Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now

by Antony Gormley, Martin Gayford

Practiced by every culture throughout the history of the world, sculpture is a universal art form that’s deeply rooted in the human psyche and may even predate the advent of language. In this wide-ranging book, internationally renowned sculptor Antony Gormley and distinguished art critic Martin Gayford consider sculpture as an art form related to humanity’s potential for thought and feeling, as well as to our urge to build, make pictures, practice religion, and develop philosophical thought. They take into account materials and techniques and consider overarching themes, such as space, light, and darkness.


Drawing on examples from around the globe—ranging from the standing stones at Stenness, Orkney, dating from around 3100 BCE, and the Terracotta Army in China to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Richard Serra’s steel structures—Shaping the World explores sculpture as a form of physical thought capable of altering the way people feel.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Design, History

392 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2020

Reviews

[Elizabeth]

Outstanding, one of my best ever Christmas presents. I’ve tried hard to delay finishing it, and now I have I’ll go back to certain chapters. It tackles a huge subject and the themed chapters really help.

[David Cutler]

For awhile I have been looking without success for a history of sculpture and was delighted when this appeared. Even more so as I think Martin Gayford is one of the best writers on the arts, hugely enjoying his Modernists and Mavericks history of a post War generation of British painters and his more personal account of being painted by by Lucian Freud - The Man in the Blue Scarf.

This book presents itself as a conversation between the sculptor Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford. It clearly isn’t a verbatim conversation and doesn’t flow as such. It is highly erudite and somewhat scripted. The two perspectives do work though with Gormley giving his personal experience as an artist alongside a formidable knowledge of art history and Gayford complementing this.

As you would expect from an expensive art book, it is superbly illustrated.The choices of works are mainly extremely interesting with a number that I wasn’t aware of.

It is not a chronological history but rather themed, with some themes more interesting than others, such as Trees and Life, Voids and Fear and Fetishism. As a history it is very uneven with more interest spent on a few subjects such as Prehistory, Michaelangelo, Rodin and the contemporary.

Overall I am very pleased to have read this and will continue to enjoy the beautiful photographs. I still feel there is a space for a more thorough chronological history of the subject though.

[Lucy]

The two authors alternate in discussing the sculptures and art in general from their two perspectives: a sculptor and an art critic. Interesting objects discussed, some familiar, many others not at all. Ranging from prehistory and cave paintings and a few objects that were minimally shaped by human hands up to at least 2013. Organized by topic rather than chronology, which means that timelines jump around a lot. Often showcasing an artwork done by Gormley that has a thematic connection to the works discussed. This "well-known" sculptor was previously known to me only through one work: the Angel of the North, which to me has echoes of airplanes and crucifix as well as the titular angel.
Chapters are: Preface; Bodies in space; Off the wall; Mounds, fields & standing stones; Trees & life; Light & darkness; Clay & modelling; Voids; The body & the block; The age of bronze; Bodies & buildings; The Colossus & the slave; Time & mortality; Drapery & anatomy; Actions & events; Fear & fetishism; Collecting & selecting; Industry & heavy metal; Shaping a changing world.
There's a whole lot of artist and critic jargon and philosophy that isn't what I want to read about for pages on end. You have to wade through the text to find out about the artworks depicted because the captions give title (if any), artist, location and time of creation, the utter minimum. Most of the artworks discussed are also pictured, except a few like Brancusi's Bird in Flight. I'm glad I got this book from the library for its introduction to the unfamiliar works, but it's not the book I want about sculpture.

[Fiona Wojtas]

This book was big and expensive and I dithered in front of the shelf displaying it in the MONA shop. But I had recently read and enjoyed another book by Martin Gayford, one of the co-authors, and knew that I would gain a lot from his insights, so I pulled out my credit card. The other co-author is Antony Gormley, a sculptor whose work I have seen in galleries, and also seen in photos of the massive Angel of the North in Britain. The book takes the form of discussions between the two and I really gained different insights from Antony Gormley’s views on the many types of sculpture that were generously illustrated throughout the book. It was great to read their comments and immediately look at an image of what they were talking about. Antony Gormley’s comments came from the viewpoint of someone for whom sculpture is the pre-eminent form of art, but he had cogent reasons why he felt this way, talking about how it occupies space in a way that a painting on a wall can’t. he feels strongly that sculpture as an art form lost it’s way when it focused on purely representational sculpture, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him, but then the two authors lost me on discussions on minimalist sculpture. I finished the book in February 2025. It’s another book that I could come back to and gain just as much the second time around.

[Edie Lee]

This is not a consecutive history of sculpture. Rather, the two authors, an artist and a critic, examine three dimensional art through such categories as “clay”, “space”, “collecting”, “stone”, “time”. The individual chapters span prehistory to the present day.

For the most part I found the musings interesting, and I learned a great deal. However, I would have appreciated a good art historian on the team because some of the information was just plain wrong. This clearly showed in their comments on Roman portraiture.

I’m not a big fan of contemporary art, although some of the examples did appeal to me. However, their pondering, though at times informative, occasionally lapsed into what struck me as nonsense. Perhaps I’m not aesthetically evolved enough.

Even with this, I thought the book worth reading. There’s a lot of information and much to think about. That, I believe, was its intention.