Born in Leeds in 1916, Kenneth Armitage studied at Leeds College of Art from 1934 – 37 followed by the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1937 – 39. His pre-war sculpture of this period was mainly carvings, most of which he later destroyed.
During the Second World War Armitage served in the army and then, after the war ended, became Head of Sculpture at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, a post he held for ten years. It is during this period that he began to work in bronze.
Kenneth Armitage was one of eight young British sculptors, including Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Robert Adams and Geoffrey Clarke whose work, when first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1952, was dubbed by Herbert Read ‘the geometry of fear’. Their sculptures, with spiky, fragmented forms, seemed to encapsulate the bewildered anguish of this post-war generation.
In Kenneth Armitage’s sculpture there was a specific emphasis on the human figure, strongly influenced by the work of Giacometti and Picasso. Armitage had also 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. In Bernadette going to Wales, 1972, one can identify the sense of humour Armitage also became known for, evident in the elongated limbs emerging from a distorted body and the stenciled figures running, arms outstretched away from the figure. Also in evidence is the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical which Armitage also experimented with, creating movement which seems to generate an opposition between figure and plane – but also a framing, the figure almost growing out of the sculpture. He developed a distinctive style, of spindly legged figures with slab bodies, depicted with a playful humour. From the late 1960s he began to experiment more, combining sculpture and drawing in figures of wood, plaster and paper but by the 1970s he had returned to bronze and non-human subject matter.
Armitage’s first one man exhibition was at Gimpel Fils 1952. By the time of his one-man retrospective show at the Venice Biennale in 1958, Kenneth Armitage was internationally famous and is now recognised as having been one of the major British sculptors of the twentieth century. He has won a number of accolades including the David E Bright Foundation award for best sculpture under 45 at the Venice Biennale of 1958. In 1959 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
New York Times review (1954), quoted in James Scott and Claudia Milburn, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage (London: Lund Humphries, 2016), p. 40.
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