The smaller-than-life sized upright, inert, and frontal bronze figure - typically for Butler nude and female - issues form an optimum phase within the celebrated sculptor’s career when he was basking in the afterglow of his having won first prize at the 1953 International ‘Unknown Political Prisoner’ Competition. Like his 1952 Venice Biennale colleague Lynn Chadwick, Butler was not academically trained, coming to sculpture through an architectural training. He studied the subject during the mid-1930s at the Regent Street Poly. and became an associate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1937, the year after he designed the clock tower for Slough Town Hall. He also designed a modern movement extension for a listed Tudor house at Berkhampstead, Herts, a property he acquired as a long resident with prize winning proceeds. Also like Chadwick, Butler exhibited welded iron constructions, retaining figure or animal associations, as the 1951 Festival of Britain and elsewhere. Closer, perhaps, to Picasso and Gonzalez, these wiry constructs led to subsequent reengagement with the human figure, a process aided by a brief assistantship at Henry Moore’s Hertfordshire studio, by a 1950 Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University and, from 1951 onwards, by part time teaching under the academic sculpture Alfred Gerrard at the Slade School, London. The resulting mid-1950s ‘Girl’ series led to ‘Ophelia’. While with ‘Girl’ sculptures featured slim, attenutated anatomies with vertically raised arms, ‘Ophelia’ is inactive, perhaps belonging more to Butler’s bronze watchers and onlookers. ‘Ophelia’ is a full length, if armless, figure, a feature revealing what Margaret Garliake describes as Butler being “conscious of the potency and status of the fragment”. Garlake’s estimation that the French sculptor Germaine Richier’s “emphasis on multilation and metamorphosis made an immense impact on Butler” did not, however, lead to any anthropomorphic outcome. Indeed, at his 1980 William Townsend Memorial Slade lecture, the British sculptor decried neo-primitive affectation feeding on “the emotions long-dead cultures making cult objects for non- existing societies”.

54.5 (H) cms
P.O.A.