Alexander Potts Professor PhD University of London (Warburg Institute)

Note: Alex Potts is on leave for fall '09 term.

Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the Department of History of Art. He has given the Slade Lectures in Fine Art at the University of Oxford and was recently appointed Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He has held senior fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His books include Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994 and 2000) and The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000). His publications range over a number of different areas, from modern sculptural aesthetics and art and artistic theory in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods to artistic culture in the twentieth century. He was project scholar and wrote the introduction for the new English translation of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (2005) and is co-editor of an anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007). He is currently writing a book on the significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war Europe and America, titled Art and Non-Art 1945-1965.

Books:

Modern Sculpture Reader. Henry Moore Institute, 2007. (co-edited with Jon Woods & David Hulks)

The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. Yale University Press, 2000.

Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. Yale University Press, 1994; reissued in paperback, 2000.

Articles:

“Disencumbered Objects”, October, No. 124, Spring 2008 (special issue on ‘Postwar Italian Art’), pp. 169-189.

“The Aesthetics of Non Art: writing the happening” in Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (eds.), Allan Kaprow - Art as Life. Getty Research Institute, 2008, pp. 20-31.

"Stokes and the architectural basis of the sculptural," in Stephen Bann (ed.), The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes's Engagement with Art History, Criticism, Architecture, and Psychoanalysis. Penn State Press, 2007, pp. 13-36.

"Robert Rauschenberg and David Smith: Compelling Contiguities," The Art Bulletin, Vol. LXXXIX, No, 1, March 2007, pp. 148-159.

“Eros in Piccadilly: monument and anti-monument”, in David J. Getsy (ed.), Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880-1930. Ashgate, 2004, pp. 105-139.

"Tactility: the Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s," Art History, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2004, 283-304.

"Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-heroic and Casual," Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 27, No.1, 2004, 43-59.

"Walter Pater's Unsettling of the Apollonian Ideal" in M. Biddiss and M Wyke (eds.), The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity, Bern, 1999, 107-126.

"Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato's Cave," Art History, 1998, pp. 531-45; also in A. Rifkin (ed.), About Michael Baxandall. Blackwells, 1999, 69-83.