Los portadores de la antorcha (The Torch Bearers) (cast aluminum, University of Madrid, 1955)
2,069 words
Despite the triumph of modernism, a handful of American sculptors, including Anna Hyatt Huntington, creator of The Torch Bearers (1955), continued to work in the neoclassical mode prior to and after WWII. Huntington was highly regarded for her large-scale public commissions at a time when the preferred product of most women sculptors was the small bronze statuette. In the words of one art journalist, she “made a name for herself depicting fierce creatures, strong leaders, and legendary heroines.”
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1876 Read more …
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) is the greatest work of art and literary criticism since the days of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. It is a work of extraordinary ambition, the most sweeping and synoptic book on Western civilization since Spengler’s Decline of the West. 
Albion’s Hidden Numina
Andy Goldsworthy
3,213 words
Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Ball
The English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is a practitioner of Land art, a practice that seeks to create art from natural materials and settings. Other practitioners of Land art include Richard Long, Robert Smithson, and David Nash. Whilst there is this common element of setting art in (or creating it from) the landscape, there is also a particularly striking quality to Andy Goldsworthy’s work that sets him apart from other Land artists. In short, this particular quality of his work might be termed sacred or numinous. For this reason he is both lauded as a contemporary shaman and derided as a twee pastoralist. Neither extremity really reveals much about Goldsworthy’s art. Read more …