Gormley spotting

I have been dipping into the Modern Sculpture Reader, edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, an invaluable compilation of texts produced by the Henry Moore Institute at £20. It’s a hefty paperback tome determined to give sculpture its rightful place in the anthology stakes — so often dominated by painting — and in doing so it tracks the nature and status of the art object in the modern world. It ranges from Adolf von Hildebrand writing in 1893 on the problem of form, to Susan Hiller in 2003 discussing the sculptural legacy of H. Moore himself. In between it stops at many stations from Rilke to Acconci, by way of Eric Gill, Michel Leiris, Tatlin, Gabo and Sartre. It’s not a book to sit down and read, but to look things up in and then go away and ponder, a source and an inspiration. Regrettably, it’s not an easy volume to handle.