What is ordered about ‘classicism’? Who benefits from an ordered, stable canon of classicism in art and literature? Is classicism, in art, architecture, archaeology and academia truly the realm of the dead white men (to borrow from the title of Donna Zuckerberg’s 2018 book, Not All Dead White Men)?

This conference seeks to challenge, reassess, and provoke discussion on the position of ‘classicism’ in art following Winckelmann’s seminal text on the topic in 1755 through to the present day.

Winckelmann’s ordered, teleological histories of art have been thrown into disarray by 265 years of new archaeological discoveries; every generation develops its own ‘classic’ and its own canon. Technologies of communication, dissemination, modification, and reproduction offer artists and academics new media for their engagement with classicism, art, and the world; previously unrepresented populations and individuals have more access to academia, art, and classics than ever before, but not without opposition.

Bringing together artists and scholars across career stages working in a range of fields, this conference challenges the notion of the ‘classic’ as stable, ordered, or unchanging.

The conference will be held alongside a Henry Moore Institute retrospective exhibition of the work of Edward Allington (1951-2017), which considers the creative engagement of Allington with the cultures of classicism.


PROGRAMM

Friday 15 November, 1 - 7:30pm

1pm
Welcome and Introduction
Dr Melissa Gustin (Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow)

Session 1: Nachleben der Antike
Chair: Prof. Charles Martindale (University of York)

1:15pm
Afterlife of Antiquity – Lost in Translation?
Dr Han Lamers (University of Oslo)

1:45pm
Classicist Rationality? Karl Philipp Moritz and the ‘Fantastic’ Foundations of German Neo-Classicism
Tilman Schreiber (Friedrich-Schiller Universität, Jena)

2:15pm Break

Session 2: Ruskin/AntiRuskin
Chair: Prof. Liz Prettejohn (University of York)

2:30pm
The Stones of the South: Ruskinian Aesthetics for 'Classical' Marble
Alexander Kusztyk (University of Cambridge)

3pm
Classical Sculpture and Victorian Polemics: Falkener versus Rauch and Ruskin
Dr Clemence Schultze (Durham University)

3:30pm Tea and Coffee served

Session 3: Queer Classics
Chair: TBC

3:45pm Queer Loss, Queer Classics: A.E. Housman’s “Lost Country”’
Prof. Jennifer Ingleheart (University of Durham)

4:15pm “Art Knows How to Sculpt the Form of Beauty, Improving Life and Blending the Days”: Queering Sculpture in the Poetry of Constantine Cavafy
Joe Watson (University of Durham)

5 - 6pm Opportunity to view the exhibition Edward Allington: Things Unsaid at the Henry Moore Institute

6 - 7pm Keynote Lecture: Translating the Classics
Prof. Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania)


Saturday 16 November, 10am - 5:30pm

10am Opening Remarks
Dr Melissa Gustin

Session 4: Modernism
Chair: Dr Clare O’Dowd (Henry Moore Institute)

10:15am “After the Fable, the Moral”: Classical Statuary and Modern Sculpture Revisited
Jonathan Vernon (Courtauld Institute of Art)

10:45am Contemporary Classicism as the Aftermath of Postmodern Conceptualism? A Critical Historicisation
Dr Christian Drobe (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

11:15am Louise Bourgeois’ Debased Classicism
Dr Alexandra Parigoris (University of Leeds)

11:45am Break

Session 5: Artists’ Roundtable
Chair: Dr Melissa Gustin

12pm The Reason Being
Zachary Eastwood-Bloom

12:30pm Fit for Purpose: The Classical Millstone, the Classical Touchstone
Dr Richard Hollinshead (artist/University of Northampton)

1pm
Jessica Harrison

1:30pm Lunch (provided)

Session 6: Venus
Chair: Simon Marginson (University of York)

2:30pm A[ccelerationist] Venus? Gottfried Semper, Albert Moore and “Queer Rationality” in 1869
Dr Nick Shaddick (University of York)

3pm Surrealism/Classicism: Man Ray and the Motif of Venus
Carolin Goll (Universität Würzburg)

3:30pm Yves Klein’s Classicism
Dr Molly Warnock (John Hopkins University)

4pm Tea and Coffee served

Session 7: Vernacular Classicisms
Chair: Rebecca Mellor (University of York)

4:15pm Animating Anxiety: Stage Sculpture and Middlebrow Classicism
Dr Rhiannon Easterbrook (University of Oxford)

4:45pm A “Celtic” Classicism? Classically-Influenced Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Dr Ciarán Rua O’Neill (University of York

5:15 - 5:30pmC losing Remarks
Dr Melissa Gustin

Tickets
Tickets for this conference cost £20 / £10 concessions (students, unwaged or retired).
For more information please contact Kirstie Gregory, Research Coordinator