The human clay
This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.The topics in The Necessity of Sculpture emerged randomly, thrown off by successive exhibition calendars and coming to range in time and place from ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century Manhattan. As I made the selections, what began to take shape, beyond a conventional anthology, was a synoptic history of the art form. The title is a belated riposte to Ad Reinhardt’s famous dismissal, in around 1960, of sculpture as ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’.
