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Robert Burstow

University of Derby, Arts, Faculty Member

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Dr Robert Burstow is an art historian based at the University of Derby, where he is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Art. Alongside his work as a lecturer and doctoral supervisor, he is an academic researcher, author and Independent exhibition curator. As a specialist in the history and theory of 20th century British art, he has a particular interest in its relationship with domestic and international political ideology. His doctoral thesis (University of Leeds, 2001) examines the political context of several innovative forms of public sculpture exhibition in post-war ‘New Britain’.

He has delivered papers at national and international conferences, published essays, exhibition reviews and book reviews in academic journals, such as Apollo, Art History, Artscribe, Frieze, The British Art Journal, The Oxford Art Journal, The Sculpture Journal, and The Journal of the Twentieth Century Society, and contributed chapters to academic books, such as Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art (Lund Humphries, 1993), Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Ashgate, 2003), Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain (Henry Moore Institute, 2003), Sculpture and the Garden (Ashgate, 2006), The History of British Art, 1870—Now (Tate & Yale Center for British Art, 2008) and British Art in the Nuclear Age (Ashgate, 2014). He has also written catalogue essays for exhibitions of contemporary art.

As an independent curator, he has organised exhibitions of post-war British sculpture, including Symbols for ’51: the Royal Festival Hall, Skylon and Sculptures for the Festival of Britain at the Royal Festival Hall in London (1995) and Sculpture in the Home: re-staging a post-war initiative at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2008). He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and was until recently the Regional Organiser of the Public Monument and Sculpture Association’s National Recording Project in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
Phone: 07812 051280
Address: School of Arts
College of Arts, Humanities and Education
University of Derby
Markeaton St
Derby
DE22 1GB

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Book Reviews by Robert Burstow

Review of Der unbekannte politische Gefangene: Ein internationaler Skulpturenwettbewerb zu Zeiten des Kalten Krieges (The Unknown Political Prisoner: An International Sculpture Competition in the Cold War Era)

The Sculpture Journal, vol. 31, no.2, pp. 269-73, 2022

This is a review of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin (30 October 2020–18 June 2021)... more

The Sculpture Journal, 2007

Review of 'Heinz Henghes' exhibition, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, London, 2006; Mark De No... more

The Sculpture Journal, 2005

review of ‘Anthony Caro’ exhibition, Tate Britain, 2005; I. Barker, 'Anthony Caro: Quest for the ... more

'Eduardo Paolozzi: critical postmodernist'

The Sculpture Journal, 2003

Review of 'Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews', ed. R. Spencer, Oxford University Press, 2000

Public sculpture of Liverpool and Birmingham

Art History (UK), vol. 22, no. 1, March, 1999

Review of 'Public Sculpture of Liverpool' by T. Cavanagh (Liverpool University Press, 1997) and '... more

Books by Robert Burstow

The 'Sculpture in the Home' Exhibitions: Reconstructing the Home and Family in Post-war Britain

Henry Moore Institute Essays on Sculpture, 2008

This essay offers the first detailed account of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s series of fou... more This essay offers the first detailed account of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s series of four 'Sculpture in the Home' exhibitions, which toured British municipal galleries in the late 1940s and 1950s. By presenting modern sculpture in simulated domestic settings, with furnishings selected by the Council of Industrial Design, the exhibitions encouraged visitors to purchase sculpture for their own homes. The essay identifies the types of sculpture shown, the untypically high proportion of female sculptors included and, through reproduction of unpublished exhibition plans and photographs, the unusual appearance of the exhibitions. It demonstrates that alongside the Arts Council’s early support of public sculpture and murals, it promoted the sale of small-scale domestic sculpture as another means by which art could have a place in the lives of ‘ordinary people’ (although in reality the price of most exhibits meant that purchase was restricted to the middle-classes). It analyses the aesthetic and social contexts for the growth of public and critical interest in the domestic function of modernist sculpture in that ‘home-centred society’ and thereby uncovers an aspect of post-war British sculpture long overshadowed by attention to its innovative forms of outdoor public display. The essay draws on the literature of post-war interior design, domestic space and gendered familial roles, and on archival research in the National Art Library, Tate Gallery Archive, and Design Council Archive. It was published to accompany the Henry Moore Institute’s exhibition, Sculpture in the Home: re-staging a post-war Initiative (2 Oct 2008 – 4 Jan 2009), in which the author recreated the appearance of the London-showings of the 1950 and 1953 exhibitions, attracting reviews in The Burlington Magazine, The Independent and The Yorkshire Post.

Exhibition catalogues by Robert Burstow

Symbols for '51: the Royal Festival Hall, Skylon and Sculptures for the Festival of Britain

Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London, exhibtion catalogue, 1996

Ronald Pope - Derbyshire Modernist

Ronald Pope: Modern Sculpture in the Public Eye , 2008

Materialising Memory: mementoes, memorials and modernism

In Memoriam, New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK, 2000

Book chapters by Robert Burstow

‘Peter László Péri in Britain, 1933-1967: reforming “Socialist Realism” for Western Europe’

Péri’s People: Peter László Péri (1899-1967), eds Arie Hartog, Dorothea Schöne & Veronika Wiegartz, Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, & Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen, pp. 119-26, 2023

This essay contributes to a growing field of research into the work of Central European artists w... more This essay contributes to a growing field of research into the work of Central European artists who settled in Britain in the 20th century. It examines the development and reception of the sculpture of the Hungarian-born, Jewish, Communist, refugee artist Peter László Péri following his flight from Berlin in 1933. It was commissioned for the bilingual catalogue of the largest ever exhibition of the artist’s work in a public gallery (Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, 23/9/23-28/1/24, and Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen, 10/3/24-2/6/24). As the principal essay in the catalogue to address Péri’s work in Britain (the focus of the exhibition), it makes a significant contribution to the first substantial, scholarly, English-language publication on the artist. The essay situates Péri’s work in the historical context of mid-century Britain by supplementing research from the published literature with archival materials in the Tate Gallery, Henry Moore Institute and artist’s estate. Its originality lies primarily in highlighting the changing types of patronage Péri received following the emergence of the Cold War, and in using unpublished and previously uncited writings by the artist to show how he deliberately abandoned the stylistic norms of official Communist art by conflating realist figuration with technical and formal strategies assimilated during his early years in the Berlin Constructivist avant-garde. (The English translation follows the German text.)

'Geometries of Hope and Fear: The Iconography of Atomic Science and Nuclear Anxiety in the Modern Sculpture of World War and Cold War Britain'

British Art in the Nuclear Age (ed. C. Jolivette), 2014

This book chapter investigates the ways in which nuclear science and technology figured in a vari... more This book chapter investigates the ways in which nuclear science and technology figured in a variety of sculptural forms in early Cold-War Britain. First it shows how in the 1930s and 1940s constructivist sculptors, such as Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, referenced atomic science in their work, encouraged by contact with the crystallographer J.D. Bernal. Through works alluding to the geometry of crystal structures they signified optimistic hope for increased human understanding in a future Socialist society. The chapter then examines how the creation and use of atomic weapons led surrealist and social-realist sculptors, such as Henry Moore and Peter Peri, to make ambivalent or critical works about nuclear science and technology, exemplified in sculptural representations of nuclear arms and the disarmament campaign (in which several sculptors and critics were active). Lastly, the chapter considers the extent to which the expressionist sculpture of a younger generation of British sculptors, such as Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows, has also been understood to reflect fears of nuclear warfare, despite an absence of explicit ‘nuclear’ signification. As this now familiar interpretation of their imagery has invariably been supported by Herbert Read’s famous characterization of it as an expression of ‘the geometry of fear’, the chapter interrogates the intended meaning of his epithet and how and when it became associated with the nuclear threat. Throughout the chapter, interpretations by sculptors and contemporary critics of these disparate sculptural engagements with nuclear science and technology are scrutinized, alongside analysis of how they related to the aesthetic and ideological oppositions of the Cold War.

‘“The Geometry of Fear”: Herbert Read and British Modern Sculpture after the Second World War’

Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, 1993

‘The Competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”’

The History of British Art (Vol. 3): 1870 - Now, ed. Chris Stephens, 2008

Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by th... more Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by the editor, Dr Chris Stephens (Head of Displays and Curator of Modern Art at Tate Britain), this short chapter focuses on the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1953 international sculpture competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”, in which British sculptors were heavily involved and especially successful. It synthesizes aspects of my doctoral research, previously published in specialist academic journals, providing an instructive case-study in how British art and art institutions were implicated in the ideological and propaganda struggles of the early Cold War. It is based on research undertaken in the Tate Gallery Archive, the MoMA Archive (New York) and the Whitney Corporation archive (New York), and on the personal papers of, and interviews with, sculptors, critics, and former ICA staff and CIA officers. It draws on the literature of Cold War politics, government intelligence, and international cultural diplomacy. It takes a revisionist approach to the institutional patronage of Western modernist sculpture in the early Cold War and demonstrates that this competition was funded covertly by the US government, probably through the CIA, as a weapon of anti-Communist propaganda. Importantly, and unlike comparable writings by British and US scholars on American Abstract Expressionist painting, it proposes that the most extreme forms of modernist art were not compatible with the ideological values of US ‘New Liberalism’, since the internationalist liberals who backed the competition withdrew their support after the Grand Prize was awarded to an ‘ultra-modern’ British design by the British sculptor Reg Butler.

‘Henry Moore’s “open-air” sculpture: a modern, reforming aesthetic of sunlight and air’

Henry Moore: Critical Essays, 2003

This essay connects the British sculptor Henry Moore’s commitment to carving sculpture out-of-doo... more This essay connects the British sculptor Henry Moore’s commitment to carving sculpture out-of-doors and exhibiting it in urban parks and rural landscape to his wider interest in outdoor leisure pursuits, such as rambling and sunbathing. It associates Moore’s aesthetic and recreational preferences with his childhood in industrially polluted Yorkshire, and to the ideological significance of the ‘open air’ in mid-century Britain, especially to debates around public health and access to the countryside. It argues that even the open forms and reclining figure theme characteristic of Moore’s sculpture may be related to the contemporary cult of the open air. The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered to the ‘Place-Body-Script: Contemporary Views of Henry Moore’ conference at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, in 1998. The book was published in the UK and USA, and represents a significant critical intervention in Moore scholarship.

Modern sculpture in the public park: a Socialist experiment in open-air 'cultured leisure'

Sculpture and the Garden, 2006

This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of scu... more This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of sculpture in London’s Battersea Park in 1948 and 1951 established an influential model for the post-war display of modern sculpture in temporary parkland exhibitions and permanent rural sculpture parks. It argues that the encouragement of healthy, improving forms of recreation and modernist forms of culture in certain circles of British socialism contributed to the emergence of this new type of exhibition. It examines the idea of the ‘open air’ in political discourses in inter-war Britain when poverty, poor housing and infectious disease were endemic and public health was comparatively neglected by government. Communal participation in outdoor leisure recreation was encouraged by socialist groups and demands for access to ‘open space’ led to ‘mass trespasses’ and calls for the formation of national parks and ‘green belts’. Thus, the Battersea Park exhibitions coincided with a moment when entitlement to improved health and ‘open space’ were urgent political causes. Within months these demands had found other productive outcomes in the realisation of two major pieces of post-war legislation: the foundation of the National Health Service and the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act.

The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered at the ‘Sculpture and the Garden’ conference at University College, Bretton Hall, Wakefield, in 1998, organised by the Henry Moore Institute, New Arcadian Press, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the Centre for Sculpture, University College, Bretton Hall. The book analyses the role of sculpture in gardens from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with essays by Alan Powers (University of Greenwich), Joy Sleeman (Slade School of Fine Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and others. It was published in the UK and USA.

'Western European Modernism in the Service of American Cold-War Liberalism: unveiling a “Monument to Democracy”’’

Art and Ideology: The Nineteen-Fifties in a Divided Europe, conference proceedings, University of Zagreb, 18-21 February 1999, ed. Ljiljana Kolesnik, translated into Croatian by Natalija Jovanovic. Zagreb: Drustvo povjesnicara umjetnosti Hrvatske [Art History Association of Croatia], 2004

A familiar claim of revisionist historians of post-war American modernist painting is that during... more A familiar claim of revisionist historians of post-war American modernist painting is that during the Cold War such painting was funded and promoted in Western Europe by clandestine agencies of the United States Government for use as a political weapon since it was seen to symbolise the individualistic, ‘free enterprise’ ideology of capitalist liberal democracy. This paper briefly sketches the origins of this argument and reassess its validity, given that firm evidence for such activity is difficult to establish. Archival evidence will be used to demonstrate that in one instance, at least, in the early 1950s, certain museum officials and wealthy businessmen who had links with American intelligence showed more interest in exploiting the propagandistic potential of Western European modernist art. The likely involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an international sculpture competition initiated in 1951 to commission a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner suggests that early American attempts to enlist art in the Cold War were relatively explicit and unsophisticated. Organised in London by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and ostensibly funded by an anonymous American donor, the Monument was to be erected in West Berlin. The competition attracted enormous numbers of sculptors from outside the Eastern bloc to participate, including forty-seven sculptors from the former Yugoslavia. It challenged contemporary sculptors to re-engage with the problem of designing a public monument, a tradition somewhat discredited by association with the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Although the independent international jury gave the Grand Prize to a highly innovative, modernist design by the British sculptor, Reg Butler, the response of the competition’s secret patrons suggests that they were far less adventurous in their artistic tastes and far from committed to promulgating avant-gardism, as some have assumed the CIA were inclined to do. While not contesting the broad conclusions of those revisionists who have argued that modernist art served the political aspirations of a certain American social class, a fuller understanding of this failed attempt to realise a modernist monument, suggests a far more complex situation and a need to rethink existing presumptions about the CIA’s aesthetic tastes and any simplistic equation between the ideological values of radical modernist art and US liberal democracy.

‘Aesthetics: Forms and Meanings, 1950-1975’

Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Britain, Vol. 1, 2003

This essay traces the formal development of post-war British sculpture, from the expressionistic ... more This essay traces the formal development of post-war British sculpture, from the expressionistic figuration of the 1950s, through the formalist abstraction of the 1960s, to the Conceptualist transgressions of the early 1970s. To account for the meanings of these forms it identifies key critical voices in each period and explains how changing aesthetic precepts were influenced by philosophical and critical standpoints informed by existentialism, humanism, formalism, and phenomenology. It also connects the dominance of specific aesthetic forms and meanings to broader ideological changes. The essay was commissioned for the first history of 20th century British sculpture to be published since the landmark catalogue that accompanied the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1981 exhibition, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, and draws on much new scholarship. It replaces the conventional survey approach with essays on five contexts in which sculpture was produced and interpreted in each of the four 25-year periods constituting the century. The twenty commissioned authors include many leading authorities on British sculpture, such as Margaret Garlake (editor of The Sculpture Journal and formerly Courtauld Institute of Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and Anne M. Wagner (University of California, Berkeley).

'Bernard Meadows'

Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Britain, Vol. 2: A Guide to Sculptors in the Leeds Collections, 2003

'Benno Elkan (1877-1960)

New Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

Participation and Pageant: The Miralda Honeymoon Project

Out of Here: Creative Collaborations Beyond the Gallery, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 1998

Review of Der unbekannte politische Gefangene: Ein internationaler Skulpturenwettbewerb zu Zeiten des Kalten Krieges (The Unknown Political Prisoner: An International Sculpture Competition in the Cold War Era)

The Sculpture Journal, vol. 31, no.2, pp. 269-73, 2022

This is a review of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin (30 October 2020–18 June 2021)... more

The Sculpture Journal, 2007

Review of 'Heinz Henghes' exhibition, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, London, 2006; Mark De No... more

The Sculpture Journal, 2005

review of ‘Anthony Caro’ exhibition, Tate Britain, 2005; I. Barker, 'Anthony Caro: Quest for the ... more

'Eduardo Paolozzi: critical postmodernist'

The Sculpture Journal, 2003

Review of 'Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews', ed. R. Spencer, Oxford University Press, 2000

Public sculpture of Liverpool and Birmingham

Art History (UK), vol. 22, no. 1, March, 1999

Review of 'Public Sculpture of Liverpool' by T. Cavanagh (Liverpool University Press, 1997) and '... more

The 'Sculpture in the Home' Exhibitions: Reconstructing the Home and Family in Post-war Britain

Henry Moore Institute Essays on Sculpture, 2008

This essay offers the first detailed account of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s series of fou... more This essay offers the first detailed account of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s series of four 'Sculpture in the Home' exhibitions, which toured British municipal galleries in the late 1940s and 1950s. By presenting modern sculpture in simulated domestic settings, with furnishings selected by the Council of Industrial Design, the exhibitions encouraged visitors to purchase sculpture for their own homes. The essay identifies the types of sculpture shown, the untypically high proportion of female sculptors included and, through reproduction of unpublished exhibition plans and photographs, the unusual appearance of the exhibitions. It demonstrates that alongside the Arts Council’s early support of public sculpture and murals, it promoted the sale of small-scale domestic sculpture as another means by which art could have a place in the lives of ‘ordinary people’ (although in reality the price of most exhibits meant that purchase was restricted to the middle-classes). It analyses the aesthetic and social contexts for the growth of public and critical interest in the domestic function of modernist sculpture in that ‘home-centred society’ and thereby uncovers an aspect of post-war British sculpture long overshadowed by attention to its innovative forms of outdoor public display. The essay draws on the literature of post-war interior design, domestic space and gendered familial roles, and on archival research in the National Art Library, Tate Gallery Archive, and Design Council Archive. It was published to accompany the Henry Moore Institute’s exhibition, Sculpture in the Home: re-staging a post-war Initiative (2 Oct 2008 – 4 Jan 2009), in which the author recreated the appearance of the London-showings of the 1950 and 1953 exhibitions, attracting reviews in The Burlington Magazine, The Independent and The Yorkshire Post.

Symbols for '51: the Royal Festival Hall, Skylon and Sculptures for the Festival of Britain

Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London, exhibtion catalogue, 1996

Ronald Pope - Derbyshire Modernist

Ronald Pope: Modern Sculpture in the Public Eye , 2008

Materialising Memory: mementoes, memorials and modernism

In Memoriam, New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK, 2000

‘Peter László Péri in Britain, 1933-1967: reforming “Socialist Realism” for Western Europe’

Péri’s People: Peter László Péri (1899-1967), eds Arie Hartog, Dorothea Schöne & Veronika Wiegartz, Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, & Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen, pp. 119-26, 2023

This essay contributes to a growing field of research into the work of Central European artists w... more This essay contributes to a growing field of research into the work of Central European artists who settled in Britain in the 20th century. It examines the development and reception of the sculpture of the Hungarian-born, Jewish, Communist, refugee artist Peter László Péri following his flight from Berlin in 1933. It was commissioned for the bilingual catalogue of the largest ever exhibition of the artist’s work in a public gallery (Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, 23/9/23-28/1/24, and Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen, 10/3/24-2/6/24). As the principal essay in the catalogue to address Péri’s work in Britain (the focus of the exhibition), it makes a significant contribution to the first substantial, scholarly, English-language publication on the artist. The essay situates Péri’s work in the historical context of mid-century Britain by supplementing research from the published literature with archival materials in the Tate Gallery, Henry Moore Institute and artist’s estate. Its originality lies primarily in highlighting the changing types of patronage Péri received following the emergence of the Cold War, and in using unpublished and previously uncited writings by the artist to show how he deliberately abandoned the stylistic norms of official Communist art by conflating realist figuration with technical and formal strategies assimilated during his early years in the Berlin Constructivist avant-garde. (The English translation follows the German text.)

'Geometries of Hope and Fear: The Iconography of Atomic Science and Nuclear Anxiety in the Modern Sculpture of World War and Cold War Britain'

British Art in the Nuclear Age (ed. C. Jolivette), 2014

This book chapter investigates the ways in which nuclear science and technology figured in a vari... more This book chapter investigates the ways in which nuclear science and technology figured in a variety of sculptural forms in early Cold-War Britain. First it shows how in the 1930s and 1940s constructivist sculptors, such as Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, referenced atomic science in their work, encouraged by contact with the crystallographer J.D. Bernal. Through works alluding to the geometry of crystal structures they signified optimistic hope for increased human understanding in a future Socialist society. The chapter then examines how the creation and use of atomic weapons led surrealist and social-realist sculptors, such as Henry Moore and Peter Peri, to make ambivalent or critical works about nuclear science and technology, exemplified in sculptural representations of nuclear arms and the disarmament campaign (in which several sculptors and critics were active). Lastly, the chapter considers the extent to which the expressionist sculpture of a younger generation of British sculptors, such as Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows, has also been understood to reflect fears of nuclear warfare, despite an absence of explicit ‘nuclear’ signification. As this now familiar interpretation of their imagery has invariably been supported by Herbert Read’s famous characterization of it as an expression of ‘the geometry of fear’, the chapter interrogates the intended meaning of his epithet and how and when it became associated with the nuclear threat. Throughout the chapter, interpretations by sculptors and contemporary critics of these disparate sculptural engagements with nuclear science and technology are scrutinized, alongside analysis of how they related to the aesthetic and ideological oppositions of the Cold War.

‘“The Geometry of Fear”: Herbert Read and British Modern Sculpture after the Second World War’

Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, 1993

‘The Competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”’

The History of British Art (Vol. 3): 1870 - Now, ed. Chris Stephens, 2008

Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by th... more Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by the editor, Dr Chris Stephens (Head of Displays and Curator of Modern Art at Tate Britain), this short chapter focuses on the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1953 international sculpture competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”, in which British sculptors were heavily involved and especially successful. It synthesizes aspects of my doctoral research, previously published in specialist academic journals, providing an instructive case-study in how British art and art institutions were implicated in the ideological and propaganda struggles of the early Cold War. It is based on research undertaken in the Tate Gallery Archive, the MoMA Archive (New York) and the Whitney Corporation archive (New York), and on the personal papers of, and interviews with, sculptors, critics, and former ICA staff and CIA officers. It draws on the literature of Cold War politics, government intelligence, and international cultural diplomacy. It takes a revisionist approach to the institutional patronage of Western modernist sculpture in the early Cold War and demonstrates that this competition was funded covertly by the US government, probably through the CIA, as a weapon of anti-Communist propaganda. Importantly, and unlike comparable writings by British and US scholars on American Abstract Expressionist painting, it proposes that the most extreme forms of modernist art were not compatible with the ideological values of US ‘New Liberalism’, since the internationalist liberals who backed the competition withdrew their support after the Grand Prize was awarded to an ‘ultra-modern’ British design by the British sculptor Reg Butler.

‘Henry Moore’s “open-air” sculpture: a modern, reforming aesthetic of sunlight and air’

Henry Moore: Critical Essays, 2003

This essay connects the British sculptor Henry Moore’s commitment to carving sculpture out-of-doo... more This essay connects the British sculptor Henry Moore’s commitment to carving sculpture out-of-doors and exhibiting it in urban parks and rural landscape to his wider interest in outdoor leisure pursuits, such as rambling and sunbathing. It associates Moore’s aesthetic and recreational preferences with his childhood in industrially polluted Yorkshire, and to the ideological significance of the ‘open air’ in mid-century Britain, especially to debates around public health and access to the countryside. It argues that even the open forms and reclining figure theme characteristic of Moore’s sculpture may be related to the contemporary cult of the open air. The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered to the ‘Place-Body-Script: Contemporary Views of Henry Moore’ conference at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, in 1998. The book was published in the UK and USA, and represents a significant critical intervention in Moore scholarship.

Modern sculpture in the public park: a Socialist experiment in open-air 'cultured leisure'

Sculpture and the Garden, 2006

This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of scu... more This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of sculpture in London’s Battersea Park in 1948 and 1951 established an influential model for the post-war display of modern sculpture in temporary parkland exhibitions and permanent rural sculpture parks. It argues that the encouragement of healthy, improving forms of recreation and modernist forms of culture in certain circles of British socialism contributed to the emergence of this new type of exhibition. It examines the idea of the ‘open air’ in political discourses in inter-war Britain when poverty, poor housing and infectious disease were endemic and public health was comparatively neglected by government. Communal participation in outdoor leisure recreation was encouraged by socialist groups and demands for access to ‘open space’ led to ‘mass trespasses’ and calls for the formation of national parks and ‘green belts’. Thus, the Battersea Park exhibitions coincided with a moment when entitlement to improved health and ‘open space’ were urgent political causes. Within months these demands had found other productive outcomes in the realisation of two major pieces of post-war legislation: the foundation of the National Health Service and the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act.

The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered at the ‘Sculpture and the Garden’ conference at University College, Bretton Hall, Wakefield, in 1998, organised by the Henry Moore Institute, New Arcadian Press, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the Centre for Sculpture, University College, Bretton Hall. The book analyses the role of sculpture in gardens from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with essays by Alan Powers (University of Greenwich), Joy Sleeman (Slade School of Fine Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and others. It was published in the UK and USA.

'Western European Modernism in the Service of American Cold-War Liberalism: unveiling a “Monument to Democracy”’’

Art and Ideology: The Nineteen-Fifties in a Divided Europe, conference proceedings, University of Zagreb, 18-21 February 1999, ed. Ljiljana Kolesnik, translated into Croatian by Natalija Jovanovic. Zagreb: Drustvo povjesnicara umjetnosti Hrvatske [Art History Association of Croatia], 2004

A familiar claim of revisionist historians of post-war American modernist painting is that during... more A familiar claim of revisionist historians of post-war American modernist painting is that during the Cold War such painting was funded and promoted in Western Europe by clandestine agencies of the United States Government for use as a political weapon since it was seen to symbolise the individualistic, ‘free enterprise’ ideology of capitalist liberal democracy. This paper briefly sketches the origins of this argument and reassess its validity, given that firm evidence for such activity is difficult to establish. Archival evidence will be used to demonstrate that in one instance, at least, in the early 1950s, certain museum officials and wealthy businessmen who had links with American intelligence showed more interest in exploiting the propagandistic potential of Western European modernist art. The likely involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an international sculpture competition initiated in 1951 to commission a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner suggests that early American attempts to enlist art in the Cold War were relatively explicit and unsophisticated. Organised in London by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and ostensibly funded by an anonymous American donor, the Monument was to be erected in West Berlin. The competition attracted enormous numbers of sculptors from outside the Eastern bloc to participate, including forty-seven sculptors from the former Yugoslavia. It challenged contemporary sculptors to re-engage with the problem of designing a public monument, a tradition somewhat discredited by association with the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Although the independent international jury gave the Grand Prize to a highly innovative, modernist design by the British sculptor, Reg Butler, the response of the competition’s secret patrons suggests that they were far less adventurous in their artistic tastes and far from committed to promulgating avant-gardism, as some have assumed the CIA were inclined to do. While not contesting the broad conclusions of those revisionists who have argued that modernist art served the political aspirations of a certain American social class, a fuller understanding of this failed attempt to realise a modernist monument, suggests a far more complex situation and a need to rethink existing presumptions about the CIA’s aesthetic tastes and any simplistic equation between the ideological values of radical modernist art and US liberal democracy.

‘Aesthetics: Forms and Meanings, 1950-1975’

Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Britain, Vol. 1, 2003

This essay traces the formal development of post-war British sculpture, from the expressionistic ... more This essay traces the formal development of post-war British sculpture, from the expressionistic figuration of the 1950s, through the formalist abstraction of the 1960s, to the Conceptualist transgressions of the early 1970s. To account for the meanings of these forms it identifies key critical voices in each period and explains how changing aesthetic precepts were influenced by philosophical and critical standpoints informed by existentialism, humanism, formalism, and phenomenology. It also connects the dominance of specific aesthetic forms and meanings to broader ideological changes. The essay was commissioned for the first history of 20th century British sculpture to be published since the landmark catalogue that accompanied the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1981 exhibition, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, and draws on much new scholarship. It replaces the conventional survey approach with essays on five contexts in which sculpture was produced and interpreted in each of the four 25-year periods constituting the century. The twenty commissioned authors include many leading authorities on British sculpture, such as Margaret Garlake (editor of The Sculpture Journal and formerly Courtauld Institute of Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and Anne M. Wagner (University of California, Berkeley).

'Bernard Meadows'

Sculpture in Twentieth-Century Britain, Vol. 2: A Guide to Sculptors in the Leeds Collections, 2003

'Benno Elkan (1877-1960)

New Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

Participation and Pageant: The Miralda Honeymoon Project

Out of Here: Creative Collaborations Beyond the Gallery, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 1998

‘Institutional Patronage of Central and Eastern European Émigré Sculptors in post-war Britain, c.1945-65: moderate modernism for the social-democratic Consensus’

British Art Journal, 2019

This paper assesses the extent to which émigré sculptors from central and eastern Europe benefite... more This paper assesses the extent to which émigré sculptors from central and eastern Europe benefited from new sources of institutional patronage in early post-Second World War ‘New Britain’. It demonstrates that many of those who settled there between 1933 and 1948 – most escaping racial, religious and political persecution – attracted support from government agencies and/or local authority departments. Works by Belsky, Charoux, Ehrlich, Fleischmann, Gordine, Henghes, Nimptsch, Peri, Soukop, Vogel and others were selected for public exhibition and permanent siting in or on public buildings and residential estates, suggesting that a combination of comprehensible imagery, moderately modernist style, and early experience of architectural or commemorative work, were especially valued by institutional patrons. Their numerous commissions for the Festival of Britain are especially notable, given the xenophobic and anti-Semitic attacks before the war on Epstein’s sculpture. Yet early success with bodies such as the London County Council and Arts Council of Great Britain contrasted conspicuously with the initially more tempered response of the Royal Academy of Arts and the permanent and almost total neglect of the British Council, leading this paper to ask why the embrace of these sculptors shifted in successive decades between different sections of the post-war institutional art establishment.

'Sculpture in the Home': selling modernism to post-war British homemakers

The Sculpture Journal, 2008

This essay investigates an unfamiliar tendency in British post-war modernism toward the domestica... more This essay investigates an unfamiliar tendency in British post-war modernism toward the domestication of sculpture. Finding its key manifestation in public exhibitions supported by the Arts Council and the Council of Industrial Design – notably a series of Sculpture in the Home exhibitions that toured Britain between 1945 and 1959, and the Homes and Gardens pavilion of the Festival of Britain’s 1951 South Bank Exhibition – the essay shows how the display of modern sculpture alongside contemporary modern furnishings disseminated a state-backed vision of modern living, in response to governmental concerns with domestic design reform. Although the high price of sculpture and the wider public’s limited disposable income thwarted ambitions for sculpture to be enjoyed in the home as a part of everyday life, attendance figures suggest the exhibitions aroused considerable interest among post-war homemakers. Contrary to critical accounts that have identified an antagonism between modernism and domesticity, the essay argues that post-war interest in the domestic role of sculpture extended a strain of English avant-garde art that endured from the Arts and Crafts movement until it was eclipsed around 1960 by the anti-domestic values of Greenbergian Modernism.

'Domestic Sculpture'

Apollo Magazine, 2008

‘Modern Sculpture in the South Bank Townscape’

Twentieth Century Architecture (special issue on the Festival of Britain), 2001

This paper examines the use of sculpture in the South Bank Exhibition of the 1951 Festival of Bri... more This paper examines the use of sculpture in the South Bank Exhibition of the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Festival marks the first occasion that the British state patronised public sculpture on a significant scale without the imperative of commemoration. Most of the sculpture was displayed in and around the buildings of the Exhibition and represents an historic attempt to unify sculpture and architecture within an extended urban environment, thereby acting as a prototype for post-war Reconstruction. However, just as the Exhibition’s architecture tends to be remembered for one untypically futuristic building - Tubbs’ Dome of Discovery - so the sculpture has tended to be misleadingly characterised by the most controversial ‘abstract’ pieces. Misconceptions about the sculpture have been fuelled by several factors: a lack of certainty over the number and character of the sculpture displayed, the disproportionate critical attention given to works by Hepworth and Moore, and the widespread dispersal or destruction of sculpture after the Festival. This essay is the first to give a comprehensive account of sculpture at the Exhibition and shows that the majority of the thirty or so sculptures displayed - like most of the buildings, layout and landscaping - conformed to a moderate and populist modern aesthetic. It also reveals the extent to which the types of sculpture displayed reflected the aspirations and values of the two separate sources of state patronage: the Arts Council of Great Britain, which commissioned Hepworth and Moore, and the Festival of Britain Office, which was responsible for acquiring almost all other sculpture. The latter were selected by the Festival Design Group – a team of architects, town-planners and designers – who shared a predilection for Picturesque ‘townscape’ in which sculpture remained essentially subservient to architecture. Their attitudes are compared to those of the Arts Council and of more radical modernist sculptors, like Moore, who placed greater value on sculpture’s autonomy, thereby producing tensions within the triangular relationship of sculptors and commissioning bodies. Given that the Festival was intended as a celebration of national identity, this new account of the sculpture at the South Bank also reveals that it reaffirmed contemporary notions of Britishness/Englishness. Based on extensive archival study, the essay develops and expands research initiated for my curatorship of the exhibition Symbols for ’51: the Royal Festival Hall, Skylon, and Sculptures for the Festival of Britain at the Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London, in 1996. The article is the only one on the visual arts in this special issue of the Twentieth Century Architecture journal that provides the first overview of the Festival since Banham’s and Hillier’s A Tonic to the Nation: the Festival of Britain 1951 (Thames & Hudson, 1976).

The Limits of Modernist Art as a 'Weapon of the Cold War': reassessing the unknown patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner

Oxford Art Journal, 1997

The writer discusses the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an internat... more The writer discusses the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an international sculpture competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, proposed by Anthony J. T. Kloman, the U.S. cultural attaché. It has been claimed that during the Cold War, American Modernist painting was targeted by clandestine agencies of the U.S. for use as a political weapon “in the battle for the mind of Europe.” However, the sculpture competition had an explicitly political theme and attempted to deploy mainly European modernist art in the propaganda offensive, giving no credence to the idea that Abstract Expressionist painting was similarly used; this is consistent with the reservations of Clement Greenberg and Alfred H. Barr over the limited propaganda potential of American painting in the early 1950s. Moreover, the CIA's early withdrawal of support for Reg Butler's design because of its “ultra-modern” style shows an underlying populist conservatism in aesthetic matters that excluded the more ambitious forms of modernist art from their propaganda weaponry. (from Art Full Text)

Butler's Competition Project for a Monument to 'The Unknown Political Prisoner': Abstraction and Cold War Politics

Art History, 1989

‘Projekt Rega Butlera w Konkursie na Pomnik Nieznanego, Wieznia Politycznego. Abstrakcja a polityka zimnej wojny’

Rzezba Polska Yearbook, 1990

Polish translation by A. Walczak & E. Wyzynska of my article: ‘Butler’s Competition Project for a... more

‘On Art and Politics: a recent interview with Clement Greenberg by Robert Burstow’

Frieze, no. 18, Sep/Oct, 1994

Chesterfield Art Trail

Chesterfield Borough Council website, 2012

My contributions to Chesterfield Borough Council's online Art Trail catalogue and interpret over ... more My contributions to Chesterfield Borough Council's online Art Trail catalogue and interpret over sixty works of contemporary public art commissioned or supported through the Council's ‘Per Cent for Art’ scheme between 1992 and 2011. The artworks include sculptures, murals, earthworks, lightworks, glassworks, and architectural-works. Among the artists represented are Angela Conner, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Ibbeson, Liz Lemon, David Mach and Denis O'Connor. The entries on individual artworks must be accessed using the map on the Council's website, which can be found by clicking on the google.com link above or below, or by going to the Council's website and using the drop-down 'Explore' menu. The entries combine analysis of the artworks with interpretation and contextualization based on archival documentation of the works' selection, commission, production and reception. Since the online Art Trail first went live in May 2012, more than twenty shorter entries on newly commissioned artworks have been added by other unidentified contributors.

Modern Public Sculpture in 'New Britain', 1945-1953

PhD History of Art thesis, University of Leeds, 2000

In postwar social-democratic 'New Britain', new sources of state, municipal and institutional pat... more In postwar social-democratic 'New Britain', new sources of state, municipal and institutional patronage enabled modern sculpture to acquire new forms and uses in outdoor urban spaces, transforming the norms of public sculpture internationally. This thesis considers how far three emergent models of public-sculpture practice may be connected to the ideological commitments of their patrons, exploring one prototypical event in each case. Chapter One examines the new trend for displaying modern sculpture in the 'open air', focusing on the London County Council's 1948 exhibition at Battersea Park. It demonstrates that the exhibition's conception and modernist bias were linked to the LCC's progressive Socialist policies. Through an exploration of the inter-war practices and interests of Henry Moore, who played a key role in the exhibition, the open-air aesthetic is placed within contemporary discourses on the benefits of the open air. Chapter Two examines the parallel trend for displaying modern sculpture in 'townscape', focusing on the state-sponsored South Bank exhibition of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the model of postwar urban reconstruction. This chapter demonstrates that the unity of modern sculptures and picturesque architectural environment affirmed social-democratic values and contemporary conceptions of national identity. Chapter Three examines the attempt to reconcile modern sculpture with the traditions of the public commemorative monument, focusing on the Institute of Contemporary Art's 1952-3 competition for a monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. Here it is shown that the competition's anonymous funding derived covertly from the US government, that the proposed monument was intended to function as an instrument of anti-communist propaganda, and that the patron's withdrawal from the project provides evidence to critique revisionist accounts of modern art's role in American, Cold-War, cultural diplomacy. In short, this thesis argues that the new institutional patrons sought in various ways to identify modern public sculpture with the shifting social-democratic values of the postwar consensus, though this was problematized by some ultra-modernist practices.

Chesterfield Art Trail

Description and interpretation of 60 works of Contemporary public art (each approx. 200-300 words... more

The 'Sculpture in the Home' exhibitions: reconstructing the home and family in post-war Britain

Essays on Sculpture no. 60

Ronald Pope: modern sculpture in the public eye

Exhibition guide published to accompany exhibitions of work by the Derbyshire artist Ronald Pope ... more Exhibition guide published to accompany exhibitions of work by the Derbyshire artist Ronald Pope at the University of Derby, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and Derby Cathedral; written and edited by Robert Burstow, with essay,‘Ronald Pope – Derbyshire Modernist’ and personal recollections by the artist's daughter Jane Hubbard..

Modern Sculpture in the Public Park: A Socialist Experiment in Open-Air ‘Cultured Leisure’

This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of scu... more This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of sculpture in London’s Battersea Park in 1948 and 1951 established an influential model for the post-war display of modern sculpture in temporary parkland exhibitions and permanent rural sculpture parks. It argues that the encouragement of healthy, improving forms of recreation and modernist forms of culture in certain circles of British socialism contributed to the emergence of this new type of exhibition. It examines the idea of the ‘open air’ in political discourses in inter-war Britain when poverty, poor housing and infectious disease were endemic and public health was comparatively neglected by government. Communal participation in outdoor leisure recreation was encouraged by socialist groups and demands for access to ‘open space’ led to ‘mass trespasses’ and calls for the formation of national parks and ‘green belts’. Thus, the Battersea Park exhibitions coincided with a moment when entitlement to improved health and ‘open space’ were urgent political causes. Within months these demands had found other productive outcomes in the realisation of two major pieces of post-war legislation: the foundation of the National Health Service and the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered at the ‘Sculpture and the Garden’ conference at University College, Bretton Hall, Wakefield, in 1998, organised by the Henry Moore Institute, New Arcadian Press, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the Centre for Sculpture, University College, Bretton Hall. The book analyses the role of sculpture in gardens from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with essays by Alan Powers (University of Greenwich), Joy Sleeman (Slade School of Fine Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and others. It was published in the UK and USA.

Butler's Competition Project for a Monument to ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’; Abstraction and Cold War Politics

Art History, Dec 1, 1989

Modern art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom. For this reason the hist... more Modern art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom. For this reason the history of modern art tends at certain moments to become the history of modern freedom. Robert Motherwell, 1944 1 in a society which considers and treats the arts as activities which can profoundly affect the ideological and political consciousness of the people, sculpture occupies a most controversial and central position. John Berger, 1969 2 Public sculpture has long exercised an ideological function in crystallising and unifying collective social values. The cult of the civic sculptural monument has flourished in affluent, self-confident, humanistic societies such as those of Ancient Greece and Rome or eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe. That such statues have possessed a symbolic potency is as evident in the size of the crowds which attended their inauguration and the popularity of domestic replica 'reductions', as in the iconoclastic fervour with which those of the ancien regime and the Russian Czars were later toppled by Revolutionary decree." Yet by the mid-twentieth century, with the exception of many Eastern bloc countries, the bond between the public and public statuary had become increasingly emasculated. Of the comparatively few memorials erected in the West after the Second World War, most commemorated new democratised subjects such as the victims of civilian bombing or the concentration camps but, because of their modern style, often failed to win public approval. Before the war, the form of the public monument remained largely dependent upon classical precedent, but the inexorable ascendancy of modern art in western societies was increasingly to come into conflict with traditional expectations of public sculpture; this was most often expressed in widespread condemnation of newly erected works, if not actual wanton damage or defacement." Seldom, though, has modern sculpture provoked such fierce public debate, unrivalled in Britain even by the controversies surrounding sculptures by Epstein and Moore, as followed the award of the Grand Prize in the 1953 International Competition for a Monument to 'The Unknown Political Prisoner'.

The Limits of Modernist Art as a 'Weapon of the Cold War': Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner

Oxford Art Journal, 1997

The author discusses the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an internat... more The author discusses the involvement of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an international sculpture competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, proposed by Anthony J. T. Kloman, the U.S. cultural attaché. It has been claimed that during the Cold War, American Modernist painting was targeted by clandestine agencies of the U.S. for use as a political weapon “in the battle for the mind of Europe.” However, the sculpture competition had an explicitly political theme and attempted to deploy mainly European modernist art in the propaganda offensive, giving no credence to the idea that Abstract Expressionist painting was similarly used; this is consistent with the reservations of Clement Greenberg and Alfred H. Barr over the limited propaganda potential of American painting in the early 1950s. Moreover, the CIA&amp;#39;s early withdrawal of support for Reg Butler&amp;#39;s design because of its “ultra-modern” style shows an underlying populist conservatism in aesthetic matters that excluded the more ambitious forms of modernist art from their propaganda weaponry.

Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art

The competition for a monument to the Unknown political prisoner

Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by th... more Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by the editor, Dr Chris Stephens (Head of Displays and Curator of Modern Art at Tate Britain), this short chapter focuses on the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1953 international sculpture competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”, in which British sculptors were heavily involved and especially successful. It synthesizes aspects of my doctoral research, previously published in specialist academic journals, providing an instructive case-study in how British art and art institutions were implicated in the ideological and propaganda struggles of the early Cold War. It is based on research undertaken in the Tate Gallery Archive, the MoMA Archive (New York) and the Whitney Corporation archive (New York), and on the personal papers of, and interviews with, sculptors, critics, and former ICA staff and CIA officers. It draws on the literature of Cold War politics, government intelligence, and international cultural diplomacy. It takes a revisionist approach to the institutional patronage of Western modernist sculpture in the early Cold War and demonstrates that this competition was funded covertly by the US government, probably through the CIA, as a weapon of anti-Communist propaganda. Importantly, and unlike comparable writings by British and US scholars on American Abstract Expressionist painting, it proposes that the most extreme forms of modernist art were not compatible with the ideological values of US ‘New Liberalism’, since the internationalist liberals who backed the competition withdrew their support after the Grand Prize was awarded to an ‘ultra-modern’ British design by the British sculptor Reg Butler.

Sculpture in the Home': selling modernism to post-war British homemakers

Sculpture Journal, Dec 1, 2008

On Art and Politics

Text of 1993 interview with eminent US art critic, first published in Frieze (no. 18, September/O... more

Modern Sculpture in the Public Park: A Socialist Experiment in Open-Air ‘Cultured Leisure’

Sculpture and the Garden, 2017

This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of scu... more This chapter demonstrates that the London County Council’s earliest ‘open-air’ exhibitions of sculpture in London’s Battersea Park in 1948 and 1951 established an influential model for the post-war display of modern sculpture in temporary parkland exhibitions and permanent rural sculpture parks. It argues that the encouragement of healthy, improving forms of recreation and modernist forms of culture in certain circles of British socialism contributed to the emergence of this new type of exhibition. It examines the idea of the ‘open air’ in political discourses in inter-war Britain when poverty, poor housing and infectious disease were endemic and public health was comparatively neglected by government. Communal participation in outdoor leisure recreation was encouraged by socialist groups and demands for access to ‘open space’ led to ‘mass trespasses’ and calls for the formation of national parks and ‘green belts’. Thus, the Battersea Park exhibitions coincided with a moment when entitlement to improved health and ‘open space’ were urgent political causes. Within months these demands had found other productive outcomes in the realisation of two major pieces of post-war legislation: the foundation of the National Health Service and the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. The essay is an extended and revised version of a paper delivered at the ‘Sculpture and the Garden’ conference at University College, Bretton Hall, Wakefield, in 1998, organised by the Henry Moore Institute, New Arcadian Press, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the Centre for Sculpture, University College, Bretton Hall. The book analyses the role of sculpture in gardens from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with essays by Alan Powers (University of Greenwich), Joy Sleeman (Slade School of Fine Art), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and others. It was published in the UK and USA.

Projekt Rega Butlera w konkursie na Pomnik Nieznanego Więźnia Politycznego : abstrakcja a polityka zimnej wojny / Robert Burstow ; tł. Edyta Wyżyńska, Anna Walczak

The competition for a monument to the Unknown political prisoner

Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by th... more Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art and commissioned by the editor, Dr Chris Stephens (Head of Displays and Curator of Modern Art at Tate Britain), this short chapter focuses on the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1953 international sculpture competition for a Monument to “The Unknown Political Prisoner”, in which British sculptors were heavily involved and especially successful. It synthesizes aspects of my doctoral research, previously published in specialist academic journals, providing an instructive case-study in how British art and art institutions were implicated in the ideological and propaganda struggles of the early Cold War. It is based on research undertaken in the Tate Gallery Archive, the MoMA Archive (New York) and the Whitney Corporation archive (New York), and on the personal papers of, and interviews with, sculptors, critics, and former ICA staff and CIA officers. It draws on the literature of Cold War politics, government intelligence, and international cultural diplomacy. It takes a revisionist approach to the institutional patronage of Western modernist sculpture in the early Cold War and demonstrates that this competition was funded covertly by the US government, probably through the CIA, as a weapon of anti-Communist propaganda. Importantly, and unlike comparable writings by British and US scholars on American Abstract Expressionist painting, it proposes that the most extreme forms of modernist art were not compatible with the ideological values of US ‘New Liberalism’, since the internationalist liberals who backed the competition withdrew their support after the Grand Prize was awarded to an ‘ultra-modern’ British design by the British sculptor Reg Butler.

Domestic sculpture

Apollo: The international magazine of arts, 2008

... Domestic sculpture. Autores: Robert Burstow; Localización: Apollo: The international magazine... more

Modern public sculpture in'New Britain', 1945-1953

Modern Public Sculpture in'New Britain', 1945-1953. Robert Burstow University of Leeds, 2... more

The Geometry of Fear: Herbert Read and British Modern Sculpture after the Second World War

B. Read and D. Thistlewood, Herbert Read: A British …, 1993

Geometries of hope and fear: the iconography of atomic science and nuclear anxiety in the modern sculpture of World War and Cold War Britain

Institutional patronage of central and Eastern European émigré sculptors in Britain, c1945-65: moderate modernism for the social-democratic consensus

Of the fifty or more British sculptors represented in the numerous exhibitions and commissions as... more Of the fifty or more British sculptors represented in the numerous exhibitions and commissions associated with the 1951 Festival of Britain, a surprisingly high proportion-more than a fifth-were émigrés from Central or Eastern Europe, none of whom had lived in Britain for more than eighteen years. The proportion rose to nearly a third at the Festival's South Bank Exhibition, where among the twenty-five or so contributing sculptors were the German-born Heinz Henghes (Pl 1), Hungarian-born László ('Peter') Péri, Latvian-born Dora Gordine, Czech-born Franta Belsky and Karel Vogel, and Austrian-born Siegfried Charoux, Georg Ehrlich, Anna Mahler and Willi (Wilhelm) Soukop. 1 Another German-born sculptor, Uli (Julius) Nimptsch, was among eight sculptors commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain to create a 'small sculpture' for the Festival (all of which were displayed alongside the Council's Sixty Paintings for '51 exhibition), 2 and in a rare example of corporate patronage the Slovakian-born Arthur Fleischmann was invited to design what became one of the most publicized artworks of the Festival, the Miranda mermaid fountain in the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park. 3 In addition, six of these same sculptors-Charoux, Ehrlich, Henghes, Nimptsch, Soukop and Vogel-were among eighteen British participants in the London County Council's International Exhibition of Sculpture at Battersea Park (postponed from 1950 to coincide with the Festival). That the work of so many sculptors born and, in most cases, trained in the German, Russian or Austro-Hungarian empires was presented in this state-led celebration of British cultural achievement is remarkable, as is the fact that their selection seems to have passed without comment in the popular and specialist art press. 4 Less than ten years earlier, during the Second World War, the Home Office had interned Charoux, Ehrlich and Vogel, and deported Henghes and Soukop as 'enemy

Ronald Pope: modern sculpture in the public eye

Exhibition guide published to accompany exhibitions of work by the Derbyshire artist Ronald Pope ... more Exhibition guide published to accompany exhibitions of work by the Derbyshire artist Ronald Pope at the University of Derby, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and Derby Cathedral; written and edited by Robert Burstow, with essay,‘Ronald Pope – Derbyshire Modernist’ and personal recollections by the artist's daughter Jane Hubbard..

Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art