Edward Morris and Timothy Stevens are retired. Edward Morris is chairman of the Editorial Board for the series of volumes entitled the Public Sculpture of Britain. Emma Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Liverpool John Moores University. Reg Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Photography at Liverpool John Moores University.
AN AUTHOR from Chester has had her second book published. Dr Emma Roberts, of Curzon Park, is celebrating the publication of her book The Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside (co-authored by Edward Morris, curator of Fine Art at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery). The book features chapters on every public sculpture of interest or renown between the second century AD and the present day and include those in Chester Town Hall, the lion on top of the NCP car park on Pepper Street and the Grosvenor Park sculptures. Emma is leader of the history of art degree course at Liverpool John Moores University and publishes journal articles and curates regularly. AdChoicesThe book is published by Liverpool University Press and distributed internationally through University of Chicago Press. Her first book, also with Edward Morris, was entitled The Liverpool Academy: A History and Index. The new book will be launched at Chester Grosvenor Museum on Thursday, November 21, at 6.45pm. All are welcome, wine will be served and the authors will be available for signings. There is also an optional lecture at 7.30pm entitled War Memorials of Cheshire and Merseyside. The GBP45 book will be available for under GBP30 on the launch night Email Emma at e.e.roberts@ljmu.ac.uk if you would like to attend the launch. This is a scholarly and highly informative guide to an area notably rich in public sculpture. Combining deep local knowledge with a broader critical perspective, the authors draw on a wealth of primary sources, from artists' papers to company records and the copious minutes of memorial committees; the responses of contemporary critics are also analysed. It is excellent on the whys and hows of public sculpture, on the process of commission or donation, and the motives - especially political - of those involved. The latest volume in the Public Sculpture of Britain series is complementary to the very first, which covered the city of Liverpool. Following the established gazetteer format of the series, it deals with the rest of Merseyside, from Birkenhead and the dormitory suburbs of the Wirral to old industrial towns such as Bootle and newer ones such as Runcorn, plus the whole county of Cheshire. Much of this is urban nineteenth- and twentieth-century territory, but there is a sprinkling of country houses, and it holds surprises such as the towering fourteenth-century statue of St Christopher at Norton Priory and a rock-cut Romano-British figure of Minerva at Chester, still in its original setting. This is a scholarly and highly informative guide to an area notably rich in public sculpture. Combining deep local knowledge with a broader critical perspective, the authors draw on a wealth of primary sources, from artists' papers to company records and the copious minutes of memorial committees; the responses of contemporary critics are also on the whys and hows of public sculpture, on the process of commission or donation, and the motives - especially political - of those involved. We learn how in the late nineteenth-century political differences in Warrington were brought into sharp focus by the gift of a statue of Oli ver Cromwell, while in Birkenhead the predominantly Conservative composition of the Queen Victoria memorial committee may have hampered fundraising, resulting in a relatively modest Eleanor Cross instead of the monumental bronze statue originally envisaged. The deliberations of war-memorial committees reveal tensions between secularists and proponents of Christian iconography; between those favouring idealisation and those seeking a more realistic depiction of the horrors of war; and, indeed, between advocates of sculpture and those urging that the money would be better spent on utilitarian schemes such as village halls and cash for the bereaved. The most impressive war memorial in the region - William Goscombe John's for Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, with its vivid and unique representation of ordinary men and women defending the village - managed to avoid such difficulties because it was effectively a personal project of William Hesketh Lever, Company Chairman and Port Sunlight's founder. Industrial wealth allowed clients in Merseyside and Cheshire to commission leading London sculptors, while significant works by European figures - Lorenzo Bartolini, Pietro Tenerani and the Rome-based John Gibson - also found their way to the region. But local talent flourished too. Possibly the most remarkable producer of architectural sculpture on late nineteenth-century Merseyside was not an individual but a business: the Birkenhead Della Robbia Pottery. This Arts and Crafts enterprise produced quattrocentoinspired terracotta plaques with brightly coloured glazes, very suitable for decorating buildings. It supplied the iconographically unusual reredos for the Unitarian Memorial Church at Liscard, and some charming friezes for the exteriors of houses, but apart from these examples it is sparsely represented on its home patch. More visible is the work of Liverpool-based Herbert Tyson Smith (1883-1972), who collaborated on several classical war memorials designed by former students of the Liverpool School of Architecture, including the superb one at Southport by Leonard Barnish. When commissions for war memorials dried up, Tyson Smith found that his linear, archaising style lent itself equally well to ecclesiastical sculpture, particularly for Roman Catholic churches. Both the Della Robbia Pottery and Tyson Smith are given substantial biographies here (the valuable Biography section is confined to local artists, a new departure for the series). Having inherited so much public sculpture from its years of industrial pre-eminence, the region has been served a second helping over the last thirty years as a direct result of post-industrial decline. 'Regeneration sculpture' - intended to embody community aspirations and give a visual boost to depressed areas - features very prominently in this volume. Examples range from Jaume Plensa's Dream (2008-09), a colossal female head overlooking the M62 motorway from a former coalfield at St Helens, to numerous lesser works situated on roundabouts, in pedestrianized town centres and in the car parks of public buildings. Whatever the merits of these as art, the accounts of them given here are interesting for what they reveal about changed attitudes to the commissioning of public sculpture. Lay involvement - once seen as unwelcome meddling - is now often a requirement, and artists who are willing to work in this way are employed repeatedly. Funding tends to come from a mixture of regional, national and European agencies rather than local voluntary donors. Subjectmatter is typically drawn from nature, folklore or the cosier aspects of local history, but even when abstraction and symbolism are used, the mood is usually celebratory. Standing well outside the mainstream of regeneration sculpture is Antony Gormley's Another place. This mysterious assembly of cast-iron men, spread over a two-mile stretch of beach and sea at Crosby, is unquestionably the region's most ambitious and remarkable work of contemporary art. Not originally conceived for this location, it was brought to the Mersey estuary in 2005 with the stated aim of attracting 600,000 visitors in six months. It was meant to stay for less than two years but it became a permanent fixture in 2007, after a well-publicised debate in which arguments over maritime safety, nature conservation and tourism figured prominently. A detailed account of this complex story is given here. The book has a substantial Introduction that draws out key themes from the individual gazetteer entries; it includes a section on major private collections, such as the important ones at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, and Ince Blundell Hall, Lancashire. The majority of works described in the gazetteer are illustrated with black-and-white photographs specially taken for the purpose.
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