Plastic Anatomy

The original is  “Michelangelo and the Human Form: His Knowledge and Use of Anatomy,” Art History 7 (1984): 176–86. The French is Published in l’Anatomie chez Michel–Ange: de la réalité à l’idéalité edited by Chiara Rabbi–Bernard (Paris: Hermann, 2003), 89–112

This version is unillustrated, and needs to be read with the printed text (English or French).
[Revised March 2013]

In many anthologies of art, sculpture is given short shrift in relation to other media, if it is treated at all. Modern Sculpture Reader aims to rectify this situation by presenting a collection of important texts that have defined sculpture's radically changing status and role since the end of the nineteenth century, a time marked by a general reappraisal of the forms and functions of art.

From the rigorously theoretical to the experimental and poetic, Modern Sculpture Reader offers a lively discourse on the medium by a range of artists, writers, critics, and poets—Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenberg, André Breton, Ezra Pound, and Clement Greenberg—in a variety of genres: poems, lectures, transcribed interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and artists' statements. These diverse text selections offer valuable insight into the development of the critical language of sculpture and its connections to other media in an era of increasingly conceptual artistic practice. Many of the essays highlight key ongoing concerns such as sculpture's physical properties and conditions of display, both of which have important implications for the viewer's tactile and emotional interaction with sculptural works.

Jon Wood is research curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and coauthor of Articulate Objects: Sculpture, Voice and Performance (Peter Lang, 2009). David Hulks is a teacher and researcher in world art studies with an interest in psychoanalytical theory and the conceptual aspects of three-dimensional art since the post-war era. Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the author of The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (Yale University Press, 2001).

The German painter Tom Leonhardt detracts almost all coulours from his large-sized paintings: They seem to be nearly white. This absence of bright coulours makes them unreproducible by photography. They need the observer's presence. W. Benjamin's modernist term of "aura" gets a contemporary revival.  The feathery lines contour - and this is undecidable - close views of landscape details or general views of southern German areas. This ambivalent perspective of map and zone is typical to Tom Leonhardts oeuvre.