Output details

'Sculpture in the Home:selling modernism to Post-war British Homemakers'

Based on research into the 'Sculpture in the Home' exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s, the essay complements and extends issues addressed in the author’s HMI book (Output 1); it was commissioned by Christopher Bedford, Assistant Curator Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for a special issue of The Sculpture Journal devoted to British Modernism.

Drawing on the literature of design history, the essay shows how the 'Sculpture in the Home' exhibitions, jointly organised by the Arts Council and the Council of Industrial Design, contributed to governmental efforts to modernize domestic design in post-war Britain, encouraged by a circle of influential artists, designers and critics, such as Gordon Russell, Henry Moore and Herbert Read. The essay argues that despite evidence of public and critical interest in domestic sculpture, the attempt to popularise the consumption of modern sculpture among post-war homemakers failed, like the design reform campaign, due to public alienation from modernist aesthetics and the high costs.

It argues for a re-assessment of the relationship between Modernism and domesticity, which art historians, such as Christopher Reed, have proposed were typically antagonistic. It suggests instead that the display of sculpture in the post-war home was compatible with the traditions of the English interwar avant-garde, with its roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement (at least until this aesthetic was superseded around 1960 by gallery-oriented modes of formalist criticism).

Like Output 1, the high standard of scholarship is based on research at the National Art Library, Tate Gallery Archive and Design Council Archive, supplemented by extensive study of the primary and secondary literature of British sculpture, governmental patronage of art and design, the art market and British Modernism. The sources are identified and acknowledged in footnotes. The essay underwent a thorough process of peer-review and editorial discussion and revision.