Alexander Potts

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Descripción del Profesional del arte

Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his PhD in the history of art at the Warburg Institute in London. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Slade Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Oxford; Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and is currently a Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His work on art and artistic theory covers a number of areas — sculptural aesthetics and the history of sculpture, experimental practices and the aesthetics of realism in 20th century art, art and artistic theory in the 19th century, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of the classical ideal. His main publication on the latter was his book Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale University Press, 1994). In addition to The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (Yale University Press, 2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007); reissued by the Getty Research Institute in 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti, Melvin Edwards, and many other 20th century sculptors. In his more recent research, Potts has been arguing for the significance of experimental forms of realism in post-war European and American art. This was the subject of the Slade Lectures in Fine Art he gave at the University of Oxford in 2008 and of the Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2009, and also of his book, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Post-war European and American Art, published by Yale University Press in 2013. The latter examines a variety of forms of art, from the post-war painting of De Kooning and Dubuffet to New Brutalist and Pop image and object making, and actions and assemblages of artists such as Rauschenberg and Beuys. His current book project is an exploration of naturalist aesthetics and the picturing of the social in late-19th and early-20th century art.