Art City 2020

Michael Parkin FA, London 
Private Collection, UK
Sally Hunter FA, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 13

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 15.

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1969 (directly from the artist whom they represented)
Marlborough Fine Art, New York
Arte Contacto, Caracas, 1975 (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, Florida (purchased from the above)
Osborne Samuel, London

Roland Penrose, Kenneth Armitage (Amriswil: Bodensee-Verlag, 1960), ill. plate 7 (with incorrect dimensions).
‘Kenneth Armitage’, exhibition catalogue (Arts Council touring exhibition, 1972-3), essay by Alan Bowness (unpaginated), ill.
Charles Spencer, Kenneth Armitage, Alecto Monographs 1 (London: Academy Editions, 1973), ill. p. 6
Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work (Much Hadham/London: The Henry Moore Foundation, in association with Lund Humphries, 1997), KA 28, ill. p. 35.
James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), ill. p. 94, no. 22.

‘Sculpture by Kenneth Armitage, Pottery by James Tower, Pen and Ink Drawings by “Scottie” Wilson’, Gimpel Fils (December 1952), cat. no. 37 [exhibited in plaster].
‘The New decade: 22 European painters and sculptors’, touring exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, New York (10 May – 17 August 1955), Minneapolis Institute of Arts (21 September – 30 October 1955), Los Angeles County Museum (21 November 1955 – 7 January 1956), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2 February – 15 March 1956); catalogue edited by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, with statements by the artists, ill. p. 58.
‘Kenneth Armitage: sculpture & drawings; S W Hayter: paintings & engravings; William Scott: paintings’, the British Pavilion at the XXIX Venice Biennale 1958, organised by the British Council (14 June – 19 October 1958), essay by Herbert Read, cat. no. 5.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (22 November – 21 December 1958), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 5.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (7-29 March 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 5 [Collection: Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York].
‘Sculptuur en tekeningen van Kenneth Armitage en schilderijien van William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, based on the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (3-30 June 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in Dutch), cat. no. 5.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (10 January – 8 February 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in German), cat. no. 5.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Kunsthaus, Zürich (April-May 1959), cat. no. 5.
‘Kenneth Armitage: a retrospective exhibition of sculpture and drawing, based on the XXIX Venice Biennale of 1958’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (July-August 1959), essay by Alan Bowness, cat. no. 10, plate VII [Collection: Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York].

The estate archives and artist’s notebooks do not record the exact edition size. At this time in the artist’s career, when working on a bronze of this scale, the edition size was usually limited to 6.

In 1954 Ida Kar photographed Kenneth Armitage, sitting in a spartan, whitewashed room. Sculpture surrounds him, on the bare floorboards, on a makeshift plinth and on the mantlepiece, cheek by jowl with a lamp made from a wine bottle. Some sculptures are still in plaster, and the majority are groups: vertical constructions, arms horizontally out-thrust.

Armitage later identified one specific origin for these forms. He had rented a hut in Corsham as a studio, where he could work without interruption from the students he was teaching. The owner, a Miss Spackman, had left a pile of furniture at one end, which Armitage concealed using folding screens on short narrow legs, to which he tacked corrugated cardboard. He recalled,

Although they were there I never thought about them, but I actually started making real screens. As a result of having looked at aircraft with their wings, the screens appeared as if they were almost flying. The screen has fascinated me all my life, because the folded screen is a shape that is extremely stable, but as it is made of membranes it has very little mass. It is a very light structure. ₁

In Kar’s photograph, one of Armitage’s earliest group sculptures, Linked Figures (large version) (1949/51), can be seen placed on the floor. The two figures have an arm and a leg apiece, while they share two further limbs, creating a composite, conjoined composition. From this date onwards, Armitage’s vision of the sculptural ‘ensemble’ evolved rapidly. His four bronzes at the Venice Biennale in 1952 were all groups: figures going for a walk, windblown, or simply standing. By 1955, in the British Council’s touring exhibition to the United States and Canada, ‘Young British Sculptors’, these groups were both familiar and keenly sought after. Children by the Sea (1953), for instance, sold four casts, outstripping the bounds of its intended edition.

Each sculpted group presented a new configuration of interlocking elements, as Armitage explained:

I found in time I wanted to merge them so completely they formed a new organic unit – a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary. So in a crowd we see only the face or hand that catches our eye, for we don’t see mathematically but only what is most conspicuous or important or familiar. ₂

Standing Group 2 (large version) is among the most geometrical examples. Like its predecessor, Standing Group 1, it resembles a screen, but rather than being open, it folds in on itself. The figures form a knot, legs on the outside, arms protruding at different heights. The sculpture’s taut composition may be traced to Armitage’s fascination with architecture and the placement of objects, awakened by the dramatic sight of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. Armitage explored the theme in a statement from 1955:

The human range of vision is concerned with the baroque textural configuration with which the Earth’s form is camouflaged. Gravity stiffens this world we can touch and see with verticals and horizontals— the movement of water, railways and even roads … We walk vertically and rest horizontally, and it is not easy to forget North, South, East, West and up and down. ₃

Standing Group 2 (large version) was first exhibited in plaster at Gimpel Fils in December 1952. ₄ In 1954 it was cast in bronze, almost certainly as a unique piece, and shipped to New York, possibly in connection with Armitage’s first solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Armitage’s records are patchy, yet the sculpture’s subsequent movements can be traced through exhibition catalogues. In March 1955 it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of a prestigious initiative, ‘The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors’, which toured the United States. It was sent from the Bertha Schaefer Gallery to the 1958 Venice Biennale, after which it toured almost constantly until 1959, as part of the British Council’s travelling version of the Biennale – taking in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland before reaching the UK. Thus, Standing Group 2, undoubtedly one of Armitage’s most significant sculptures of the 1950s, ranks also among its most visible and fiercely promoted.

₁ Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work (Much Hadham/London: The Henry Moore Foundation, in association with Lund Humphries, 1997), p. 30.
₂ Kenneth Armitage, in Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York: MOMA, 1959), p. 23.
₃ Kenneth Armitage, in The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, catalogue edited by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, with statements by the artists (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 59.
₄ ‘Sculpture by Kenneth Armitage, Pottery by James Tower, Pen and Ink Drawings by “Scottie” Wilson’, Gimpel Fils (December 1952), cat. 37. For most of Armitage’s sculptures, the catalogue indicated prices for both plaster and bronze.

Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York
Artcurial, Paris, 1996
Connaught Brown, London (purchased at the above)
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above 30 October 1997)
Osborne Samuel, London

Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work (Much Hadham/London: The Henry Moore Foundation, in association with Lund Humphries, 1997), KA 50.
James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), ill. p. 103, no. 50.

New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, catalogue not traced, another cast exhibited, March / April 1956
‘Kenneth Armitage: sculpture & drawings; S W Hayter: paintings & engravings; William Scott: paintings’, the British Pavilion at the XXIX Venice Biennale 1958, organised by the British Council (14 June – 19 October 1958), essay by Herbert Read, cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (22 November – 21 December 1958), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage, S W Hayter, William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (7-29 March 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in French), cat. no. 8.
‘Sculptuur en tekeningen van Kenneth Armitage en schilderijien van William Scott’, exhibition organised by the British Council, based on the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (3-30 June 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in Dutch), cat. no. 8.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (10 January – 8 February 1959), essay by Herbert Read (text in German), cat. no. 8.
‘Stanley W. Hayter: Gemälde und Graphiken; William Scott: Gemälde; Kenneth Armitage: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen’, exhibition organised by the British Council, tour of the Venice Biennale Exhibition, Kunsthaus, Zürich (April-May 1959), cat. no. 8.
‘Kenneth Armitage: a retrospective exhibition of sculpture and drawing, based on the XXIX Venice Biennale of 1958’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (July-August 1959), essay by Alan Bowness, cat. no. 17.

Estate records an edition of 6

‘Sculpture should express a liking for ordinary unheroic people who are not idealised in any way. People are funny; their bodies and actions having teasing and tantalising forms … obstinate lovable lumps of flesh continually falling short of their aspirations. In this attitude of life I express something beyond my own nature, something more general about the human predicament. I don’ t seek an idealised form of perfection or what is sometimes called grace. Grace makes an object remote and unattainable.’ – Kenneth Armitage

By 1954, Armitage was poised to move into the next stage of his career. He had exhibited with success at the Venice Biennale in 1952, alongside Adams, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Meadows, Paolozzi and Turnbull. The following year, he built a foundry at Corsham Court, with Meadows, enabling him to experiment with casting his own work. Armitage’s sculpture was being sold internationally, and in March 1954 the Bertha Schaefer Gallery opened a solo exhibition in New York, where his bronzes were described as ‘impressive’, ‘natural and convincing’.₁

Amid this, and within the increasingly confident evolution of Armitage’s group sculptures, Standing Figure (1954) appears strikingly anomalous. Unlike the composite figures, it has a lightness stemming from the voids created by its arms hanging perpendicular to its shoulders. The figure’s singularity, in fact, endows it with a quiet magnetism. Far larger than the hand-sized Cycladic figurines that may have inspired it, it stands gaunt, head angled quizzically.

Armitage had studied the British Museum’s Egyptian and Cycladic collections as a student, and would retain an interest in the frontality of Egyptian sculpture throughout his life. There is cross-currency, too, with the sculpture of William Turnbull, who was likewise, albeit briefly, a teacher at Corsham. Armitage’s Standing Figure echoes Turnbull’s heads, from the 1950s and later, whose impassive flatness – in common with Cycladic sculpture, as well as Picasso – is relieved only by dots, dashes or wedges. And while the gently incised surfaces of Standing Figure imply antiquity, they also parallel those of ceramic vessels made by James Tower, an artist friend at Corsham, with whom Armitage shared his first exhibition at Gimpel Fils. These are concerns common to sculpture of the decade. What is remarkable, however, is Armitage’s skilful orchestration of their effect, subordinating their impact to his own creative voice.

₁. New York Times review (1954), quoted in James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), p. 40.

Private Collection

Alan Bowness, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work , p46 (London : Lund Humphries, 1997), KA54 ill. b/w
Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage , (London : Methuen, 1962) ill. b/w
Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage : Art in Progress seies (London: Methuen, 1962).: Toby Treves, British Art in Focus: Patrons’ Papers , (London : Tate, 2004)

Venice Biennale, 1958, catalogue # 71, loaned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Osborne Samuel, Aspects of Modern British Sculpture: The Post War Generation , London, September 27 – October 27, 2017

There were three variants of this bronze, one unique, another with a rougher head and double base and this version with a single base and more solid head construction.

Armitage had studied at art colleges before the war, initially with painting before setting out on the path of Moore-inspired carving and experimenting with bronze casting, when the war intervened.  He taught tank and aircraft recognition during his war service, and the method of playing with flat silhouettes in the training exercises would translate, more subconsciously than consciously, into the sculpture than he began after the war.  That method, which he clearly preferred, involved modelling in plaster on an iron armature, from which he could extend his abbreviated suggestions for heads and limbs.

Rejecting the all-roundness of Moore and Hepworth, his abstracted figure sculptures appeared to emerge out of a screen or a wall.  The pin-heads and stub-limbs of ‘Family going for a Walk’ may draw on Picasso-esque distortions, but the sloping movement of the family is closer to the wit of Klee’s drawings.  Armitage explained the attraction for him of joining the figures of the family together: ‘Two or three figures would be unified into one mass, and then I could arrange the arms and legs as I wanted, because if you look at a crowd, you do not count the arms and legs, you just see odd arms swinging and the odd leg moving.  So I could use the arms as I wanted in the design of the maquette’.

In similar vein, the emaciated form of ‘Standing Figure’ obviously bears some resemblance to Giacometti’s post-war bronzes, but the schematic head and bulbous abdomen have a touch of the cheeky paintings of his contemporary Roger Hilton.   Indeed the spirit of Hilton’s quasi-childlike abstractions can also be seen in other pieces such as agglomeration of figures in ‘The Seasons’, and his exaggerated disfiguration of the Moore-like ‘Seated Woman with square Head’.  Effectively, Armitage’s drawings and gouaches, too, share the deliberate shorthand of the gruff, often interrupted graphic jottings and random patches of colour that characterised Hiltons’s rapid, energetic écriture.

These are not derivative works, as they all bear his unmistakeable character of brevity to convey the sensation of movement or stasis.  They are also recognizably his in the relative flatness and frontality of each group of figures, and show how intelligently Armitage analysed the work of others such as Chadwick or the French sculptor César (in ‘Two Seated Figures’) or Klee, mentioned above, to create his own gently humorous vision of humankind.  Phillips Wright

Purchased by Mr Greenwoods at the 1945 exhibition.
Mr Bernard Davies-Rees, London, by 1983.
Mr and Mrs Herbert L. Lucas, by 1988.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

The Israel Museum, David Bomberg in Palestine 1923-1927 , Jerusalem, 1983, p. 33, no. 64.
Fischer Fine Art, David Bomberg 1890-1957: A Tribute to Lilian Bomberg , London, 1985, pp. 26-27, no. 59, illustrated.
R. Cork, David Bomberg , New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 209, 212, no. C37, illustrated.
R. Cork, exhibition catalogue, David Bomberg, London, Tate Gallery, 1988, p. 159, no. 124, illustrated.

London, Royal Academy, 1945, no. 3.
Reading, Museum and Art Gallery, David Bomberg and Lilian Holt, June – July 1971, no. 60.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, David Bomberg: the Later Years, Sept – Oct 1979, no. 4.
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, David Bomberg in Palestine 1923-1927 , Oct 1983 -Jan1984, no. 64.
London, Fischer Fine Art, David Bomberg 1890-1957: A Tribute to Lilian Bomberg , March – April 1985, no. 59.
Los Angeles, L.A. Louver Gallery, David Bomberg: A Survey of Paintings and Drawings , March 1986, no. 3.
London, Tate Gallery, David Bomberg , February – May 1988, no. 124.

At the end of 1934, David Bomberg and his future wife, the artist Lilian Holt, settled in Ronda. Lilian hoped that the town’ s dramatic topography might inspire Bomberg’ s work, in the same way as Toledo and Cuenca had earlier done. Her instinct proved well-founded. Bomberg not only considered Ronda the most interesting town in southern Spain, but was immediately struck by its surrounding amphitheatre of mountains and ‘ the gorge – a stupendous rent 250-300 ft wide & 400 ft deep’ .1

The ravine initiated a series of charcoal drawings emphasising the violence of the rock’ s fracturing. A mirroring of formations on either side suggested seismic rupture, while the river Guadalevin, coursing the gorge, might be imagined as constantly eroding its nether reach. Spanning the ravine was the ‘ Moor’ s Bridge’ : a monumental structure, built over a period of forty years during the eighteenth century, pierced with eye-like arches.

Lilian recalled the Ronda paintings as swiftly executed, often no more than a few hours’ intensive work.2 Several capture the Moor’ s Bridge, sometimes facing its gimlet visage, other times focusing on the rock-hewn citadel. The Moor’ s Bridge, Ronda 1935 places the bridge to the left of the composition, backlit by sun, the town clinging to the plateau’ s rim with scarcely a margin of sky. The subject of the painting thus becomes – through Bomberg’ s eyes – the overwhelming mass of riven, fissured rock.

1 David Bomberg (1936), in Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 207-8.

2 Lilian Bomberg (1980), in Cork, David Bomberg , p. 209.

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Offer Waterman, London
Private Collection, UK, Leeds
Osborne Samuel, London

The Sculpture of Reg Butler , Margaret Garlake, published by the Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2006, cat, no.110, illustrated in colour Plate 8, p.22
British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, published by Jeremy Millings Publishings, 2009 to accompany the exhibition of the same title at Leeds City Art Gallery, 10th July – 1st November , 2009, p.127

Hanover Gallery, London, 1954
Curt Valentin, 1955, Cat no. 15
J B Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Reg Butler ‘A Retrospective Exhibition , October 22 – December 1, 1963, cat no.49
Museum of Modern Art (Mima), British Surrealism & Other Realities, Middlesborough, 23 May -17 August, 2008
Leeds Art Gallery, British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, 10th July – 1st November , 2009,
Hepworth Wakefield, Post-War British Sculpture and Painting, 5 May 2012 – 3 November 2013

Reg Butler’s powerful Study for Sacrificial Figure was conceived concurrently with his prizewinning submission for ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’ competition in 1952. Suggesting an elongated horse’s head, it appears half-flesh, half-skeleton, with sockets for eyes and twisted cage for a muzzle.

Butler created two sculptures titled Study for Sacrificial Figure, both exhibited at his solo Hanover Gallery exhibition in 1954. ₁ Tantalisingly, there is no visual record of the larger unlocated work, yet a context for both can be amplified through chronologically adjacent sculptures. Early maquettes for the ‘Unknown Political Prisoner’ monument (1952) imply confined figures, St Catherine (relief) (1953) consists of a wheel and racked torso, while the subject of Study for Figure Falling (1953) twists convulsively within its frame: all are victims. Through them, we can trace Butler’s interest in Germaine Richier’s sculpture, with its emphasis on the metamorphic, mutilated figure, as well as a close reading of Freud, focusing on notions of the ‘primitive’, the fetish and the sacrificial object.

Between 1951 and 1952 Butler had fluctuated between using iron, to create forged and welded sculpture, and a new technique: shell bronze. The process was laborious, involving creating a model, then a plaster mould, ‘pasting’ on shell bronze using oxyacetylene, then welding the cast sections together. Its principal advantage lay in the ability to replicate detail with great sensitivity, its disadvantage in the time required to patinate the resulting sculpture by gilding. Yet the technique’s liberating potential is instantly apparent. Butler had begun to feel constrained by the dominance of iron, as well as a need, in his sculpture, ‘to establish a greater physical presence, more directly related to the subject’. ₂ In Study for Sacrificial Figure the wax, poured and modelled over an armature, remains visible in the casting as a molten skin: an effect both tactile and shocking in its immediacy.   

Butler’s Study for Sacrificial Figure was included in a solo exhibition at New York’s Curt Valentin Gallery in 1955. Reviewing it for The New York Times, Stuart Preston considered Butler to be one of the most vital artists to have emerged in Britain since the war. He identified Marini’s influence, in figures that were ‘strained, almost tormented, in their expressive distortions’, continuing,

They are stripped down to bone and muscle to which skin clings tightly as cerements. Economical and tense, heads thrown back and legs and arms akimbo, they electrify the space about them. ₃

Vital to this ability to animate space was the inclusion of plates, blocks and protruding wires, suggesting the sculptures’ means of construction at the same time as connecting them to the real world. In Study for Sacrificial Figure the result is complex. What might be a found object, relic of an apocalyptic disaster, might equally be a totemic head, accessory to an unspecified ritual. 

Modern photographs of this work, taken in profile, have encouraged its identification as an animal’s head. Butler was himself a keen photographer, adept, as Margaret Garlake notes, at ‘exploiting contrasts of tone and lighting to create a minor drama in almost every print’. ₄ From 1949 onwards Butler took considerable care to document his work, also using photography as a tool to gauge the potential scale of a sculpture. Thus it is intriguing that the catalogue for a retrospective at the J. B. Speed Art Museum at Louisville in 1963, which included small-scale images of each of Butler’s sixty-one sculptures, shows Study for Sacrificial Figure photographed from above. ₅ From this vantage the sculpture appears quite different: a tortured figure, quasi-human, with spine arched, arms thrust outwards, and a piteous head. Voids which suggested eye sockets now imply wounds to the torso, and the twisted fuselage beneath the sculpture perhaps indicates a rack, or its tethering to the ground. While the photographer is uncredited (was it Butler, or did he approve the image?), it seems clear that either interpretation is valid, and that this compelling sculpture derives its strength from such ambiguity.

Even as he struggled to articulate his thoughts on Butler’s new work, destined for the Venice Biennale in 1952, Herbert Read had noted as much. The British Pavilion included six sculptures by Butler (three iron, three bronze), identified as single female figures, a couple (girl and boy), and an insect. Tracing their origin to a ‘precise study of the morphology of nature’, Read identified Butler’s mode of transformation as the interchange of species to create ‘convincing hybrids, endowed with vitality and grace’. ₆ Study for Sacrificial Figure, contemporary with this reading, hovers uncannily between categories – between animal, human and object.

1.The Hanover Gallery exhibition catalogue lists Study for Sacrificial Figure (1952), length 11”, cat. 5, and Study for Sacrificial Figure (1952), length 22”, cat. 6. The catalogue entry (no. 110, p. 134) in Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler (Lund Humphries / The Henry Moore Foundation, 2006), conflates these two sculptures.

2. Reg Butler, ‘The Venus of Lespugue and Other Naked Ladies’, The William Townsend Lecture (11 November 1980), quoted in Reg Butler (London: The Tate Gallery, 1983), p. 89. 

3. Stuart Preston, ‘Recent Sculpture and Painting’, The New York Times (16 January 1955).

4. Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, p. 60.

5. Reg Butler (J. B. Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 1963), cat. 49. The catalogue includes an essay by the curator, Addison Franklin Page (1911–1999), who visited Butler at his studio in 1960.

6. Herbert Read, ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’, catalogue essay for the XXVI Biennale, Venice (1952).

Private Collection, USA
James Goodman Gallery, New York
Marion Benedek, USA (acquired from the above)
Christie’s, New York, May 16, 1980, lot 15
Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Michael Middleton, ‘The British Council Collection’, The Studio (June 1959), illustration of cast in the British Council collection, p. 167.
The Connoisseur (June 1961), p. 22
J. P. Hodin, Chadwick (London: Zwemmer, 1961), illustrated, plate 10.
Alan Bowness, Lynn Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1962), illustrated (unpaginated).
A. M. Hammacher, Modern English Sculpture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1967), illustrated p. 112.
Dennis Farr and Éva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, with a complete illustrated catalogue, 1947–2003 (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014), no. 214, illustrated p. 141.
Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014), illustrated p. 15 (colour).
Karen Thomson (ed.), The Blema and H. Arnold Steinberg Collection (Westmount, Quebec: Blema and H. Arnold Steinberg, 2015), illustrated p. 28 (colour).
Michael Bird (ed.), Lynn Chadwick: A Sculptor on the International Stage (Zürich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2019), illustrated p. 26 (colour).

‘Paintings by Ben Nicholson: sculpture and drawings by Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, F. E. McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leslie Thornton, William Turnbull, Austin Wright’, IV São Paulo Bienal (22 September – 30 December 1957), cat. no. 60.
‘Ten Young British Sculptors: Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, F. E. McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leslie Thornton, William Turnbull, Austin Wright’, touring version of the São Paulo Bienal exhibition (1957–9), cat. no. 22.

If the leitmotif for Armitage’s work in the 1950s was the sculptural group, for Chadwick it was the paired figure. From 1953 onwards, Chadwick developed an array of typologies, whose features he inflected and interchanged. The first manifestation was Conjunction, followed by Two Dancing Figures (or simply Dance), then Encounter, Teddy Boy and Girl and Winged Figures. These were never passive meetings, or, for that matter, decorative pas-de-deux. In each instance, an electricity seems to arc between the figures. They circle, momentarily attracted, thrusting arms upwards in ritual dance or courtship. Stephen Spender potently described such pairings as ‘holding up negative and positive poles or prongs through which powerful currents interflow’. ₁

The series of ten Encounters was launched with éclat at the first ‘documenta’, in 1955, at Kassel. This was the most significant display of international contemporary art in Germany since the war, and Chadwick’s Encounter (1955) cut a lean silhouette: angular, avian, utterly distinct. From this theatrical opening, the sequence unfolded over the next half-decade, exploring a subtle range of variations.

Chadwick was already working with Stolit (a mixture of gypsum and iron filings), to in-fill the welded iron armatures of his sculptures. Nonetheless, his first Encounter presents an agile profile: two conjoined lozenge or leaf forms, on spindle legs, surmounted by beaks. Encounter II (1955), by contrast, has already evolved different attributes. Its weight is firmly at the base, with supports more like legs than spikes. Most strikingly, the figures’ pyramidal form evokes robes, falling in starched pleats, or creased from prolonged folding.

In Encounter VI, the confrontation appears demure. Two figures are enveloped within drapery of oriental symmetry, whose layering is rendered exquisitely to catch the light. Chadwick uses his materials and techniques deftly, abrading surfaces to achieve clean planes, but leaving sufficient texture to ensure liveliness. The male figure stands broadside, its torso twisted on wide-planted legs. The female’s balancing is more precarious, as if standing on tiptoe or high heels, a short cape providing a modish counterbalance. Both figures possess Chadwick’s signature ‘attitude’, while kindling fascination through their alterity.

Encounter VI was first exhibited at the São Paulo Bienal in 1957, in a display of sculpture and drawings by Adams, Armitage, Butler, McWilliam, Meadows, Paolozzi, Thornton, Turnbull and Wright, complemented by Ben Nicholson’s paintings. The selection committee included Herbert Read and Lilian Somerville (the latter the redoubtable Director of the British Council’s Fine Art Committee, affectionately celebrated in Chadwick’s Diamond Lil). It is little surprise, therefore, to detect a close intertwining between the São Paulo and Venice Biennales: the 1957 São Paulo Bienal proved to be an expanded roll-call of those sculptors exhibited, to such international acclaim, at Venice in 1952. While Chadwick garnered the International Prize for Sculpture at Venice in 1956, his success at São Paulo blossomed in 1961, when he was declared hor concours, the first British artist to be so honoured. Chadwick laughingly recalled the irony of the award. ‘And what do you get for it? Nothing’.

The economic problems of making sculpture, during this period, were significant. Chadwick’s preferred method, of using iron and Stolit, resulted in unique pieces that could be vulnerable to damage and deterioration if exposed to damp. Although bronze-casting was expensive, and dependent on the support of galleries and sales, it created multiples that were sufficiently robust to be transported safely. Bronze also, as demonstrated by Encounter VI, lent a soft, tactile sheen to sculptures’ surfaces, modifying their character and encouraging a different breed of collector.

The period at which Encounter VI was created coincides with a shift towards bronze casting in Chadwick’s practice. Chadwick initially sent works to Paris, to be cast by Susse Frères; he later worked with the Morris Singer foundry, as well as establishing casting facilities of his own at Lypiatt. The majority were small editions. Typical of this is Encounter VI, casts of which were acquired by the British Council (and thus exhibited in a succession of international tours, from 1957 until 1971), and by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney.

₁ Stephen Spender, catalogue essay for ‘Lynn Chadwick’ (New York: Knoedler Gallery, 1961).

Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.149, published by Lund Humphries, no. 277

Private Collection, UK (1988)
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2005, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2006, cat. no.615, illustrated p.272 (another cast)

Gloucester City Art Gallery, Lynn Chadwick , September – October 1972 (another cast), with tour to City Art Gallery, Plymouth

The Artist’s Estate
Miriam Sheill Fine Art, Ontario, September 2006
Private Collection, Canada

Dennis Farr & Éva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p.294, cat.no.654

Marlborough Fine Art, Lynn Chadwick, Recent Sculpture, January-February 1974, London

The Artist
Galeria Freites, Caracas
Private Collection, (purchased from the above 1988)
Osborne Samuel, London

D. Farr and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, p.341, no. 787S

Chadwick first explored the subject of the seated figure in the early 1970s. Sculptural mass was paramount in these expositions, with paired figures almost conjoined, legs suggested minimally, and heads oblong or triangular. While Chadwick’s convention for the head – oblong for male, triangular for female – persisted, other aspects would be rebalanced. Firstly, the squatness of the figures diminished. As they became more erect, elegantly poised in relation to one another, the treatment of drapery altered. Some sculptures were also editioned with brightly polished heads, lending a different quality altogether.

Chadwick was a keen observer of human form, noticing instantly its particular bearing or attitude. In Sitting Figures in Robes I (1980) the couple appears slightly distanced, the female perhaps tense, shifting weight from one leg to the other, the male more stolidly at ease. It is a scenario that may be unpicked at leisure, as light emphasises and diminishes different aspects of the composition. Chadwick’s treatment of the couple’s robes modulates our perception of their relative forms. Where the female’s robes flatter, by clinging to narrow shoulders and spreading, fish-tailed, to one side, the male’s drop squarely, with minimal fuss. Chadwick models with consummate skill, such that bronze appears to curve and drape with the fluidity of lead.

Estate of the artist

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Aldershot, 2006, no. C109, p. 412, illustrated p. 412
J. Fletcher, ed., Exhibition catalogue, London, Blain|Southern, Lynn Chadwick Retrospectives , 2014; Berlin, Blain|Southern, New York, Blain|Di Donna, p. 53, 115, illustrated in colour p. 48, 53
Susanne Van Hagen, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Sotheby’s, S|2 Gallery, Animal Farm: Beastly Muses and Metaphors , 2016, p.18, illustrated in colour p. 19
Greg McNamara, ed., Exhibition Catalogue, Hong Kong, McNamara Projects, Lynn Chadwick , 2016, p. 60, illustrated in colour p. 60

A cast of this work has been included in the following exhibition(s);
Bay Harbor Islands, Anne Jaffe Gallery, Lynn Chadwick , January – February 1992

London, Blain|Southern, Lynn Chadwick: Retrospectives , May – June 2014
Chalford, Gallery Pangolin, Mini Crucible, September – November 2014
London, Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery, Animal Farm: Beastly Muses and Metaphors , June- July 2016
Hong Kong, Lynn Chadwick, 1914-2003 , project organised by McNamara Art Projects, March – April 2016

Private Collection, USA

D. Farr and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor: with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, pp. 406, no. C111, another cast illustrated.

Caracas, Galeria Freites, January – February 1993

‘I thought I’d contrast the movement of legs going up and down stairs, so you get the legs, the knees bending one way, then the other way … I was really thinking, ‘How else can I do these curious figures of mine? How can I do them? What shall I do with them? … How can I use the human body? What can I do with it?’₁

Lynn Chadwick

Chadwick’s comments regarding the ‘stair’ series both reveal and deflect. They address his persistent motivation to push the figure in new directions, yet spread a pall over any specific spur for the imagery. He had begun in 1990 to make what would become one of the last tributaries to his welter of late, mainly female, figures. Taking the prop of the stairs – solid, open-tread or spiral – he examined the particular movement of a figure ascending or descending. Knees bend, muscles tense, sometimes the torso inclines forward and the buttocks appear to sway. The motion can be more or less elegant, accordingly. Each figure’s clothing, whether a sophisticated above-the-knee shift dress, or one that appears too tight for comfort, frames and modifies its bearing.

In First Stairs (1991), Chadwick presents a pair of figures moving in opposing directions. They are not doubles, but they create an effect of mirroring, brushing shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps adolescent, they appear long-backed, slender, demure; inexplicably charged with silence.

₁ Lynn Chadwick, Artists’ Lives, quoted in Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick (Farnam: Lund Humphries, 2014), p. 169.

The Estate of The Artist
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Craxton neatly characterised the British interest in landscape as relating to weather. ‘Light and lack of light. Light coming in through clouds and beams of light, moonlight, sunlight – we’re obsessed with it in this country, and quite rightly too, because it’s part of us. 1

During wartime in England, Craxton had felt stifled by darkness – physical and metaphorical – and the inability to travel to more exotic places. In August 1945, Peter Watson sent Craxton and Lucian Freud to paint in the Scilly Isles, the nearest practical equivalent to foreign travel at that moment. This proved a foretaste: in 1946–7, again with Watson’s help, Craxton would travel to France, Switzerland and Greece, before discovering Crete, the island where he would later live.

House in Rocky Landscape (1945) reflects Craxton’s mood just before these pivotal journeys. Although paintings relating to Scilly introduced brighter colour, combined with a post-Cubist simplification of landscape into geometrical forms, House in Rocky Landscape retains a weather-washed palette of sepia, strong shadow and dilute turquoise. The composition is one that Craxton favoured. Showing a gable-ended building and a road, or path, sweeping to the left, it echoes the artist’s many paintings of Alderholt Mill, a wartime refuge shared with E. Q. Nicholson and her family.  

1.John Craxton in conversation with Simon Martin, Pallant House Gallery Magazine, No. 11 (2007).

Leicester Galleries, London
Julius Fleischmann Foundation, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (purchased from the above)
Mr & Mrs Nicholas Lott
Private Collection, UK

Ian Collins , John Craxton , Lund Humphries, London, 2011, Cat No 152 (illus p123)

In our May 2018 exhibition John Craxton in Greece – The Unseen Works we showed an earlier version of the same subject, the same young man minus the cigarette, the same pose with his left leg raised on a
grey block, right hand on his hip and his left elbow resting on his left knee. His tee-shirt is dark blue with white stripes and his trousers are grey. It is signed and dated 1959. Craxton spent Christmas of 1959 with his close friend the Greek artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas (1906-1994), known as Nikos
Ghika, in an 18th century ancestral mansion built by his great-greatgreat-grandfather above the fishing village of Kaminia on the island of Hydra.

Ghika invited numerous artists, writers and performers to stay for protracted periods, among them Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy) who wrote Mani, his acclaimed travel book there and arranged a studio for John Craxton to use on his visits (where he also designed the book cover). The three men remained the closest of friends and their work and lives were celebrated in the 2018 British Museum exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece.

During the 1959 Hydra visit the builders at Ghika’s house had some unused plaster that Craxton put to good use. He frequently used whatever was at hand and the plaster fitted his curiosity for texture and technique while embarking on a painterly voyage of discovery – in this case building a relief on board by applying the plaster with various tools and then painting the figure in tempera. His love of classical sculpture and ancient reliefs is manifested here in a monumental image of a modern young man.

In 1960 Craxton moved to a ruined Venetian-Ottoman house onthe Cretan harbour of Chania, a thriving port and former islandcapital well-known for its vibrant atmosphere. Below his new homewere the tavernas and bars frequented by off-duty sailors and locallabourers who became the artist’s companions and models in hiswork. This second relief emerged again from left-over plaster duringthe renovation of the Chania home just like the 1959 portrait. In thisversion, the young man has a white tee-shirt and off-white trousersand holds the same pose with the addition of a cigarette depictedwhere the white plaster remained unpainted and the previous greybox has been substituted by a low side-table or stool.Both pictures were exhibited at Craxton’s 1961 exhibition at theLeicester Galleries. This final version was bought by the Julius Fleischmann Foundation, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA where it remained fordecades before being repatriated. 

Gordon Samuel 

The artist’s estate

The Artist’s Estate

Gimpel Gallery, New York

Private collection USA
The Prudential Assurance Company of America

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Patrick Heron’s exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, in summer 1972, blazed with colour. Focusing on paintings from the last fifteen years, it contrasted sombre reds, on one side of the gallery, against oranges, grass-greens and scarlets on the other. As Hilary Spurling recalled, The space between seems to pulse with colour – so much so that, as one rounds a corner … it is as though one had stepped from a clear, sunny day into a pool of firelight. 1

In the catalogue text, Heron wrote specifically about his use of colour in these recent paintings, conjecturing, ‘Perhaps I am the first wobbly hard-edge painter?’ 2  An eloquent art critic himself, Heron juxtaposed adjectives knowingly. ‘Hard-edge’, a term coined in the United States in 1959 for paintings characterised by areas of flat, cleanly delimited colour, was subverted instantly by ‘wobbly’, thus drawing attention to a critical aspect of Heron’s work. The scintillating colours of Yellows and Browns Interlocking with Soft Cadmium (Blue Flash) intensify by virtue of their blurred edges. Amorphous forms – keyholes, seeking to enclose and subsume– float upon the colour ground: orange, greens, browns and blue against red. At the aqueous margin of these shapes, a fringe of interference appears. Heron was fascinated to observe the effect of this frontier, particularly when its edges were freely, intuitively, drawn. As the eye travels, the spatial position of adjacent colour-areas appears to alternate, as first one side, then the other, comes to the fore.

1.Hilary Spurling, ‘East-End flame-thrower’, The Observer(25 June 1972), p. 28.

2.Patrick Heron, in Patrick Heron: recent paintings and selected earlier canvases (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1972)

Private Collection, Malaysia
Osborne Samuel, London

Hilton’s bouts of drinking and associated ill health seriously impacted his output in later years, when he found it difficult to sustain the discipline of working. The paintings he did complete – although sometimes uneven – were, however, able to draw upon the experience of maturity. Hilton had won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1963, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and in 1969 (the year after he received a CBE) his work was included in the British Council’s survey of ‘Contemporary British Painting’, which toured South Africa.

Among ideas from earlier decades that recur in Hilton’s paintings is a fluid outline suggesting a head, seen to the lower left in Untitled (1968). The motif has no fixed location, appearing sometimes at the top of a canvas, sometimes at the bottom, and from various angles – straight-on, skewed or oblique. Often it is combined with a horizontal line, which implies the contour of a landscape or a reclining figure. Given Hilton’s proclivity for transforming and abstracting from the human form, the temptation is to interpret the umber silhouette in Untitled (1968) as the shadow from a viewer’s head, cast across the legs and lower torso of a reclining nude. Yet the reference is ambiguous, the painting’s ochre and chalk palette suggesting equally a parched landscape. Focusing more closely, it is the quality of line that proves seductive. The charcoal line emanating from the right – perhaps separating hills, or legs – is disrupted by a disc more opaque than the surrounding ground. The line, too, falters. Through this stutter, or vibration, a compelling relationship is established between the implied viewer, the disc, and the empty looped circle echoed above.

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

In 1965, at the height of his career, Hilton dismantled his London studio and moved to Cornwall, where he had painted since the 1950s. His new studio was in a cottage in Botallack, on the first floor overlooking the moors. It was there that he would paint Untitled (1971), now in the collection of the Tate. That same year, 1971, the Waddington Galleries presented Hilton’s sixth solo exhibition of paintings and drawings. Norbert Lynton, reviewing the exhibition, noted a dazzling variety among the works, some apparently referential, others abstract, a ‘gamut of possible marks and splotches, lines, colours’. The common denominator was freshness: ‘Each [painting] is driven home and left to its own devices, sufficient and vibrant, unpropped by theory or process’.₁ 

Although Hilton painted less and less during these later years, as his health declined, he did so with intensity. His work continued to walk a tightrope between figuration and abstraction, with curves suggesting breasts or hills, hard lines the outline of a house or a table’s edge. This allusiveness had been noted as early as 1958, in terms of landscape, but it was not until 1974 that there was critical acknowledgement of ‘a streak of the erotic’ in Hilton’s painting.₂ In Untitled (1970) there is an ambiguous interplay between landscape and the figure. The painting’s tonality suggests warm earth colours, including a strangely defined vegetal form, but the delineation, through drawing, evokes human contours.

₁ Norbert Lynton, ‘Waddington Galleries, London’, Studio International (November 1971), p. 195–6.
₂ Michael Shepherd, ‘Streak of the Erotic’, Sunday Telegraph (17 March 1974).

The Leicester Galleries, London, 2 February 1962
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Woodland became a key feature of Hitchens’ paintings from the early 1940s onwards, following the family’s move to Lavington Common, Sussex, after his studio in Belsize Park was badly damaged by a bomb. This was a turning point for the artist, having escaped London to the seclusion and tranquillity of the countryside and surrounded by nature, his work took on a fresh spontaneity that is particularly evident in this painting.

Peter Khoroche noted:

“About Yellow Autumn from a Terrace -there is a note in IH’s Despatch Book, under Summer 1949, to the effect that certain pictures from the Leicester Galleries were transferred to the Leger Galleries at this time. Among these was Yellow Autumn from a Terrace. So we can be sure that it was painted before Summer 1949. I think ‘ca.1948’ would be a reasonable guess as to when it was painted.”

Taking a horizontal canvas, often propped low in front of him, Hitchens worked in the open air from landscapes hemmed close by foliage, bracken and the dank mass of water. He had moved to Greenleaves, six acres of woodland in Lavington, Sussex, following the bombing of his London studio. Never finding a reason to leave, he continued to paint its seasons, finding infinite variety where others might hardly register change.

Hitchens frequently drew analogy with music to describe his approach to painting, referring to the instruments in the ‘ painter’ s orchestra’ , a picture’ s rhythm and harmony, or the notation of tones and colours necessary to its ‘ visual music’ .1 Yet if his canvases are scanned, in the same way as musical scores, the attentive viewer soon notices that Hitchens’ calligraphic strokes are precise rather than bravura , the balancing of tone to unpainted canvas as calculated as that of an experienced orchestrator.

In Yellow Autumn from a Terrace , Hitchens creates a foreground scaffolding of tree trunks, arched brambles, shrubs, the suggested curlicues of ironwork, letting the eye find its own way towards chinks of cerulean-grey. As Christopher Neve wrote,

“…nature seemed to consist to [Hitchens] more of spaces than of objects, and it often appears that he instinctively drew the air and light that vibrates in the interstices of the view rather than the view itself.”2

1. Ivon Hitchens, Statement in Ark (1956), based on notes made a decade earlier.

2. Christopher Neve, ‘ Ivon Hitchens: Music’ , in Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting (Faber, 1990), p. 139.

Private Collection, UK

By the late 1950s, when Kinley painted Red, White and Black and other pared down palette-knifed abstractions of landscape with subliminal suggestions of the human figure, the Vienna-born, St. Martin’ s-trained painter had already enjoyed two solo exhibitions at Gimpel Fils, London. The connection with Gimpels continued well into the 1960s and was followed with other landmark solo exhibitions with Arthur Tooth in London and with Paul Rosenberg in New York.

Despite the pronounced effect on his work of the hugely influential Russian-born French painter Nicolas de Stael, described by the art critic Marco Livingstone as, « a godsend to Kinley» , the young British painter apparently, « trod a solitary path that has made him difficult to place» in the pantheon of Modern British art. The individuality of his approach to form and colour was plastic rather than descriptive and rested on the emphatic physicality of his paint handling. Nevertheless Kinley, whether in the impastoed de Stael-influenced early manner, or the thinly scribbled Matisse-inspired later colour field work, retained simplified, minimal and icon-like central motifs.

A clue to, and symptom of, the plasticity of Kinley’ s approach is in the picture titles themselves – Landscape or Seascape for example – that in Livingstone’ s estimation confirms the artist’ s intention to, « treat such time worn subjects generically» . Shortly after, however, and with the brightly coloured Abstract Composition (1956) and then with Red, White and Black in the present case, Kinley uses titles without reference to landscape or other natural, external subjects. Red, White and Black does, however, suggest a landscape with the palette-knifed band of cream and red paint slabs across the middle of a near-black ‘ ground’ .

By the late 1950s, and early 1960s, Kinley turned to the classic motif of the upright figure against anonymous interior or suggested landscape backdrops. One of these totem like figures, now re-orientated into a reclining posture, could conceivably be a residual or secondary feature of the landscape band in Red, White and Black.

A medium size work produced during Kinley’ s decade teaching at St. Martin’ s School of Art (a distinguished teaching career at Wimbledon and Corsham would follow) Red, White and Black shows how far Kinley pursued an abstract painterly dimension without fully abandoning external references.

1 Peter Kinley Marco Livingstone and Catherine Kinley, p10 Lund Humphries 2010

2 ibid, p9

3 ibid, p10

The Artist
Annely Juda, London
Annandale Galleries, Sydney
Private Collection, Sydney

Kendall R., Kossoff, Poussin and drawing: The anarchic and the
purposeful, British Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1999, pp. 70,
Heathcote C., Bliss in the here and now, Art & Australia, vol. 38, no. 4, 2001 pp. 534,

This painting will be included in the forthcoming publication Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings edited by Andrea Rose, with research by Andrew Dempsey and Stephanie Farmer, to be published by Modern Art Press. © Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York;
travelled to Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Cat No 74, Illustrated.
Leon Kossoff, Annandale Galleries, Sydney

Kossoff’s studio at Willesden Green was described, in 1999, as a place where his ‘belief in the fundamental but elusive nature of drawing and in the primal chaos of creativity’ took palpable form.1 Kossoff was born in London, to Russian-Jewish parents, and this was the studio where he had painted most of his work since 1966. Paint encrusted the floor and work surfaces. Light came from a single bulb, since a screen of curtains and garden overgrowth largely excluded daylight, and in one corner, slightly cleaner than the rest, was a radiator and old bench, where models would pose. It is this radiator and bench that can be seen in Cathy II. Kossoff would typically make series of charcoal drawings, then work in oils, revising and beginning again numerous times, perhaps over months, until a final state of coalescence was reached. In Cathy II, Richard Kendall described this moment as possessing ‘a raw feeling for structure, the studio tones fusing with a subject that is both old-masterly and poignantly real’.2 Taking Kendall’s description as a cue, Cathy II may be approached through light, subject, and a connection to the past.

Light in the studio was apparently not an overriding concern for Kossoff. His studio faced south, and if the light proved awkward, he would simply turn a painting around or start anew. Yet its effect within a painting is a different matter. Describing Kossoff’s handling of paint as evocative of mud and clay, and his palette as frequently subdued or monochrome, David Sylvester continued,

But the most wonderful of the resolved contradictions in Kossoff’s paintings is that between the sense of heaviness in the paint itself and the sense of light in the image, whether the palette is pale or quite dark. … Mud and clay are opaque; Kossoff’s paintings are luminous.3

Light defines contours in Cathy II, bringing nearer to us the nude’s angled leg and shoulder, highlighting her elbow and breastbone. It also clarifies structure, so that we appreciate the body’s folded form by virtue of the crumpled cloth and pillow and the ridged radiator behind. The limited palette focuses attention on the movement of the paint, its tone and texture both embodying and catching the light. This gestural quality reinforces a sense of Cathy II as a physical object, setting up rhythms and counter-rhythms within the composition. In places – such as in the downward pull of the paint in the lower left corner – this reinforces reality. In others, such as the delicate trails of white near the sitter’s head, it seems to have no connection with it, although absence would be felt as loss.

Kossoff had painted his subject in 1994 as Cathy No. 1, Summer and Cathy No. 3, Summer. Both are larger paintings on board, showing Cathy, nude, slumped in a chair. In the former, her arms hug her chest and her body is tipped forward on the picture plane, emphasising her pelvis and the fullness of her thighs. In the latter, the pose is quieter and more oblique: she closes her eyes and appears comfortably at rest. Cathy II is yet more intimate, suggesting the sitter curled asleep, her back to the radiator for warmth. Kossoff established close relationships with his models, who were often family or friends.

In 1996, John Berger wrote to Kossoff, in what became an essay in the form of a written correspondence. Again Kossoff’s studio provided the starting point for discussion. From student days Kossoff had kept on his wall an image of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at her Bath, in which she holds a letter: as she sits, naked, the upper part of her body is bathed in light, her legs in shadow. The recollection of the painting evoked for Berger a chain of thought about Kossoff’s portraits, whether of Cathy or Pilar. An artist friend, Miquel Barceló, had made a book of reliefs with a text in Braille, to be felt by the blind:

And this made me see that if a blind person felt Bathsheba’s body and then felt Pilar’s or Cathy’s, they would have the sensation of touching similar flesh. And this similarity is not to do with a similar way of painting but with a similar respect for flesh, paint and their vicissitudes 4

Berger’s response struck a chord with Kossoff, prompting a meditation on light and what he described as the ‘thereness’ of the sitter in the painting. Ending the correspondence, Kossoff alluded to the impossibility of painting light, yet its miraculous existence within a painting at its moment of resolution: ‘In a sense, before the work is resolved, the painter is, in a certain way, blind’.5  Cathy II, with remarkable assuredness, evinces this moment of clarity.

1. Richard Kendall, ‘Kossoff, Poussin and drawing: the anarchic and the purposeful’, British Art Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 1999), p. 70.
2. Kendall, ibid.
3. David Sylvester, ‘Kossoff’, in About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–96 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 294.
4. John Berger, ‘Kossoff’, in The Shape of a Pocket (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 81
5. Leon Kossoff, in Berger, p. 84.

The Artist
George Dix, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent
Private collection, Virginia
Osborne Samuel, London

University of Virginia Museum of Fine Art, February 1949

A major figure in the neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and 50s, English painter John Minton was also an abundantly gifted graphic artist and prolific illustrator. His commissions spanned book illustration, dust-jacket design, illustrations for magazines and journals, advertising, commercial posters for film, wallpapers, theatre design and importantly a large canvas commissioned for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain. Notable projects also include illustrations for food writer Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Alan Ross’s Time Was Away, and Kay Dick’s An Affair of Love.

Minton was clearly influenced by the previous generation of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland. As Gerard Hastings wrote in his essay for our exhibition in 2018, the impulse was to preserve picturesque scenery and to locate a poetic vision among our home-grown hops and thistles. A distinct nostalgia for something familiar that might soon disappear. The Fisherman is a wonderful example of this.

This drawing previously owned by George Dix who was stationed in London during the Second World War and remained there for a time afterwards. During this period in England, he befriended many of the luminaries of mid-century British culture, among them Minton, Wells, Vaughan and Piper, along with the famed sculptor Henry Moore. He maintained these relationships even after his return to America, where he worked as a partner in the New York office of the bi-continental gallery Durlacher Brothers. In Manhattan, Dix remained part of the intelligentsia, enjoying the company and friendship of Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein, among others.

Curt Valentin, New York
George Gallowhur, USA
Brigitta Bertoia, USA
Private collection, Los Angeles
William Beadleston Gallery, New York
James Kirkman, London
New Art Centre, London
Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York
Osborne Samuel, London

Herbert Read, Moore (Vol.1), 1944, pl152a; 1949, pl.152a
Henry Moore Complete Drawings; Volume 2 (1930-39) , edited by Ann Garrould, published by Lund Humphries, no. AG39.19; HMF 1460
Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), illustrated p. 237.

This drawing and Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture AG39.20 originally formed part of a large sheet. Moore gave permission for the two sections to be separated in December 1983.

Around 1937, Moore became fascinated by Fabre de Lagrange’s mathematical models in the Science Museum: beautiful objects, made in 1872 from polished brass, wood and coloured filaments. Their aim was to demonstrate the new discipline of Descriptive Geometry, but for Moore it was the models’ structure and changing viewpoints that proved compelling – ‘the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other’. ₁

The precursors to these models, containing fixed elements, were devised by Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), whose pupil, Théodore Olivier (1793–1853), refined the concept by designing versions able to be distorted and rotated into a variety of configurations. It was these models, made by Lagrange, that changed the course of mathematical teaching. Forming the basis of teaching collections, they dictated the tenor of lectures, their delicate construction even requiring technicians to care for them.₂  Moore evidently studied Lagrange’s models carefully, commenting,

I was fascinated by the mathematical models … made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side … Through these holes rings were threaded and lead [sic] to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle ₃

Over a three-year period, between 1937 and 1939, Moore created around fifty sculptures in which space is modified by taut threads. There is a complex relationship between such works, Moore’s drawings and photography, as Andrew Causey has noted. A photograph, showing a cluster of stringed maquettes arranged on a plinth in Moore’s studio, corresponds exactly with the composition of Landscape with Figures (1938), in which Moore has supplied an imagined background. ₄ The implication is that Moore was exploring ideas beyond sculpture, and it is pertinent, as Causey also observes, that Moore’s drawings were included in the series of Penguin Modern Painters. ₅

In the two sets of drawings presented here, originally part of a single sheet, stringed figures predominate: proliferating and mutating serially across the paper, to suggest bones or stones, worn into strange cavities and curvatures. Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture relates most closely to the complexity of Lagrange’s conoid models, albeit exchanging their angularity for organic, rounded forms. In Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture the focus alters, to address – as Moore’s annotation makes clear – the ‘mother & child’. Moore made biomorphic stringed sculptures with this title, predominantly small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, in 1938–9. Also on this page are more familiar depictions of the subject, a mother standing, child in arms, as well as an abstract enclosing figure, similar to Moore’s internal/external forms. Most intriguing, and fitting into Causey’s category of the uncanny, are the two drawings to the lower left of the sheet, in which a bone-white structure is set closely against a quasi-human form. If the yellow of these figures isolates them, their darkly shaded background contributes to a sense of menace. Such ambiguity was captured by Robert Melville’s term ‘object-presences’: figures ready at any moment to ‘break into overt and destructive action’. ₆

₁ Moore, in Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore (Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 105.
₂ Jane Wess, ‘The history of surface mathematical models’, in Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces (London: The Royal Society, 2012), p. 7–8.
₃ Moore, in Moore and Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, p. 105.
₄ Andrew Causey, ‘Henry Moore and the Uncanny’, in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), p. 82–90.
₅ Geoffrey Grigson, Henry Moore, The Penguin Modern Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Limited, 1943). Plate 20 shows a drawing, Objects – string and wood (1938), illustrating stringed figures in a prison-like setting.
₆ Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1921–1969 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 17.

Curt Valentin, New York
George Gallowhur, USA
Brigitta Bertoia, USA
Private collection, Los Angeles
William Beadleston Gallery, New York
James Kirkman, London
New Art Centre, London
Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York
Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, London

Herbert Read, Moore (Vol.1), 1944, pl152a; 1949, pl.152a
Henry Moore Complete Drawings; Vo lume 2 (1930-39) , edited by Ann Garrould, published by Lund Humphries, no. AG39.20; HMF 1383

This drawing and Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture AG39.19 originally formed part of a large sheet. Moore gave permission for the two sections to be separated in December 1983. Moore signed this drawing when it was separated in 1983.

Around 1937, Moore became fascinated by Fabre de Lagrange’s mathematical models in the Science Museum: beautiful objects, made in 1872 from polished brass, wood and coloured filaments. Their aim was to demonstrate the new discipline of Descriptive Geometry, but for Moore it was the models’ structure and changing viewpoints that proved compelling – ‘the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other’. ₁
The precursors to these models, containing fixed elements, were devised by Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), whose pupil, Théodore Olivier (1793-1853), refined the concept by designing versions able to be distorted and rotated into a variety of configurations. It was these models, made by Lagrange, that changed the course of mathematical teaching. Forming the basis of teaching collections, they dictated the tenor of lectures, their delicate construction even requiring technicians to care for them.₂ Moore evidently studied Lagrange’s models carefully, commenting,
I was fascinated by the mathematical models … made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side … Through these holes rings were threaded and lead [sic] to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle ₃
Over a three-year period, between 1937 and 1939, Moore created around fifty sculptures in which space is modified by taut threads. There is a complex relationship between such works, Moore’s drawings and photography, as Andrew Causey has noted. A photograph, showing a cluster of stringed maquettes arranged on a plinth in Moore’s studio, corresponds exactly with the composition of Landscape with Figures (1938), in which Moore has supplied an imagined background. ₄ The implication is that Moore was exploring ideas beyond sculpture, and it is pertinent, as Causey also observes, that Moore’s drawings were included in the series of Penguin Modern Painters. ₅
In the two sets of drawings presented here, originally part of a single sheet, stringed figures predominate: proliferating and mutating serially across the paper, to suggest bones or stones, worn into strange cavities and curvatures. Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture relates most closely to the complexity of Lagrange’s conoid models, albeit exchanging their angularity for organic, rounded forms. In Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture the focus alters, to address – as Moore’s annotation makes clear – the ‘mother & child’. Moore made biomorphic stringed sculptures with this title, predominantly small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, in 1938-9. Also on this page are more familiar depictions of the subject, a mother standing, child in arms, as well as an abstract enclosing figure, similar to Moore’s internal/external forms. Most intriguing, and fitting into Causey’s category of the uncanny, are the two drawings to the lower left of the sheet, in which a bone-white structure is set closely against a quasi-human form. If the yellow of these figures isolates them, their darkly shaded background contributes to a sense of menace. Such ambiguity was captured by Robert Melville’s term ‘object-presences’: figures ready at any moment to ‘break into overt and destructive action’. ₆

₁ Moore, in Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore (Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 105.
₂ Jane Wess, ‘The history of surface mathematical models’, in Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces (London: The Royal Society, 2012), p. 7-8.
₃ Moore, in Moore and Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, p. 105.
₄ Andrew Causey, ‘Henry Moore and the Uncanny’, in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), p. 82-90.
₅ Geoffrey Grigson, Henry Moore, The Penguin Modern Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Limited, 1943). Plate 20 shows a drawing, Objects – string and wood (1938), illustrating stringed figures in a prison-like setting.
₆ Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1921-1969 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 17.

Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York (by 1955).
Erna Futter, New York; Estate sale, Christie’s, New York, 1986
Private Collection, USA (acquired from the above)
Osborne Samuel, London

Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings , with an introduction by Herbert Read, published by Lund Humphries, first published 1944, illustrated p. xxxii

A. Garrould, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-49 , London, 2001, vol. 3, p. 156, no. AG 42.148 (illustrated p.156).

As its title implies this working, energetic sheet is a graphic rehearsal or blueprint for possible sculptures and contains both reclining, seated and figures with internal forms, themes which were to dominate Moore’ s career. Elements hark back to the surrealist tendencies from the late 1930’ s but also formal sculptural resolutions have evolved on the sheet and are familiar in works from the 1940’ s onwards. The energetic application of layers of mixed media echoes the bony, taut surfaces of the sculptures. The memorable drawing ’ Crowd looking at a tied-up object (1942) recalls Yves Tanguy’ s ocean-bed surrealism. Ideas for Sculpture , though a set of un-related studies rather than an independent or cohesive narrative, contains a similarly elusive feeling of mystery and atmospheric flux.

Edgar B. Young & Jane White Young, New York (acquired from the artist on November 26, 1965)
Private Collection, USA (acquired from the above in 2002)
Osborne Samuel, London

David Sylvester, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, vol. 1 , London, no. 231, illustration of the terracotta version p. 146
David Mitchinson et al., Celebrating Moore, Works from the Collection of The Henry Moore Foundation , London, 1998, no.143, illustration of another cast p.209
John Hedgecoe, Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore , London, 1998, no.234, illustration of the terracotta version, p.211
Dorothy Kosinski, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century (New Haven & London: Dallas Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2001), cat. 50, illustrated in terracotta, p. 174.

Casts held at the San Diego Museum of Art & the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USAThe terracotta original is held by the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK

A group of a dozen or more maquettes owes its origin to an unrealised commission for Impington Village College, in Cambridgeshire. When the educationalist Henry Morris approached Moore, in the 1930s, it was with an inspirational vision to create a centre for the surrounding villages, designed by the architect Walter Gropius, to integrate art, music, lectures, plays and films into everyday life. Moore instantly lighted upon the subject of the family, as most appropriate. Although funds proved insufficient to fulfil the project at the time, the idea took root.

In 1944, Morris again contacted Moore, who began to make sketches, then maquettes of family groups. Some were intended to be enlarged as bronze sculptures, but most were envisaged as stone carvings, Moore’s preferred medium for Impington. After nine months’ work, however, the project foundered, partly through lack of money, and partly due to the Education Authority’s lack of enthusiasm for Moore’s maquettes. Some years later, the ideas were developed as two significant commissions: Family Group (1948-9), in bronze for Barclay School in Stevenage, and Family Group (1954-5), in stone for Harlow New Town. ₁

Contemplating the Impington commission, Moore filled two sketchbooks with family groups. The compositions varied between one- and two-children families, with the children (of different ages) seated or standing. Some are more abstract than others, some figures contain holes, others have vestigial or split heads. The female figure is often swathed in a shawl or dress, and sometimes a blanket is draped, tenderly, over both figures’ knees. Moore regarded these sketches not only as generating ideas for sculpture but as a means of clarifying the subject in his mind: with a battery of possibilities before him, he could choose which to refine and take forward. In conversation with David Sylvester, Moore later identified the family group as his last significant subject to be developed through this process of drawing. ₂

The maquette for Family Group (1944) shows three seated figures. To the left, a woman holds a child, to the right, a man places one hand protectively on the woman’s shoulder, while his other hand holds a book. The message is clear: that a close family unit is inseparable from the values of education. Significantly, Morris had intended to bring all aspects of learning together at Impington, with parents and children using the same building, and ‘village’ and ‘college’ functioning, effectively, as families.₃ Morris’s thinking can be set against the backdrop of the Welfare State, with its focus on upholding and supporting the family as a vital anchor for society.

Having made a similar group of maquettes for the Northampton Madonna and Child, in 1943, Moore realised their potential, once editioned in bronze, for use as promotion or a source of income.₄ Family Group was editioned in 1956, from the original terracotta maquette, by Charles Gaskin of the Art Bronze Foundry in Chelsea. Bernard Meadows, who was Moore’s assistant at the time, recalled that some casts were roughly finished, and required considerable refinement before returning to the foundry for patination. The flipside to this, paradoxically, is that their final state can be considered to have been closely supervised and worked on by the artist.

Kenneth Clark remained critical of Moore’s family groups, considering them to lack the force, or menace, of other subjects. The phrase Clark used was ‘dutiful deadness’, which he diagnosed as stemming from Moore’s own personal happiness, as represented by the family – a wife and child.₅ Notwithstanding, Family Group (1944) is a beautifully conceived and realised maquette, possessing the quiet strength of its monumental counterparts. Moore’s commissions for Stevenage and Harlow, meanwhile, would become well-loved examples of public art.

₁ See Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 89, 273-5.
₂ Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’ (7 June 1963), BBC Third Programme. See also Alice Correia, ‘Maquette for Family Group 1945 by Henry Moore OM, CH’, Tate Research Publications (2014).
₃ Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 133.
₄ David Sylvester, ‘The Evolution of Henry Moore’s Sculpture: II’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 90, No. 544 (July 1948), p. 190.
₅ Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 155.

The Leicester Galleries, London, where purchased by Sir Eric Maclagan, May 1951
Thence by family descent
Osborne Samuel, London

The Leicester Galleries, London, New Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore , 1951, cat.no.41

In 1927, Moore made a series of studies of his mother in which he captured the cast and tilt of her head improvisatorially in ink on newspaper. Fourteen years later, often from memory, he undertook to record the conditions in London’ s underground shelters. These drawings are quite different in character. By apparently transforming the figures to effigies, frozen in collective indignity, Moore appeared to shy away from subjective expression, creating instead ‘ a cast characters … who are drawn from reality but are also generic people who suffer and endure’ .₁

Three Female Figures stems from the shelter drawings, in technique and approach, but also provides insight into other areas of Moore’ s working practice. It is, in effect, a tableau depicting an elderly woman, hunch-shouldered, feet planted heavily, ministered by two younger women. The postures are statuesque, the gestures petrified acts of humanity, but Moore’ s realisation is graphic as well as sculptural. Using a technique he described as ‘ sectional drawing’ , Moore divides the surface of the figures into jigsaw grids to create a sense of volume. Equally, he uses wax crayon and wash to create spontaneous effects of light, offsetting and animating the composition.

Three Female Figures , in fact, relates to Moore’ s early experiments in printmaking. In 1949 Moore had begun a collaboration with the Ganymed Press, newly founded in London using equipment from its former namesake in Berlin. Ganymed’ s speciality at this period was ‘ collograph’ , so-called by the press’ s manager, Bernhard Baer, to distinguish from conventional collotypes, which were reproductive rather than autographic. Essentially, the artist would draw in separation on plastic sheets (Kodatrace) to create images transferred photographically to a light-sensitised glass plate. Among Moore’ s first prints using this technique was a scarcely modified version of Three Female Figures ( c. 1950), for which only a few proofs are known to exist. ₂

1. Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 13.

2. Three Female Figures , CGM 16, collograph, 50.5 x 38.1 cm, printed in black, blue-grey and yellow. See Frances Carey and Anthony Griffiths, Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914-1960 (British Museum Publications, 1990), p. 150-52; David Mitchinson, Henry Moore Prints and Portfolios , (Patrick Cramer, 2010), p. 28, 32 (illustrated in colour). The existence of the drawing was not known at the time of Mitchinson’ s study.

Gallery Kasahara, Osaka, Japan
Private Collection (Acquired from the above c.2003)
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and drawings, vol. 5, Sculpture 1974-1980, London, 1983, no. 656, p. 20 & p. 21
Henry Moore: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Grafiken (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Ruf, Munich, 1983-84, no. 64, illustration of another cast n.p.
John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore: A Monumental Vision, Cologne, 2005, no. 570, illustration of another cast p. 237
Henry Moore Back to a Land (exhibition catalogue), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, 2015, n.n., illustration in colour of another cast p. 126

This work is recorded in the archives of the Henry Moore Foundation under number 2019.4

Moore had always wanted to make a figure in wood with ‘a bend in its pose’. His preference was for elm, and prior to the catastrophic arrival of elm disease he carved four over-lifesize sculptures. In 1975 he acquired a large elm tree, recently felled, and immediately began to carve the unseasoned wood. The process demanded particular attention, as Moore understood. Once finished, however, he regarded Reclining Figure: Holes (1976–78) as ‘having something special and different from the others’.1 

The carving was documented, from start to finish, by the photographer Gemma Levine, and published as a photo-essay with comments by Moore.2 In several images the plaster maquette can be seen as a tiny sculptural presence on top of the elmwood block, its softly modelled surfaces contrasting with the roughly chiselled planes of the figure, as it developed amid the studio detritus of tools, rulers, wedges and woodchips.

Cast in bronze, in 1975, Maquette for Reclining Figure: Holes is a tactile, enigmatic form. From the front it rests languorously, space entering the composition through voids where limbs arch and touch. Reversed, the salient feature is the curve Moore anticipated so keenly. These two facets are complementary yet unexpected. The opening-up of the figure might be regarded as purely practical (when translated into unseasoned wood, it encouraged even drying), yet it is also integral to the work’s aesthetic – which unfolds as a lucidly structured, organic form.

1. Moore (1983), in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 305.
2. Henry Moore and Gemma Levine, Henry Moore: Wood Sculpture (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1983). Some of the images were included in With Henry Moore: The Artist at Work, photographed by Gemma Levine (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978), p. 94–108.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat. no. L3.

Zillebeke is a village south of Ypres, Belgium. In November 2014, the 1st Battalion Irish Guards suffered huge losses defending the village which played a pivotal role in preventing the Central Powers breaking through to the coast. By the time Nash arrives on the Ypres Salient in early 1917, the landscape has seen much heavy shelling and the ground is impassable. Here, a spotlight lights the scene, with figures walking with heads bowed through the rain, the light shining off the waterfilled craters and the lake beyond. The broken tree trunks stand like tomb stones as symbols of the fallen.

Postan, Alexander. The Complete Graphic Work of Paul Nash. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973. cat no. L10.

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no 9.

During his time both as an ambulance driver and with the Red Cross, Nevinson was captivated by the dense lines of marching French soldiers seemingly moving as one. Informed by the Futurist techniques for depicting movement, seen in such works a Boccioni’s ‘The City Rises’ and ‘States of Mind’, the French soldiers in ‘Returning to the Trenches’ merge into one unified mechanical mass, their limbs blurring together, giving one the impression of a speeding train disappearing into the distance. In his autobiography Nevinson stated that these soldiers may have been part of the French 89th territorial division, and in the oil painting of the same subject the early French uniform is distinctive with its impractical red cap. In an interview with The Daily Express in February 1915 where the painting was reproduced he stated:

“I have tried to express the emotion produced by the apparent ugliness and dullness of modern warfare. Our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe … Modern art needs not beauty, or restraint, but vitality.”

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no. 41.

Nerves of an Army depicts four Royal Engineers repairing severed telephone wires – vital lines of communication between Commanding Officers and the front lines. The soldiers are precariously balanced on the telephone pole and, silhouetted against the sky, would be at risk of being spotted by the enemy.

As the title suggests they remain calm and stoic in spite of the dangerous situation, qualities deemed innately British and patriotic. Years later the drypoint inspired film director, Richard Attenborough, an impression of which he owned, to recreate the image in his directorial debut ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’.

Black, Jonathan. CRW Nevinson – The Complete Prints. London: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2014. cat. no. 30.

First exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, March 1918.

The road from the city of Arras to the town OF Baupaume was a major British supply route during the Great War. Here the road continues across infinite rolling hills, the only variation on the flat expansive landscape a few broken trees.

Nevinson wrote in his autobiography of his return to London in 1918; “I got back to find that a bomb had fallen on the printing works where my lithographs were kept and my stones were damaged. The reason for the extra ridge on my lithograph of the ‘Arras-Bapaume Road’ is because I had to put it in to cover the injury done to my original stone.”

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Marlborough Fine Art, Rome
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

Private collection, UK

Victor Pasmore Paintings and Graphics 1980-1992 , Norbert Lynton, published by Lund Humphries, 1992, no.10 (Catalogue of Paintings), p. 130
Exhibition catalogue, Victor Pasmore The Green Earth: A new painting and other recent paintings and graphics 1978-80, London, Marlborough Fine Art, 1980, p. 12, no. 10, illustrated.

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Victor Pasmore The Green Earth: A new painting and other recent paintings and graphics 1978-80, April – May 1980, no. 10.

The estate of Felice Ross, NYC
Osborne Samuel, London

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. CEP 16.

Vann, Philip. Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2013). no. 16.

Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, June – September 2019

The Merry-Go-Round, like Power’s other great linocut ‘Appy ‘Ampstead is a real tour de force of Power’s vision and skill in producing intricately cut and inked lino-blocks to produce an image of such incredible kinetic energy.

The Merry-Go-Round is surprisingly printed from only two lino-blocks, in Chinese and chrome orange and Chinese blue in an edition of 50 impressions.  Like his linocut The Giant Racer, The Merry-Go-Round was observed by Power at the Wembley Exhibition Fun Fair in west London, not far from his home in Brook Green in Hammersmith.

Power’s linocut is a stark contrast to Mark Gertler’s wonderful 1916 painting also titled Merry-Go-Round which is in the Tate Collection. In Gertler’s famous painting the figures are geometrical in shape, giving them the appearance of dolls, painted in blue, red and yellow. It is almost sedentary compared to Power’s whirling Merry-Go-Round that seems almost out of control as the riders spin around at breakneck speed, the central column appears to be bending under the momentum, the blue and orange patterning above the canopy of the merry-go-round creates a vortex of energy, the silhouetted black cut-out figures in the foreground look almost out of focus conveying the speed of the merry-go-round as the riders hold on for dear life!

The watercolour is one of a number Procktor made from drawings made in New York, when he, Gervase Griffiths and Ossie Clark were staying at the apartment of John Kloss, a fashion designer friend of Clark’ s who was away on business. The watercolours were made when Procktor was back at home in London.

The following is taken directly from Ian Massey’ s book, Patrick Procktor: Art and Life , page 111:

Eric Emerson, a dancer who had appeared in Warhol’ s 1967 film Chelsea Girls, joined Procktor, Griffiths and Clark at the apartment. Over a couple of days and through the night of the sixth and seventh of December they took LSD. The eleventh-floor apartment overlooked Central Park and had mirrored walls, so that the effect was of the park entering the room. When the moon rose, its light was reflected in the mirrored room and combined with the reflections of plant foliage – all was magnified and made stranger by the effects of drugs. Procktor made a series of annotated drawings in pen and pencil on sheets of paper joined together as 180-degree panoramas. Back in London he was to develop watercolours from these drawings, in which he played with changes of scale in order to capture something of the disorientation of the experience.

This is the footnote relating to the above text: Eric Emerson, born 1945. Appeared in four Warhol films, including Lonesome Cowboys , 1969.Died as result of drug overdose on 28th March 1975. See Jean Stein’ s biography of Edie Sedgwick, Edie: an American Biography , 2006, p 276 for an anecdote about Emerson.

Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
The Artist
Private Collection

Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p.175
William Scott: Catalogue Raisonne of Oil Paintings, edited by Sarah Whitfield, published by Thames and Hudson in association with the William Scott Foundation, no. 213

The Artist

Hanover Gallery, London

Michael Trevor Williams

The Artist

Private Collection

William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings , 2013, edited by Sarah Whitfield: No.238 Volume 2, p.90

Mr & Mrs Peter Ade, München
Thence by descent
Private Collection, Germany

PA are the initials of Peter Ade, the Director of Haus der Kunst in München . A gift by the artist in recognition of the assistance Peter Ade gave with a travelling exhibition of Sutherland’s work in 1967. ( Haus der Kunst München, 11. March – 7. May 1967; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 2. June – 30. July 1967; Haus am Waldsee Berlin, 11. August – 24. September 1967; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Köln, 7. October – 20. November, 1967.)

This painting clearly relates in structure to two earlier versions of the same subject from the 1940’s, one now held in the British Council and the second at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York).

In the 1940s Sutherland began a series of paintings based on thorns. Walking in the country, and preoccupied with a commission for a Crucifixion , he began to notice ‘ thorn bushes and the structure of thorns, which pierced the air in all directions, their points establishing limits of aerial space’ . Drawing them, he observed a strange transformation take place: the thorns rearranged themselves into ‘ a paraphrase of the Crucifixion and the Crucified Head – the cruelty’ .1 Kenneth Clark described the resulting trees, heads and crosses as akin to metaphors in poetry, their freely created forms more vivid and personal for using imagery not already ‘ deadened by use’ .2

The context for these works for Sutherland, a Catholic, was deeply meaningful. In the early post-war years he received commissions from the Reverend Walter Hussey for a Crucifixion and Noli me tangere , respectively for St Matthew’ s, Northampton, and Chichester Cathedral. More significant still was the tapestry commissioned by Basil Spence as a focal point for the new Cathedral at Coventry (1962), a monumental sign of hope abutting the ruins of its war-blasted predecessor. At Coventry, Sutherland’ s Christ in Majesty was complemented sensitively by an altar set from Geoffrey Clarke, itself alluding to the bitter piercing of thorns.

Among Sutherland’ s ‘ thorn’ paintings, a cluster of Thorn Crosses evokes altar sets. The trinity of forms in Thorn Trees, Spring (1967) likewise suggests a cross and candlesticks, or perhaps a crucifixion witnessed by mourners: such is the malleability and suggestibility of Sutherland’ s imagery. Especially potent is the painting’ s confluence of death and renewal – sere thorns cloaked in the verdure of a fresh season. The contrast was one Sutherland had originally hoped to exploit in his commission for St Matthew’ s, Northampton, as he explained:

I would have liked to paint the Crucifixion against a blue sky … in benign circumstances: blue skies, green grass, Crucifixion[s] under warmth – and blue skies are, in a sense, more powerfully horrifying.3

1. Graham Sutherland, ‘ Thoughts on Painting’ , The Listener (6 September 1951), p. 378, quoted in ‘ An Exhibition of Painting and Drawings by Graham Sutherland’ (Arts Council and Tate Gallery, 1953), unpaginated.

2. Kenneth Clark, introduction to ‘ An Exhibition of Painting and Drawings by Graham Sutherland’ (Arts Council and Tate Gallery, 1953), unpaginated.

3. Sutherland, ‘ Thoughts on Painting’ , The Listener (6 September 1951), republished in Graham Sutherland, Correspondences: Selected Writings on Art , ed. Julian Andrews (Graham and Kathleen Sutherland Foundation, 1982), p. 73.

Private Collection, UK
Christies, 1983, December 19th, Lot 130
Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above)
Osborne Samuel, London

After winning the Rome Prize in 1955, on graduating from the Royal College of Art, Joe Tilson travelled to Italy. There he met his future wife, the artist Joslyn Morton, and together they shared a studio at Casa Frollo on the Giudecca in Venice, where they would marry a year later. Thus began a profound relationship with Italy, which has provided both an anchor and a creative focus for Tilson’s work, from early paintings to the recent brightly coloured Postcards from Venice (2014–15). 

 
During the 1950s Tilson made his first paintings of Tuscany, a landscape that had nurtured and informed the work of Renaissance artists such as Giovanni di Paolo, Simone Martini and Sassetta. The Val d’Orcia is distinctive for its flat chalk plains and conical hills. Over centuries, the terrain has eroded to form alternating calanchi (furrows) and biancane (sedimentary clay outcrops): the Crete Senesi, described by Iris Origo as ‘bare and colourless as elephants’ backs’. ₁ In San Quirico d’Orcia I (1956), Tilson renders this landscape using thick impasto, bulked with sand and grit, and a palette drawn from the dust-coloured valley. There is an insistent rhythm to the patterning of hills against plateau and sky. While the composition possesses a strong tonal unity, there is also mutability in its shading and contour – from the warmth of terracotta to chalk-white, cadmium yellow, and a misty blue light touching the hills.

₁ Iris Origo, Wartime in Val d’Orcia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), p. 15–16.

Waddington Galleries, London
Ann Kendall Richards, New York, June 2000
Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, London

Exhibition catalogue, William Turnbull: Sculptures 1946-62, 1985-87, London, Waddington Galleries, 1987, p. 53, no. 20, another cast illustrated.
Exhibition catalogue, William Turnbull Neue Skulpturen, Berlin, Galerie Michael Haas, 1992, no. 5, another cast illustrated.
Exhibition catalogue, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings, London, Serpentine Gallery, 1995, p. 65, pl. 45, another cast illustrated.
A.A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Much Hadham, 2005, pp. 51-52, 68, 168, no. 240, another cast illustrated.

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Sculptures 1946-62, 1985-87, October – November 1987, no. 20, p.53
Annely Juda Fine Art, From Picasso to Abstraction, June – September 1989
Berlin, Galerie Michael Haas, William Turnbull Neue Skulpturen, October – November 1992, no. 5
London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull: Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings, Nov. 1995 – Jan.1996, no.45, p.65
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, William Turnbull, October – November, 1998

Encountering Leaf Venus 2, what does it suggest? Leaf, or goddess? Close to human scale, its blade-thin, verdigris form is marked by sparse, discreet indentations.

William Turnbull began to make ‘Idols’ in the mid-1950s: simplified structures whose totality could be grasped in a glance. Their presence was primal, evoking – though not mimicking – works from other civilisations. At the British Museum, Turnbull had studied Cycladic and African sculpture, as well as utilitarian objects, such as spoons, which possessed symbolic significance. His contribution to the radical exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’, in 1956, was Sun Gazer, a mysterious ovoid on a pedestal. Turnbull amplified his intention in the catalogue: 

Sculpture used to look ‘modern’; now we make objects that might have been dug up at any point in the past forty thousand years. Sculpture = totemic object. It can exist inside or outside architectural space.

In 1979, after a gap of seventeen years, Turnbull returned to making ‘Idols’ in bronze, fashioning a series of small masks, figures and torsos. The continuity with earlier work is evident, yet there is also difference. In sculptures from the mid-1980s onwards, such as Leaf Venus 2, sculptural weight and solidity have been replaced by slenderness: an audacious balancing of wafer-thin forms. Considering such works, David Sylvester recalled Turnbull’s question, ‘How little will suggest a head?’, invoking by comparison the artist’s emptied-out canvases of the 1950s, in which brush-strokes activate monochrome surfaces. 

Amanda Davidson, in The Sculpture of William Turnbull, links the origin of Leaf Venus 2 to drawings of plants made in Singapore in 1963. 1. Turnbull related it to skateboards used by his sons; a jarring cultural appropriation, but correlating neatly with Leaf Venus’s form, its slim volume and gently curved surfaces. David Sylvester further suggested aircraft wings, which had been a visual constant during Turnbull’s four years as a wartime pilot in the RAF. 2. All are possible, indeed likely.

Sun Gazer (1959), as distinct from the 1956 sculpture of the same title, was sited outside Kingsdale School as part of an initiative by the London County Council’s Architect’s Department ‘to expose children to the most challenging and experimental manifestations of contemporary art’. 3. Sun Gazer relates directly to Leaf Venus 2. Horizontal rather than vertical, it is essentially a slim leaf form, with ridged and gashed surface markings, although the depth and legibility of this scarring is greater.

In Eugene Rosenberg’s photograph of Sun Gazer (1959), a girl in school uniform studies the sculpture. A young teacher looks on, while further pupils can be seen watching from open windows on the upper floor. We can never know what they were thinking, but the placement of the sculpture, against the modernist brick, steel and concrete architecture of Leslie Martin, is undoubtedly daring. Light, and the skilful black-and-white photograph, emphasise the strangeness of Turnbull’s sculpture – a space-age found object.
The challenge, with the smoother-surfaced Leaf Venus 2, is to register its presence through photographs: the sculpture’s surface lines and dots, ciphers across and around its slender mass, may all too easily be easily missed. Such markings subdivide the leaf, providing symmetry (dots in the centre, lines to the perimeter). Yet the effect, as with Sun Gazer, remains equivocal. Leaf Venus 2 is an object both self-sufficient and referential, clearly articulated and numinous.

1.Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull (Aldershot: The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2005), p. 52.
2. David Sylvester, ‘Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings’, in William Turnbull: sculpture and paintings (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers and the Serpentine Gallery, 1995), unpaginated.
3. Richard Cork, in Architect’s Choice: Art and Architecture in Great Britain since 1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 34, illustrated p. 35.

The Artist.
George Dix, New York, New York (acquired directly from the above in the late 1940s). 
George Dix was an art dealer and collector who had a partnership with R. Kirk Askew at Durlacher Brothers and later, after Durlacher closed in 1967, he opened his own gallery in New York City.
By family descent.
Private Collection, Charlottesville, Virginia
Osborne Samuel, London

Wells lived in Ditchling in Sussex until the early 1920s but was born in London in 1907.  He attended University College Hospital from 1925 and qualified as a GP in 1930. He took up an appointment as the GP for the Scilly Isles from 1936-45 having worked in a number of hospitals prior to this appointment.

He was largely self-taught apart from attending evening classes at St Martins School of Art in the late 1920s and his medical training during the day. Apart from that the only other training was studying under Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn during a visit to Cornwall in 1928.

Whilst in Cornwall that year he was introduced to Christopher Wood and Ben and Winifred Nicholson.  Ben became a life-long friend and when time allowed Wells would make the occasional trip to visit him in his Hampstead studio.  In 1938 Nicholson had married Barbara Hepworth and moved to St Ives in 1939 with their triplets, staying temporarily with Adrian Stokes and his painter wife Margaret Mellis, to escape the ravages of the bombing in London.

During the war years Naum Gabo, an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia’s post-Revolution avant-garde and in the development of twentieth-century sculpture moved to Cornwall.  During his visits to Nicholson and Hepworth, Wells met Gabo who became a major and lasting influence upon him.

After the war Wells decided to become a full-time professional artist and bought one of Forbes’s former studios in the artistic community of Newlyn. With his new-found confidence he became a founder member of the Crypt Group in 1946 and the Penwith Society in 1949.  From here on his career climbed and he began exhibiting extensively; in 1946 an exhibition with Winifred Nicholson at the Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1947 with Ben Nicholson, Hepworth and Peter Lanyon at Downing’s Bookshop in St Ives, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, in 1949 (Salon des Réalités Nouvelles were an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939), at the 1951 São Paolo Biennale and at the Durlacher Gallery, New York, in 1952, 1958 and 1960.

The present work, Untitled, 1948 was bought directly from Wells in the 1940’s by George Dix, a partner at the Durlacher Gallery and remained in his collection. Dix was stationed in London during the Second World War and remained there for a time afterwards. During this period in England, he befriended many of the luminaries of mid-century British culture, among them Wells, Vaughan and Piper, along with famed sculptor Henry Moore. He maintained these relationships even after his return to America, where he worked as a partner in the New York office of the bi-continental gallery Durlacher Brothers. In Manhattan, Dix remained part of the intelligentsia, enjoying the company and friendship of Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein, among others. 

Wells was an independent figure, managing without a dealer until Waddington Galleries gave him a solo exhibition in 1960 followed by a second in 1964 which did not do well commercially due to the more challenging hard edge work he was producing. 

In the mid-1960s he acquired a second studio in Newlyn that for almost 30 years he shared with his great friend, the sculptor Denis Mitchell. From this time onwards Wells suffered a fallow period commercially until the re-emergence of interest in the post-1939 Modern movement of artists based in and around St Ives. This benefitted from a pivotal Tate Gallery exhibition in 1985, St. Ives, 1939-64: Twenty-Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, which included seven works by Wells.