Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Conversations in Modern European Art
"Sculpting Prefiguration: Henri Bergson, Affinity, and the Insurrectionary Avant-Garde”
Speakers: Mark Antliff, Mary Grace Wilson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University
Friday, October 9, 2026, 6:00 pm
Schedule
Scholars have long recognized that the concept of temporal becoming central to the thought of the French philosopher Henri Bergson had a profound impact on the development of 20th century painting, but Bergson’s equally significant influence on the experimental methods of avant-garde sculptors has yet to receive comparable attention. This talk will address one example of thTis confluence: the politicized art of the celebrated French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Gaudier, together with the American poet Ezra Pound and Canadian born Wyndham Lewis, helped found the London-based Vorticist movement just before World War One. His effort to radicalize sculptural praxis was in emulation of Bergson’s own conception of his method as akin to a way of being that could potentially transform society. By considering artworks in terms of notions of creative expression, art criticism, sculptural methods, subject matter, materiality and beholder reception, I will show how we can reframe concepts of ideology and sculptural becoming in terms of states of mind and interpersonal relationships. More broadly I will consider this paradigm in terms of what many thinkers have identified as the liberatory dimension of Bergson’s metaphysics, namely its potential to foster societies wherein a notion of continual change and internal transformation serve to define the concept of an open community. By considering Gaudier’s work in conjunction with that of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, I will argue that Bergson’s thought in fact generated conflicting visions of societal transformation, one open, and the other fundamentally closed to the radical implications of Bergsonian durée.
Mark Antliff is Mary Grace Wilson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. His numerous books examining the intersections of modern art, philosophy, and politics in early twentieth-century Europe include Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, 1993), Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Duke, 2007), and, most recently, Sculptors Against the State: Anarchism and the Anglo-European Avant-Garde (Penn State, 2021). A collection of his writings, The Aesthetics of Anarchist Activism: Essays on Resistance to the State, Power, and Fascism, will soon appear in Russian translation with the dissident Égalité Press. His new book project focuses on an international group of artists and art critics who integrated the visual arts into their myriad theories of pacifism and non-violent resistance during the tumultuous era from the Spanish Civil War to the advent of the Cold War.
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