I suspect that this background in history is formative in Tucker’s writing and sculpture practice. The titles of some of his sculptures hint at this historical imput, for example ‘Thebes’ (1966) or ‘Orpheus’ (1965). History looms large in his writing, whether it is the Tucker of The Language of Sculpture, imploring his students to view sculpture ‘in the matrix of history’ or the Tucker of ‘What Sculpture is’ desperately trying to free sculpture from the historical web that ensnares it. Whether in abeyance of it or in rebellion against it, Tucker’s sense of history pervades his writing. By this I mean to infer both ‘History’ in the sense of the tradition and antecedents that Tucker is so aware of in his making, understanding of and writing about sculpture, and his own personal history. In both these senses than, Tucker is, always, an historian, in whatever professional guise he appears.

In his lecture, Tucker goes on to discuss three key (historical) experiences that led him from his initial decision to be a sculptor, through the uncertainties and questioning of his chosen professional activity, to the understanding he now (in 1976) felt he had attained. The three experiences are: an encounter with a particular painting in a particular exhibition (a Clyfford Still painting in The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery London in 1959); reading a book (Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition) and the poetry of Rilke. From this lecture, and indeed from much of Tucker’s writing (in particular The Language of Sculpture which opens with a quotation from Rilke writing on Rodin), one gets the distinct impression that Tucker’s understanding of sculpture comes from sources other than sculpture itself. Whilst he discusses works of sculpture in detail, his theories and ideas are derived in part, if not primarily, from his own history of seeing (paintings for example) and reading (theory, poetry) and from others’ histories of seeing and understanding. Tucker’s writing is the product both of his own personal history and of his attempt to reconcile this personal experience with historical accounts of sculpture and its poetic and theoretical representations.

Tucker’s book The Language of Sculpture is, despite its theoretical passages, a historical account of sculpture. It is a history of sculpture and of sculptors. The book was based on a series of lectures given at Leeds University whilst Tucker was Gregory Fellow in Sculpture there from 1968 to 1970, an origin to which Tucker refers in his preface to the book. The majority of these lectures also enjoyed an intermediary life as individual essays published in Studio International. The catalogue and exhibition The Condition of Sculpture set out to examine sculpture as an essential category which can be defined in the form ‘Sculpture is…’ (subject to gravity, revealed by light, available to perception), whereas The Language of Sculpture examines sculpture as a historically developing language. The majority of the chapters of the book (six out of eight) are on individual sculptors: Rodin, Brancusi (two chapters, one on his sculpture at Tirgu Jiu), Picasso, Gonzalez and Matisse. It might also be noted that two of these artists are as well known as painters as they are as sculptors. The other artist who figures importantly in the book but does not merit his own chapter is another ‘painter-sculptor’ – Degas. The remaining two chapters are on ‘The Object’ and ‘Gravity’ and as theoretical discourses can be seen clearly to relate to the essential ‘conditions of sculpture’ that Tucker defined in his catalogue introduction. Whilst The Language of Sculpture and The Condition of Sculpture have certain things in common, any attempt simply to categorise Tucker’s theoretical writings as a while as an examination of the historical development of the essential category of sculpture is confounded by another body of writing published in the very same period as The Language of Sculpture books and The Condition of Sculpture exhibition and catalogue, and this is the series titled ‘What Sculpture is’.