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.
Exhibition Catalogue
