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“Carola Giedion-Welcker: misrepresented collaborator of modernists”

This blind peer-reviewed book chapter developed Lerm Hayes' previous research co-organising a symposia (with Jon Wood) on Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1979) at the Henry Moore Institute in 2006. This was the first time international Giedion-Welcker scholars and the art / literature historian / critic’s now elderly children came together to consider her seminal work, particularly in and for sculptural history.

Lerm Hayes' Ashgate essay is the first published historiographic consideration of Giedion-Welcker’s work. Giedion-Welcker was subsequently included in Jon Wood’s Modern Sculpture Reader. Both together constitute the (re-)introduction of her writings into English-speaking scholarship. The chapter contributes to the feminist art-historical publication. This publication also led to the editor, Karen Brown, collaborating with Lerm Hayes in the organization of the Displaying Word and Image conference, (International Association of Word and Image Studies IAWIS focus conference), Belfast 2010.

Moreover, this essay emanates from Lerm Hayes work on James Joyce’s visual legacies – Giedion-Welcker wrote about Joyce and secured the family’s return to Switzerland during WWII. The chapter also constitutes an attempt to complicate master narratives about Modernism in sculptural (or art) history, (re-)inserting a European perspective that Rosalind Krauss deemed to be “formalist”, but that does not deserve to be this simplistically dismissed. Reconsidering Giedion-Welcher thus aligns this earliest of critical / historical perspectives on Modernist sculpture with more recent work on minimalism by George Didi-Huberman and other “non-binary” art-historical writing.