Osborne Samuel have for many years been closely associated with the work of Lynn Chadwick and have held exhibitions at galleries and museums in the UK and Internationally. We have also published many catalogues and books on the artist, working in conjunction with the Lynn Chadwick Estate.
Winning the International Prize for Sculpture at the 1956 Venice Biennale, when it was expected to go to Giacometti (who eventually won it in 1962), was a remarkable achievement for a sculptor who, like Butler, was ‘self-taught’ and had had an exhibiting career of scarcely a single decade. But in truth Chadwick had had a wish to become an artist from the early 1930’s, but had been persuaded by his father to pursue furniture and textile design and architectural draughtmanship in the Depression years. After war service as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, he resumed working with a design firm and began to make mobiles for trade shows in wood, perspex and aluminium. Enrolling on a welding course with the British Oxygen Company (as Butler would also do) in 1950 assisted him in producing two signal and substantial mobiles in 1951, ’Dragonfly’ and ‘Fisheater’, amongst others. In essence these demonstrated his difference from, and his different pathway to, mobile sculpture compared with that of Alexander Calder, to whom Chadwick’s work of this period has often been misleadingly compared.
While Calder usually hand-cut rounded and oval painted shapes, and spaced them out in evocative patterns on simple wire frameworks, Chadwick’s geometric, interlocking shapes appeared to be cut from a single sheet and, in the 1951 mobiles, anchored by an elaborate, rigid, constructed framework of iron rods, suggestive of the insect or marine form of its title. In the following year, developing this constructed framework of forged and welded rods brought his sculpture down to earth on poised, skeletal legs, foreshadowing the future character of his work. ‘Diamond Lil’ and the several variants of the large ‘Inner Eye’ that would be purchased by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, introduced quasi-modelled iron sheets sheltering a solid glass fragment held in the claws of iron rods. In this brief phase Chadwick could be said to come closest to Read’s ‘geometry of fear’, these works suggesting the remains of a delicate living thing which had been incinerated down to its bare bone structure, revealing a mysterious diamond-hard transparent core, whose very origin and function were unknowable. ... read more
Osborne Samuel have for many years been closely associated with the work of Lynn Chadwick and have held exhibitions at galleries and museums in the UK and Internationally. We have also published many catalogues and books on the artist, working in conjunction with the Lynn Chadwick Estate.
Winning the International Prize for Sculpture at the 1956 Venice Biennale, when it was expected to go to Giacometti (who eventually won it in 1962), was a remarkable achievement for a sculptor who, like Butler, was ‘self-taught’ and had had an exhibiting career of scarcely a single decade. But in truth Chadwick had had a wish to become an artist from the early 1930’s, but had been persuaded by his father to pursue furniture and textile design and architectural draughtmanship in the Depression years. After war service as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, he resumed working with a design firm and began to make mobiles for trade shows in wood, perspex and aluminium. Enrolling on a welding course with the British Oxygen Company (as Butler would also do) in 1950 assisted him in producing two signal and substantial mobiles in 1951, ’Dragonfly’ and ‘Fisheater’, amongst others. In essence these demonstrated his difference from, and his different pathway to, mobile sculpture compared with that of Alexander Calder, to whom Chadwick’s work of this period has often been misleadingly compared.
While Calder usually hand-cut rounded and oval painted shapes, and spaced them out in evocative patterns on simple wire frameworks, Chadwick’s geometric, interlocking shapes appeared to be cut from a single sheet and, in the 1951 mobiles, anchored by an elaborate, rigid, constructed framework of iron rods, suggestive of the insect or marine form of its title. In the following year, developing this constructed framework of forged and welded rods brought his sculpture down to earth on poised, skeletal legs, foreshadowing the future character of his work. ‘Diamond Lil’ and the several variants of the large ‘Inner Eye’ that would be purchased by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, introduced quasi-modelled iron sheets sheltering a solid glass fragment held in the claws of iron rods. In this brief phase Chadwick could be said to come closest to Read’s ‘geometry of fear’, these works suggesting the remains of a delicate living thing which had been incinerated down to its bare bone structure, revealing a mysterious diamond-hard transparent core, whose very origin and function were unknowable.
Sculptures on a structure of iron rods, lifted off the ground by thin supports that seemed to defy gravity and risk toppling over, were the antithesis, and in a sense a riposte to, the groundedness of Moore’s weighty reclining figures and the smooth carved surfaces of Hepworth’s resting abstract forms. The next step for Chadwick would be to give more body to these exposed structures, at first with cut and shaped iron sheets, but eventually with a new sculptural material that he had discovered: a mixture of powdered iron and cement called Stolit which, when mixed with water, hardened to the strength of bronze. Chadwick explained how welding the rods provided the basis for the work that triumphed at Venice: ‘The actual technique acted as a guide, and gave its character to the work …. I do not analyse my work intellectually. When I start to work I wait until I feel what I want to do, and I know how I’m doing by the presence or lack of a rhythmic impulse. I think that the attempt to analyse the ability to draw ideas from their subconscious source would almost certainly interfere with that ability’. Early work in this new phase still held echoes of insect or bird behaviour – parading, pecking, flaunting – which remnants would occasionally reappear as features in subjects such as the ‘Winged Figures’. ‘Dancers’ and ‘Teddy Boy and Girl’, the former with its counterpoint movement, the latter with the upright confidence of cheeky parading, suggested an insight into the parallels of human and animal behavior underlined, too, by the sexual suggestion of a work such as ‘Conjunction’.
‘Teddy Boy and Girl’ and similar vertical figure groups shared with some of Chadwick’s contemporaries the miniaturization of the head – in effect a counterbalance to the reduction of the lower limbs into points. But as his figures spread out with wings in the ‘Strangers’ and ‘Watchers’ series, the suggestion of an unfamiliar or even hostile presence seemed to need the identity of a purposeful figure with sentience who would fulfill the role of intruding or observing. These figures acquired heads as heavy and strong as their torsos, and were rendered immobile by the expedient of a pedestal. Were these figures a subconscious reflection of the Cold War atmosphere of spying and surveillance which came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis? Its eventual peaceful resolution coincided with a brief interlude when Chadwick turned to working with found iron elements welded into standing forms in his ‘Insider’ and ‘Indicator’ series. Owing to the imperfections he had detected with Stolit when exposed to the English weather over the longer term, in 1959 he began to have works cast in bronze. After the welded iron works, in 1963 he would return to bronze casting for the rest of his working life, with only rare forays to experiment with stainless steel, after the invitation he had once taken up to visit and make a work with the Italian steel company Italsider in 1962.
In 1995, he stopped working, claiming “There are only so many things to say and only so many ways to say them and I’ve done that now.”
Chadwick died at Lypiatt Park in 2003, the same year in which he was given a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain.
Osborne Samuel has curated exhibitions of Chadwick’s work for over 30 year.
His work is in the collections of MoMA in New York, the Tate in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
read less
Exhibition Catalogue 2019
