Sophie Howarth, Paul Wood, Matthew Gale, Dominic Willsdon, Discussion 1

Matthew Gale, Carving out a Reputation  Brancusi has a reputation as a skillful peasant camping in the milieu of Montparnasse modernism. Purity and innocence are habitually used to describe both the artist and his work. However, it is clear that this can be traced back to the complex myth that Brancusi constructed for himself. Matthew Gale, curator of Tate Modern's exhibition Brancusi: The Essence of Things, considers some of the questions of validity that accumulated around Brancusi's work, as it generated controversies around the world, and how the sculptor came to embody ideas of authenticity.

Paul Wood, Expanding Concepts of Sculpture  For most of the twentieth century, sculpture seemed to be the poor relation of modernist art compared to painting. After the crisis of modernism in the late 1960s this changed, as painting lost its position at the centre of contemporary art to be replaced by a multiplicity of three-dimensional practices. Paul Wood starts the day with a brief overview of some aspects of the modernist theory of sculpture leading up to the challenge to it in the sixties.

Sophie Howarth, Introduction  This study day explores the various art practices that have been described as sculpture during the modern period, with particular reference to their avant-garde and aesthetic status. The talks consider the way in which the category of sculpture has been reworked or challenged through concepts such as the 'readymade' as well as through performance and installation art and site-specific commissions.