11:00

Welcome (Marko Daniel)

11:10

Anne Wagner: Home and Away:  David Smith's Domestic Vision
Anne M. Wagner is an art historian who has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century art.  Since 1988, she has been a professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent published essays include studies of Jasper Johns's Flag, Eva Hesse's titles, and Dan Flavin's spaces.  Her work has appeared in such journals as Artforum, Represenations, October, and The Threepenny Review.  Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux:  Sculptor of the Second Empire, appeared in 1986, and Three Artists (Three Women) was published in 1996.  In 2005, her third book, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture, came out from Yale University Press.

11:50

Alex Potts: Assemblages, Signals, Metaphors - ‘Humorous and Profound’
Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal and author of the books Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994 and 2000) and The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000). He has published articles on various aspects of sculpture and sculptural aesthetics from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, on modern revivals of the classical, and on art and art theory in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. His current research examines the changes taking place in the artistic culture of post-war Europe and America that led to a radical questioning of the status of the art object in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He has recently published ‘Personages Imperfect and Persistent’ in David Smith Personages for the Gagosian Gallery, New York (2006).

12:30

Lunch and visit to the exhibition

14:00

David Anfam: “As Free as the Mind”
David Anfam, whose talk will address Smith’s aim to lend sculpture the mutability of the mind’s workings, is a critic, curator and expert on American art. His many books and catalogues include Abstract Expressionism (Thames & Hudson, 1990), Clyfford Still, Paintings 1944-1960 (Hirshhorn Museum, 2001), No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2005-6) and Bill Viola—Love/Death: The Tristan Project (Haunch of Venison, forthcoming January 2007). He is Commissioning Editor for Fine Art at Phaidon and a member of the board of the ClyffordStillMuseum, Denver. Anfam is one of the catalogue authors of the present David Smith exhibition.

14:40

Jeremy Lewison: “Sculpture is part of my world” (David Smith). The worlds of David Smith and Henry Moore at mid century.
David Smith and Henry Moore are normally portrayed as having antithetical interests. Moore was a carver and a modeller; Smith was a cutter and an assembler. Smith was a colourist; Moore had a liking for monotone. Moore's forms echoed nature; Smith's were industrial. Although neither had any known regard for the other, this paper sets out to establish whether they had any shared interests.
Jeremy Lewison is a freelance curator and art historian. For many years a Tate curator, he was Tate's Director of Collections from 1998 to 2002 and was responsible for its acquisitions and display programmes. Among the exhibitions he organised at Tate were Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden, Ben Nicholson and Anish Kapoor. He has published books on Pollock, Barnett Newman, Kapoor and Ben Nicholson among others and in 1991 wrote the catalogue for the David Smith: Medals for Dishonor exhibition held at the ImperialWarMuseum, London. He has just completed a short book on Henry Moore that will be published by Taschen in Spring 2007.

15:20

Round table questions and answers (with Rebecca Smith)

16:00

End