CALL FOR PAPERS

Carola Giedion-Welcker conference

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

Friday 2 - Saturday 3 June 2006

Conference organiser:
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (m.lermhayesulster.ac.uk, University of Ulster,
Belfast), with Jon Wood (jonwhenry-moore.ac.uk, Henry Moore Institute,
Leeds)

Deadline: Wednesday 30 November 2005

Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1979) is the author of one of the first
extensive and fully illustrated books on modern sculpture. She was active
both before and after the war, publishing works such as Modern Plastic Art:
Elements of Reality, Volume and Disintegration (1937) and then revised as
Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (1954). Her
collected writings, edited by Reinhold Hohl, came out in 1973. She wrote in
German and some but not all of her writings were translated into English.
The ones that were translated quickly became established as standard texts
for anyone interested in modern sculpture. Although she was an important and
influential founder of modern and contemporary sculptural history and
criticism, she has become less read and studied in recent decades,
especially in English-speaking countries. The aim of this symposium is to
examine her legacy and to look not only at the poetics of her writing on
sculpture and her deep interest in prehistory, but also at her radical
politics and her close connections with living artists. We will also ask why
she has been neglected and look at the ways in which her work has been dealt
with by subsequent generations of art historians.

Giedion-Welcker worked in interdisciplinary ways, writing first on the
literature of James Joyce. Amongst her friends were artists such as Arp,
Giacometti, Schwitters, Ernst, Brancusi, Klee and a good many others.
Although sculpture is our main issue here in this conference, her
multi-faceted oeuvre also calls for speakers' contributions from a variety
of backgrounds and countries - from Jarry-specialists and Joyceans, to
historiographers, feminists and architectural historians. We are also
interested in contributions that attend to communalities and connections
between her work and that of her husband Sigfried Giedion. Papers are
invited that focus on her position within the history of sculpture writing,
but we are also keen to receive proposals that deal with her life and
career, with bibliographic questions (publishing, illustration and
translation matters, especially differences between the pre- and post-war
versions of her book), her legacy in German and English-speaking countries
and contributions that attend to different aspects of her work in the
specific context of her time.

Please send 500 word proposals to the organisers and to Ellen Tait
(ellenhenry-moore.ac.uk) by Wednesday 30 November 2005