  274 Ades, Dawn  272, 273 Adorno, Theodor  270 aesthetic synthesis  170 Ancien Régime  215 Andersen, Hans Christian ‘Holger Danske’  52 Anderson, Christina  13 Angel Choir Screen, Lincoln Cathedral  98, 102, 105 animalier sculpture  144, 156–60 Apollinaire, Guillaume  11, 215, 217, 219, 232 ‘Cubist Painters, The’  219, 242–3 Apollo Belvedere  62 Applied Arts Museum, Berlin  197 Arany, János  163 n.24 Archipenko, Alexander  201, 220, 236 n.43 architecte-décorateur  222 architecture  2, 10, 11, 54, 55, 68, 70, 85– 91, 94, 95, 103, 104, 106, 108, 120, 155, 157, 174, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 211–15, 217–26, 229–33, 242, 290 Architectural and Archaeological Society, Liverpool  95, 110 n.29 Arman  244 Armstead, Henry Hugh  154, 155 Arnulf of Louvain  45 n.50 Arscott, Caroline  85, 183 Art Deco  229 Art Institute of Chicago  202, 247 artisanal workmanship  154

Art Journal  153 art market  244, 253, 307 Art Nouveau  113, 130, 133, 134, 212, 218, 233 Art of Assemblage, The (Museum of Modern Art, 1961)  244 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society  155 Arts and Crafts movement  6–7, 170 arts appliqués (applied arts)  129, 211 Art Workers’ Guild  155 Ashbee, C. R.  170 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford  94 assemblage  244, 256, 258, 259, 262, 306 Athenaeum, The  153, 154 At Home in the Museum (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998)  247 Audouard, Olympe  127 Aurier, G. Albert  212, 213 Auther, Elissa  270 Bach, Johan Sebastian  23 Baes, Edgar  124, 126–7 Bailey, Doug  199 Baldry, Arthur  154 Ballets Russes  214 Ballinger, John  151, 152 Barbary States  57–9, 73, 76 n.17 Bardenfleth, Johan Frederik  77 n.24 Barillet, Louis  223, 226 Barlow, Phyllida  307 Barr, Alfred  214 basso continuo  30–5, 39, 45 n.49 Bates, Harry Pandora  3 Battle of Copenhagen  51, 52 Baudelaire, Charles  85 Bauplastik  201 Baxandall, Michael  53 Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, The  4, 28

314 Beetz, Elisa  128 Bell, Vanessa  301 Bender, Valentine  128 Benedict, Ruth  245–6 Berchmans, Emile  133 Berger, Ursel  207 n.41 Bernard, Raymond Le Secret de Rosette Lambert  222 Besnard née Dubray, Charlotte  130–1, 131 Ceres or Persephone  131 Echo  130 Betterton, Rosemary  190 bibelots  128, 129, 134 Bille, Steen  68, 70, 80 n.54 Billingham, Charlie  290 Delft Dancer  290 Bindesbøll, Gottlieb  66, 67 Bing & Gröndahl  141 n.65 Birkett, Councillor  94, 96, 106 Bissen, Herman Wilhelm  53, 54 Blanc-Garin, Ernest  128 Bloemink, Barbara  291, 292 Bloom, Barbara  244, 246–7, 255 Blouet, George Abel  87 Restauration des thermes d’Antonin Caracalla  88 Boch, Anna  120 Bomberg, David In the Hold  183 Bone, Phyllis  167–8 Elephant  168 Boult, Joseph  106–7 Bourdelle, Antoine  217 Brahetrolleborg Church  57 Brancusi, Constantin  222 Braque, Georges  214, 217, 227, 242 Brebus, Hans  25–6 Brecht, George  244 Breedon, Kirsty  165 n.65 Breuer, Robert  189, 192, 203 Britton, Alison  291–2 Brogniez, Laurence  129 bronze  3, 7–9, 86, 93, 98, 99, 100, 107, 120, 121, 122, 128, 129, 130, 132, 137 n.30, 138 n.38, 142 n.72, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 163 nn.27, 29, 171–6,

Index 172–3, 179, 192, 194, 196–201, 196, 198, 200, 202, 208 nn.45, 46, 278, 283 Brooklyn Museum  245 Brownsword, Neil  271, 278 Factory  281, 281, 282, 284 Brüggemann, Hans  28 Brunfaut, Jules  125 Buls, Charles  127 Burden, Chris Urban Light  256–8, 258 Bürger-Hartmann, Sophie  132, 132 Burges, William  151, 153 Burne-Jones, Edward  164 n.43, 183, 184 Buxtehude, Dieterich  23, 30, 31 Camden Arts Centre  307 Cameron Highlanders  175 Campbell, Gary  285 Cardiff Castle  151, 153 Cardiff Times  146 Carl-Nielsen, Anne-Marie  141 n.65 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste  154 Danse, La  219 Carter, A. C. R.  153 Cassiers, Henri  118 Castell Coch (Red Castle)  151 Cauer, Emil  194 Cauer, Hanna Three-Emperor Fountain (Drei-KaiserBrunnen)  194 Cave, Nick  241, 259–63, 267 n.40 Until  259–61, 260 Cazin, Marie (née Guillet)  130 ceramics  7, 9, 11, 12, 127, 129, 131, 216, 241, 246, 248, 249, 269–85, 292, 293, 295, 304 Cercle Artistique de Schaerbeek  119 César  244 Challiner, Anthony  283 Chamberlain, John  244 Chamoiwicz, Marc Camille  289 chandeliers  178, 256–9, 267 n.39 Channer, Alice  291, 296–300, 309 Breathing  296–7, 298, 299 Out of Body  296–7, 297–8 Chantrey, Sir Francis  101

Index Charpentier, Alexandre  120, 128, 131–2 ‘Charte d’Athènes’  231 Chartres Cathedral  220, 221 Chéret, Jules  113 Chicago, Judy  264 Childs, Adrienne L.  11 Christensen, Christen Thorvaldsen Medal  49, 58–68, 74 Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen  50, 61–2, 66 Christian VIII  68–70 CIAM. See Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne Claudel, Camille  118, 141 n.64 Waltz  130, 141 n.65 Cockerell, Charles Robert  83–95, 97–108, 109 n.18, 110 nn.23, 24, 111 n.46 Fantasy of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, under Construction  88–9, 89, 91 Idea for the frontispiece of a public building in England  92, 92, 94 Professor’s Dream, The  89–91, 90, 104 Colinet, Claire  128 collaboration  7, 33, 53, 86, 99, 105, 170, 212, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 223–5, 290, 303, 305, 306 colonialism  51, 58, 68–71, 73, 74, 146, 157, 169, 292 colour  9, 20, 26, 27, 29, 34, 67, 91, 98, 99, 100, 103, 117–19, 119, 130, 131, 181, 183, 254, 259, 292, 301 Colour of Sculpture, 1840–1910, The (Blühm et al.)  9 Combaz, Gisbert  133 Compagnie des Bronzes, Brussels  128 Congo Free State  129 Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM)  231 Conrat, Ilse  128 Cornell, Joseph  244 Cornette, Hélène  128, 129, 132, 134 La Sculpture  124 Corn Hirlas. See John, William Goscombe Cotterill, Edmund Eglinton Trophy, The  157 Queen’s Cup  157

315

Cottington, David  214 craft  5, 7, 25, 86, 128, 167, 244, 263, 264, 274, 280, 282, 284, 289–92, 296, 299, 304, 309 Cragg, Tony  244 Cumulus  252 Crane, Walter  6–7 Cressonnières, Mlle G.[abrielle] des  129 crockery  295–6 Crystal Palace, Sydenham  105 cubism  196, 212–14, 217–20, 234 n.12, 242 cubist  212–15, 217, 220, 222, 226–9 Cumming, Elizabeth  178 Curtis, Penelope  170 Modern British Sculpture  277 Cuttoli, Marie  214 Cymmrodorion Society  162 n.9 Dalí, Salvador  243, 246 Dalou, Jules  154 Danish Asiatic Company  69 Danmarks Kirker  42 n.12 Dansk Kunstblad  65 David, Milla  192 de Brouckère, Jeanne  132 Delaunay, Robert  229 Despret, George  133 de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri  113 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (German Art and Decoration)  197 Develly, Jean-Charles Service des Arts Industriels: les sculpteurs et les garnisseurs  8 de Waal, Edmund  271, 286 n.6 De Wachter, Ellen Mara  290–1, 306 Díaz, Eva  280 Dickson, Amy  284 Dictionary of Employment Open to Women  126 Dierickx, José  123, 124 Dion, Mark  241, 244, 247 ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’  246 Dixon, Stephen  271, 282–4 Floralists, The  282, 283 domestic  11, 12, 113, 115, 117, 126, 127, 134, 135, 190, 197–203, 243, 251, 261, 264

316 Doucet, Jacques  222, 223, 223, 224, 225 Doulton Potteries  153 Droth, Martina  4, 5, 7, 85, 144, 157, 272 Dubois, Paul  128, 137 n.30 Dubuffet, Jean  244 Duchamp, Marcel  218, 242, 243, 264 Duchamp-Villon, Raymond  215, 217–19, 218 Duncan, Carol  203 East India Company  68, 69 Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm  52, 55, 56, 67 École Boulle  216 École des Beaux-Arts  215 École Diderot  215 École Estienne  216 École professionnelle pour jeunes filles (École professionnelle Bischoffsheim)  127 Eden, Michael  286 n.10 Eden Project  282 Edinburgh Castle  169 Education Act (1870)  106 Edward I  148, 163 n.24 Edwards, Jason  7, 85, 144, 165 n.65 E-flux  305 Egede, Hans  52 Elmes, Harvey Lonsdale  83–92, 94, 109 nn.11, 18 Elmes, James  109 n.18 Emile Muller & Cie  130 Empire  12 Belgian  12, 117, 124, 127–30, 132–4, 141 n.71, 221 British  92, 97, 100, 108, 143–51, 156–61 Danish  5, 25, 26, 33, 42 n.4, 51–3, 57–60, 62, 64, 67–70, 72, 73, 77 n.24, 79 n.48, 80 nn.57, 64 Roman  107 Epstein, Jacob  246 Rock Drill  175 Exhibitions At Home in the Museum (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998)  247 Colour of Sculpture, 1840–1910, The (Rijksmuseum Vincent

Index van Gogh and Henry Moore Institute Leeds, 1996)  9 Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage (London, 2015) Floralists, The (British Ceramics Biennale, 2009)  282, 283 Great Exhibition (London, 1851)  7, 127, 248 House of Words (Dr Johnson’s House)  275, 276 La femme contemporaine (The Contemporary Woman) (Antwerp, May–June 1914)  126 Modern British Sculpture (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011)  277 Out of Body (South London Gallery, 2012)  296–7, 297–8 Paris Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (Paris, 1925)  211, 227, 228, 229 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie moderne (Paris, 1937)  215, 228–9, 230 Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention 1837–1901 (New Haven and London, 2014– 15) 7, 8, 86, 161 Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Leeds and Los Angeles, 2008–9)  5–6 Fabre, Gladys  214 Faenza  294 Falbe, Christian Tuxen  59 Falconet, Étienne Maurice  7 Farnese Hercules  87 Fatmi, Mounir  241 Maximum Sensation  262, 263 Faulkner, Katie  10, 12, 17 n.45 ‘Féminisme’  124 Fierens-Gevaert, Hippolyte  129 Fierens, Paul  227 figurine  9, 12, 114, 117, 118, 122, 133, 190, 197, 199, 201–3, 245, 246, 248, 268 n.45 First World War  167–87, 196, 203, 214

Index Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge  94, 110 nn.23, 25 Flavin, Dan  256 Flaxman, John  154 Flechtheim, Alfred  197, 200–1 Floyd, Rita  283 Fluxus  244 Folkwang Museum  192, 194 Follot, Paul  229 Ford, Edward Onslow  159 St George and the Dragon  157, 159 Singer, The  163 n.27 Forster, Gela  195, 201 Fortuna (corvette)  55, 56, 67 Foster, John  111 n.42 found object  241–68 Frampton, George  154 Lamia  153 Frank, Jean-Michel  214 Fraser, Inga  289 Frayling, Christopher  309 Frederick II, King of Denmark– Norway  25–6 Frederik, Christian  59, 62 Frederik VI  51, 53, 61, 62, 70 free-standing sculpture  7, 14 n.9, 55, 88, 148, 169, 213, 214 Frenk-Westheim, Mariana Architektonik des Plastischen (The Architectural of the Sculptural)  195 Freund, H. E.  57 Frith, William Silver  153 Fry, Roger  301 furniture  6, 7, 11, 41, 117, 120, 121, 201, 203, 212, 216, 217, 222, 226, 229, 230, 241, 244, 246, 253–6, 267 n.40, 270, 300, 302, 304 Futter, Catherine  13 Gagneau Frères  256 Gaifman, Milette  199 Galathea (corvette)  47–74, 78 n.45 figurehead  48, 51–7, 54 Nicobarese representation of  50 in Nicobar Islands  68–74 Thorvaldsen’s sculptures to Denmark, return of  57–8

317

Gallace, Alberto  199 Galli, Pietro  66 Gauguin, Paul  212 Gazette des Beaux-Arts  127 Gazette des sept arts  221 Gemis, Vanessa  129 gemstones  9, 144, 145, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161 gender  113, 114, 118, 122, 126, 130, 134, 242, 243, 261, 264 Geological Museum, Jermyn Street, London  93 George, David Lloyd  145 George, Waldemar  224–5 Georgii-Hildebrand, Irene  195 Gérôme, Jean-Léon Tanagra  117 Gibson, John  101–2, 154 Tinted Venus  98 Gilbert, Alfred  14 n.9, 157, 165 n.53 St George  157, 159 Gil Blas  219 Gladstone Pottery  282 glass  133, 172, 180–4, 180–4 Gleizes, Albert and Jean Metzinger Du Cubisme  213, 217, 218 Gloria in Excelsis Deo  26, 38 Glyndwr, Owain  159 Gøbel, Erik  76 n.17 gold  103, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 249 Goldman and Salatsch Building  233 n.2 Goodchild, John  88 Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain (Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain)  145–7 Gorsedd Circle  160 Gorsedd Stone Circle  156 Gosse, Edmund  154 Goujon, Jean  221 Fontaine des Innocents  227 Government Schools of Art and Design  93 Gøye, Harald  26 Gøye, Mogens  26 Grantchester Pottery, The  291, 300–6, 309 ACID TEST  308

318 Coffee Service  301–2, 302 Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage  300 Grant, Duncan  301 Grasset, Eugène  113 Grautoff, Otto  195 Great Exhibition, London, 1851  7, 127, 248 Greenaway, Peter  244 Physical Self, The  246 Greenberg, Clement  242, 270, 275 Grossman, Nancy  246 Groult, André  229 Guévrékian, Gabriel  229 Gyldenstierne, Hilleborg  26 Gyldenstierne, Sybille  26 Hagener Stadttheater  190 Hahn, Dorothea  203 Hamilton, General Sir Ian  169 Hamischer, Johann Jacob  30 Hammons, David  241, 255, 256, 258, 259 Flying Carpet  262–3 Handel, George Frederic  23, 109 n.8 Hansen, C. F.  59, 60 Harrod, Tanya  301, 304 Hart, Emma  291–4, 308–9 Dirty Looks  293 Mamma Mia  294–6, 295 Spread  293, 293 Hart, Imogen  9, 12, 85, 144 Hatt, Michael  7, 10, 12, 86 Haverkamp, Wilhelm  194, 197 Hegarty, Olivia  303 Heimann, Moritz  198–9 Heinrich, Franz Sala del Thorvaldsen, Rome  61 Hemans, Felicia  146 ‘From the Hirlas of Owain Cyfeiliog’  146 Henry VII  159 henta board  70, 71, 72, 73 Herkomer, Hubert von  147, 164 n.39 Hildebrand, Adolf von  195–6 Hildebrandt, Hans  190 Hirst, Damien  241 Hobsbawm, Eric  162 n.9

Index Hockney, David  301 Hohenhof estate  205 n.11 Holbach, Alice  132 Holmens Kirke  20, 22, 28, 29, 45 n.44 Hölterhoff de Harven, Alice  126 Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion  145 Hoole of Sheffield  105 Hoptman, Laura  275 Horkheimer, Max  270 Horta, Victor  120, 125 House of Words (exhibition, Dr Johnson’s House)  275 Hovenden, Thomas Ain’t that Ripe  245 Hussey, Christopher  185 n.2 Hvidtfeldt, Arild  26 imperialism  7, 61, 63, 66, 97, 101, 143, 146, 157–9, 161 institutional critique  244, 245, 247, 264 Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams)  145, 150–1 iron  146, 220, 231, 247, 247, 258 ivory  3, 3, 129, 132, 137 n.30, 153 Jack Shaiman Gallery  267 n.40 Jackson, Charles Pilkington  171, 174 Jagger, Charles Sargeant No Man’s Land  174, 175 Janssen, Karl  194 Jensen, Lars  58 jewellery  8, 126, 178 J. Mackey & Co.  69 Johnson, Samuel  275 John, William Goscombe Corn Hirlas  143–66, 144, 147, 149 Elf, The  151–2, 152, 153 Medal for the National Eisteddfod Association  148, 150 Jo, Léo  123 Jones, Claire  1–2, 47, 85, 144 Journal de Bruxelles  130 Judd, Donald  242 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry  169, 171, 178, 182, 213, 217 Kelly, Julia  2

Index Kienholz, Ed  244 King, Rodney  259 kintsugi  279 Kleinplastik  200, 201 Koons, Jeff  244 Kosuth, Joseph  244, 255 Play of the Unmentionable, The  245 Kounellis, Jannis  255 Krauss, Rosalind  11, 14 n.8, 273–4, 276 ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’  273 Kremmer, Rasmus  24 Kunst für Alle (Art for All)  198 Kunstgewerb (industrial art)  211 La Fédération Artistique  128 La femme contemporaine (The Contemporary Woman) (Antwerp, May–June 1914)  126 Lagrange, Léon  127 La Jeune sculpture française (Salmon)  219 La Libre Esthétique  113, 115, 117, 119– 21, 128–30, 132, 134, 135 n.4, 140 n.58, 141 n.65 Lambeaux, Jef  128 Lambeth City and Guilds School of Art  153 L’Amour de l’art  224 L’Art allemand et l’art français au moyenâge (Mâle)  221 L’Art Moderne  115, 117, 118, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135 n.4 Laurens, Henri  11, 212, 214, 215, 216, 220–9 cubism  217–20 early education and training  215–16 Femme à la draperie  238 n.65 new theory on monumental sculpture for modern architecture  229–33 Suspended Figure  230, 231–2 Portico and sculpture, Jacques Doucet’s villa  222–3, 223, 224, 225 Relief in Mallet-Stevens’s hall for an ambassador’s house  228, 229 Relief in the hall of the Villa Noailles  226, 227

319

Sculpture for Pavillon de l’AéroClub  223, 225, 226 Lauweriks, Jan Ludovicus Mathieu  205 n.11 lawn jockey  248, 259–61 Le Corbusier  11, 212, 215, 229–33, 232 L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui  211, 229 Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau  229 Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux  229, 230 Lees-Maffei, Grace  2 Léger, Fernand  218 Composition abstraite  229 Legrain, Paul  222 Leighton, Frederic Athlete Wrestling with a Python  154, 155, 159 Leighton House  10 Lemmen, Georges  128 Léon, Comte  235 n.22 ‘Le Pays Noir’  133 Les arts de la femme  127 Les Beaux-Arts  123 Le Sillon  119 Leslie, Esther ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’  292 L’Essor  119, 140 n.58 Les XX  113, 117, 120, 121, 128–30, 135 n.4, 140 n.58 Lever, William Hesketh  145 Lewis, Wyndham Battery Shelled, A  183 light fixtures  252, 256 L’Indépendance Belge  118 Lipchitz, Jacques  220, 229, 231, 236 n.29 Lippard, Lucy  306–7 Pink Glass Swan, The  306 Liverpool Mercury  94, 106, 107, 112 n.64 Liverpool Museum  83 Liverpool Royal Institution  111 n.42 Liverpool Town Council  94, 95, 105, 106 Llandaff Cathedral  164 n.43 Loos, Adolf  11, 212 ‘Ornament and Crime’  211, 217 Lorimer, Sir Robert  169, 170 Lorrain, Jenny  129 Los Angeles County Museum of Art  257

320

Index

Lübbren, Nina  12 Luther, Martin  32 Lutheran  4, 19, 20, 22–3, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32–4, 38–41, 41 n.3, 42 nn.7, 10, 43 nn.14, 19, 44 nn.30, 32, 64 Lutyens, Edwin Cenotaph  178, 277–80 MacChesney, Clara T.  212–13 Mackey, Donald Campbell  69 Macleod, James Lachlan  176 McNamara, Robert  256 Magnificat  26 Maillol, Aristide  116–17 Maison Cubiste  214, 215, 217–19 Maison d’Art à la Toison d’Or  117, 118, 120 Mâle, Emile  221 Mallet-Stevens, Robert  11, 214, 215, 220–9, 228 ambassador’s house at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, 1925  228 Jacques Doucet’s villa  223 Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club  223, 225, 226 Villa Noailles  227 Malling, Peter  62 Mam-o-Fro (mother of the area)  146, 160 marble  3, 6, 7, 9, 47, 53, 55–8, 60, 64, 66, 87, 98, 99, 101, 117, 120, 126, 129, 153, 154, 178, 233 n.2, 296 Mare, André  217 Marin, Livia  286 n.10 Märten, Lu  200 Martin, John Bard, The  149–50 Maryland Historical Society  247 material culture  4, 11, 16 n.40, 70, 241, 246, 264 Matisse, Henri  213 Bonheur de Vivre  212 Maus, Octave  115, 127, 133, 135 n.4, 137 n.30 Mawjii, Oomersi  157 Mayer, Louise  128, 133 medal  8, 12, 47–8, 49, 58–60, 63–66, 68, 74, 77 nn.27, 31, 148, 150, 168

memento mori  252 Merewether, Charles  267 n.35 metalworks  152, 155, 241, 246 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  117 Metman, Louis  225 Metzinger, Jean and Albert Gleizes Du Cubisme  213, 217, 218 Meunier, Constantin  120 Meunier, Henri  121, 122 minimalism  256 Minne, George  121–2 Small Injured Figure II  120, 121 Minton’s  86, 100, 107 modernism  10, 11, 190, 203, 242, 243, 263, 264, 270 and the decorative  211–15 Modern Sculpture Reader  273 Møen, H. J.  55 Monet, Claude  212 Monnom, Maria  135 n.4 monument  3, 7, 8, 12, 19, 89, 97, 105, 108, 111 n.46, 124–7, 129, 133, 178, 179, 189–203, 204 n.8, 219–33, 251, 263–85, 297 Morgan, Prys  162 n.9 Morris, Robert  270 Morris, William  170, 180 Mucha, Alphonse  113 Muller, Emile  131 multiculturalism  242, 261 Municipal Theatre, Hagen  189, 190, 191, 192 Murray, William Grant Gorsedd in Singleton Park, Swansea  147 Musée de la Sculpture Comparée  220, 223 Musées Royaux des Arts  132 Museum Boymans von Beuningen  246 museum effect  275, 287 n.20 Museum of Art in Trade and Industry (Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe)  194 Museum of Modern Art, New York  244 music  5, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 36–8, 40, 41, 42 n.13, 43 n.14, 96, 121, 306 musica figurata  32–4, 39 Muysers, Carola  190

Index Myklabye  57–8 Myrbor  214 Mystic Mark  156 Nash, Paul  289, 294, 299 National Eisteddfod  143–6, 151, 154, 161 National Museum of Wales  154, 157 Natorp, M. G.  153 Naval Drawing Office  52 New Sculpture  129, 144, 151–6, 165 nn.53, 65 Nicholls, Thomas Animal Wall  153 Nicholl, William Grinsell  92, 94, 110 n.23 Nicobar Islands  68–74, 71 Nicolas, Rosalie  128 Noble, Matthew  101 Noack bronze foundry  201 North Wales Times  152 Ochsé, de Louise  133 O’Gorman, Bridget  12 Omega Workshops  301 O’Neill, Morna  157 Oppenheim, Meret  241, 243, 251 Orfèvrerie d’art Miele & Co.  123 Osthaus, Ernst Karl  191–2, 194 Outram, Sir James  157 Paalen, Wolfgang Ivy Chair  243 Palissy, Bernard  215, 216 Pallasmaa, Juhani  292 papiers collés  212, 217 Paris Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (1925)  211, 227, 228, 229 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la vie moderne (1937)  215, 228, 229, 230 Paris Peace Accords (1973)  267 n.39 Paris Salon  127 Parker, Cornelia  241, 249–53, 261 Still Life with Reflection  252, 253 Thirty Pieces of Silver  250–2, 250, 259 Parry, John  146 Peel, Sir Robert  101, 102

321

Penbeirdd, Taliesin  163 n.23 Pendragon, Uther  166 n.70 Pennethorne, James  93 Perret, Auguste  217 Perry, Gill  212, 285 Petermann  128 Petersen, J. D.  48, 54–6 pewter  126, 129, 132, 140 n.61 Picard, Edmond  117, 118, 120, 127 Picasso, Pablo  214, 217, 227, 231, 234 n.12, 242 Pilon, Germain  117, 215 plaster  53, 57, 58, 60, 66, 83, 88, 98, 102–4, 103, 111 n.46, 124, 126, 132, 136 n.11, 151, 216, 217, 220, 248, 249 Plato Allegory of the Cave  252 Polledri, Melanie  6, 9, 12 Pollock, Griselda  190 polychromy  3, 9, 22, 98, 130 Pomeroy, Frederick  154 porcelain  9, 11, 127, 138 n.42, 241, 245, 245, 246, 254, 279, 281, 282 postmodernism  242, 259, 264 postmodern theory  11, 242, 244 potterines  132–3 Potts, Alex  4, 10 Poupelet, Jane  132 Pour l’Art  117, 119, 124, 129, 140 n.58 praeteritio  275 Praetorius, Michael  23, 32 Presbyterian Scotland  176 Prikker, Jan Thorn  192 Pritchard, John  164 n.43 Privat-Livemont, Henri  119, 121, 122–6, 122, 125, 128, 134, 138 n.32 Protestantism  22 Pugin, A. W. N.  248 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre  212 Pye, David  309 Qing, Ai  254 Quirinal Palace  61, 63 racialized objects  248, 249 Raphael Rooms, Vatican Palace  105 Rassenfosse, Armand  114, 136 n.11

322

Index

Rathbone, Councillor  95 Rauschenberg, Robert  244 Rawlinson, Robert  86, 91 Ray, Man  243 Read, Benedict  2, 100–1 readymade  242, 251, 253, 264 Reed, Christopher  301 Reich, Lilly  202 Reims Cathedral  221 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste  116 Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales  145 Reykjavik Cathedral  58 RIBA library  86 Rilke, Rainer Maria  203 Robbia, della  131 Robinson, Marc Andre  255 Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)  256 Rodin, Auguste  7, 118, 203 Gates of Hell, The  212 Les Cathédrales de France  220–1 Rolls of Honour  172, 175 Roman Baths of Caracalla  86, 87 Rombaux, Egide  128 Root, Phil  301, 306 Rosenberg, Léonce  220 Rosen, David  69 Rosenheim, Edith  201 Round, Giles  301, 304–7, 309 Royal Academy of Arts, London (RA)  6, 52, 144, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155 Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels  127, 128 Royal Cabinet of Coins and Medals  76 n.27 Royal Ethnographic Museum  70 Royal Kunstkammer  70 Royal Naval Dockyard  52 Ruaud, Paul Pavillon de l’Aéro-Club  223, 225, 226 Ruhlmann, Emile-Jacques  229 Ruskin, John  170, 180 Rysselberghe, Van  116, 135 n.4 Saar, Betye  268 n.45 Liberation of Aunt Jemima, The  261

St Bartholemew’s Hospital  252 St Croix (ship)  58, 77 n.24 St Fagans National Museum of History  143–4 St George’s Hall, Liverpool  83–112 architecture  85–91 contemporary audiences, reception of the building by  105–8 decorative art  85–91 Great Hall  97–105, 84, 99, 103 sculpture  85–91 South Pediment  91–7, 105, 106 Salcedo, Doris  255, 256 Salmon, André  11, 217, 219–20, 236 n.30 Salon de Printemps, Brussels  124 Salon des Cent  114 Samuel-Blum, Juliette  120 Samuel, Charles  120 Sandham Memorial Chapel  185 Sandino, Linda  2 Scheffler, Karl  190, 199, 201 School of Decorative Arts (École des arts décoratifs)  127–8 Schrøder, Abel Altarpiece, Holmens Kirke, Copenhagen  20, 22, 28, 29, 45 n.44 Altarpiece, Skt Morten, Naestved  19–41, 20–1, 34, 35, 37–9 as carver  24–9 musical knowledge  29–33 as musician  24–9 Schubart, Herman  62 Schulte, Birgit  191 Schütz, Heinrich  23 Scottish National War Memorial (SNWM)  9, 167–87 Elephant  168 stained glass windows  180–4, 180–4 St Michael  176–80 Scottish Protestantism  176 Scott, Paul  270 Spode Works Closed Casserole No: 2  278–80, 279, 284 sculpto-painting  220 sculptural monument  269–85

Index Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention 1837–1901 (Droth et al.)  7, 8, 86, 161 Seddon, J. P.  164 n.43 Seitz, William  244 Sennet, Richard Craftsman, The  305 Serruys, Yvonne  118, 128 Femme couchée (Reclining Woman)  133 Sèthe, Maria  121 Seurat, Georges  212 Shapiro, Miriam  264 ship’s figurehead  12, 47, 48, 51–8, 54, 56, 62, 67, 68, 74 Sickert, Walter  169 Signac, Paul  212 silver  11, 49, 70, 126, 132, 143–6, 144, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155–60, 158, 201, 243, 247, 249–53, 250, 253, 258, 270 Simon, Madeleine  135 n.4 Sintenis, Renée  189, 190, 202 Foal, Looking Right (Rechtsblickendes Fohlen)  199, 200 Kneeling Deer  197–9, 198 and small-scale domestic objects  197–203 Skt Morten, Næstved  19–21, 21, 23, 25–30, 33–5, 37–41, 44 n.27, 45 n.44 Smith, Courtney  255, 256 Smith, Laurajane  285 Smithson, Robert  284 SNWM. See Scottish National War Memorial Society of Decorative Artists  229 Sommariva, Giovanni Battista  62 Sonne, Jørgen  66, 67 Sophia of Mecklenburg-Güstrow  26 South Kensington Museum (now the V&A)  248 South Wales Weekly News  146 Sparkes, John  154 Spence, Charles  199 Spencer, Stanley  185 Spielmann, Marion  152, 153 Spoerri, Daniel  244

323

stained glass windows  180–4, 180–4 Stammers, Michael  75 n.10 Stankiewicz, Richard  244 Stannus, Hugh  94, 105 Stappen, Van der  128, 137 n.30 stato delle casse  64–5, 68 statue  48, 52, 55, 101, 111 nn.42, 43, 117, 126, 138 n.39, 178, 179, 248, 249, 251 statuettes  3, 4, 14 n.9, 48, 56, 113–16, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 129–34, 137 n.30, 138 n.38, 142 n.72, 176, 201, 203 Steger, Milly  189 Ascending Youth (Auferstehender Jüngling)  197 Dancer (Tanzende)  196, 197 Four Female Nudes  190–7, 191 Steggles, Mary Ann  165 n.65 Steinbach, Haim  244 Bel Canto  265 n.9 Stay with Friends  265 n.9 Steiner, Henry Lady’s Companion  158 Steinhauer, C. L.  71, 72 Stephenson, George  101, 102 Sterckx, Marjan  12 Stevens, Alfred  83, 86, 92–4, 100, 104–5, 110 n.25 Stoke-on-Trent  278, 280, 281, 284 stone  9, 53, 105, 124, 127, 144, 153, 156–7, 158, 167, 168, 171–6, 171, 178, 185 n.2, 190, 191, 192–4, 198, 278, 292, 296 stoneware  129–32, 141 n.65, 302 Strachan, Douglas  180–4, 180–4, 187 n.23 Surtout de table (table centre)  133 Tachard, Jean  237 n.57 Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Leeds and Los Angeles, 2008–9)  5–6 Talbot, Suzanne  237 n.57 Taws, Richard  272–3 technology shelf  305 Tekhné  221 Telemann, Georg Philipp  23

324

Index

Temporal, Marcel  223 Ténicheff, Marie  133 textiles  103, 127, 216, 241, 244, 248, 261–4, 262, 263, 299, 302, 303, 303 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées  217 Thøfner, Margit  4–5, 11–12 Thomas, John Evan  149 Thomas, T. H. (Arlunydd Pen-ygarn)  147–8, 148, 163 n.17 Thomsen, C. J.  70 Thomson, Edward Clydesdale  290 Thornycroft, Hamo  154 Thorvaldsen, Bertel  53 Alexander Frieze  49, 50, 51, 57, 61–4, 66 Cupid with the Lyre  64 sculptures to Denmark, return of  57–8 Triumph of Alexander, The (see Thorvaldsen, Bertel, Alexander Frieze) Thorvaldsens Museum  66–8 Frieze  67 Three Graces, The  64 Tilt, Berthe Van  128 Tinari, Philip  267 n.35 ‘toy expressionism’ (Kinderspielzeugexpressionismus)  199 Triennial Salon of Fine Arts  133 Troy, Nancy  214 Turr, Karina  14 n.9 Twomey, Clare  271, 276, 278 Blossom  282 Monument  284 ‘Scribe’  275–7, 276, 284 Union Porcelain Works  245 Unité d’Habitation  232 Usherwood, Paul  276 Vallance, Aymer  153 Vallgren-Räström, Antoinette  140 n.58 Van Acker, Florimond  115, 116 Vanderkindere, Léon  125 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies  202 van der Rohe, Waltraut Mies  202 Van der Stappen, Charles  117, 127

van de Velde, Henry  121, 217 vanitas  252 Van Rysselberghe, Théo  115, 118, 119, 121 Vauxcelles, Louis  133, 212 Venus de Medici  9 Venus de Milo  114 Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk  132 Vetterlein, Ernst  192, 193, 195 Vide-poche  132 Villa Bloemenwerf  121 Villa Lange  202 Villa Noailles  226, 227, 229 Villa Sommariva  62 Vo, Danh  241, 255–7 08:43, 26.05, 256, 257 Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Chairs  256 Volkspark  192 von der Heydt, Karl  203 Vonnoh, Bessie Potter  132 Voortman, Clara  128 Voortman-Dobbelaere, Clara  128, 129 Vostell, Wolf  244 Wainwright, Lisa  6, 11, 13 Wales’ Investiture  157 Walker Art Gallery  83 Walter, Johann  23 Ward, Herbert  165 n.5 Watkin, David  102 wax  6, 53–5, 54, 75 n.10, 124, 133, 201, 297 Wedgwood  275, 280 Wedgwood, Josiah  285 Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota  246 Weiwei, Ai  11, 241, 261, 267 nn.35, 38 Destroying One’s History  253–4 Fairytale  254, 255 Template  254 Wellington Monument, St Paul’s Cathedral  105 Welsh Melodies (Parry)  146 Wentworth, Richard  244 Spread  252

Index Western Mail  147–8 Westhoff, Clara  203 Westmacott, Richard Monument to Lord Nelson  97 Whitechapel Gallery, London  294 Wiedewelt, Johannes  53 Wiener Werkstätte  211 Wilhelmine Empire  203 Wilkinson, Kitty  101 Willerup, F. C.  53 Williams, Alice Meredith  172, 173, 174–6 St Michael  176–80, 177 William Theed the younger  101 Willms, Auguste-Adolphe  163 n.25 Willox, John  96 Wilson, Anne  241, 261–3 Dispersions no. 7  262 Wilson, Fred  11, 241, 247–9, 251, 253, 255, 261, 262

325

Love and Loss in the Milky Way  248– 9, 249 ‘Mining the Museum’  247–8, 247 Wilson, Henry  157, 158, 160 Chamberlain Casket, The  157, 158 Wintle, Claire  72 Women’s Institute, The  126 Women’s Royal Air Force  175 wood  9, 19, 20–2, 28, 29, 34–9, 39, 50, 55, 56, 56, 153, 158, 172, 176, 177, 177, 183, 229–31, 254, 293, 297 Woodrow, Bill  244 wunderkammern  246, 286 n.6 Wyatt, Matthew Cotes Monument to Lord Nelson  97 Wysing Art Centre  301 Yates, James  111 n.42 Y Ddraig Aur (The Golden Dragon)  159

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