Modern British 2020

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.

Beth Schaefer Gallery, New York
Artcurial, Paris, 24 October 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.

‘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.

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private Collection (purchased from the above)

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, published by Rizzoli, no. 428

Frank Auerbach ‘Recent Work’ 13 January – 11 February, 1983, Cat No 31, Marlborough Fine Art, London

Auerbach met Juliet Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was working as a model at Sidcup College of Art. He began to paint her the following year, and continued to do so, at his studio in Camden, every Wednesday and Sunday, until 1997. As with all his repeated sitters, Auerbach developed an acute awareness of posture and mood:

I notice something when people first come and sit and think, they do things with their faces. It’s when they’ve become tired and stoical the essential head becomes clearer. They become more themselves as they become tired. ₁

JYM was an ideal sitter, capable of holding poses for long periods of time. At first Auerbach painted her without identification in his titles, although she is distinguishable from his previous frequent subject, Stella West (EOW). A characteristic pose shows JYM seated, her head against the back of the chair or supported by linked hands. As Robert Hughes notes, she always returns the artist’s gaze, and ‘there is a look – head cocked back, sometimes seen a little from below, a bit quizzical, sometimes challenging – that makes [her portraits] quite recognizable as a series’. ₂

Auerbach’s drawings evolve and assume their final form across weeks of sittings. A day’s work may be scrubbed back, the following morning, to leave an accumulated deposit of charcoal. In some cases the paper wears perilously thin and needs to be patched. The finished drawing represents the last sitting, the most recent thoughts, yet Auerbach feels compelled to retain the accumulated traces as part of a process of securing the image within its own space and atmosphere. ₃

Head of JYM III gazes partially downwards. There is a weight and solidity that derives from the density of charcoal, implying the settled mass of the sitter, at ease, one shoulder higher than the other. The volume of her head is registered through its eye sockets, cheekbones and chin. Through these we gain an intuition of its totality, and how it might feel to follow the head round, past its visible limits.

₁ William Feaver, Frank Auerbach (Rizzoli, 2009), p. 20.

₂ Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 80.

₃ Feaver, Frank Auerbach, p. 19.

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 Valentine, 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).

The Artist
Landau Fine Art
Private collection UK

Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, p.142, published by Lund Humphries, no. 217

Other casts: 
The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, NY
The family of the artist
The Royal Academy, London

Among the series of dancing couples Chadwick created, from 1954 onwards, Teddy Boy and Girl proved the most provocative. The very act of plucking a title from popular culture seemed  calculated to raise critics’ hackles – a ‘catchpenny’ trick as guileful as a song’s refrain. For Chadwick it reflected both the playfulness often evident in his sculpture and a narrowing of the distance between art and reality: a confrontation that proved increasingly fertile. Such clashes could be merely allusive – in titles such as Later Alligator or Moon of Alabama – or, as in the case of Teddy Boy and Girl, point to imagery derived fundamentally from contemporary visual culture.

Chadwick’s first solo exhibition in the United States took place in April 1957 at New York’s Saidenberg Gallery. The timing, less than a year after Chadwick’s prizewinning contribution to the Venice Biennale, left scant time to create a completely new body of work. Thus it is unsurprising that many of the sculptures were variations on existing themes: continuations of the Bird, Wigwam, Conjunction, Dance, and Teddy Boy and Girl series. 

Although clearly recognisable in terms of its generic subject, Teddy Boy and Girl II (1957) differs significantly from the version exhibited at Venice. Its silhouette is less angular, its clothing less crisp – in short, it is less stylised and altogether more human. By reducing the male’s head (previously two formidable spikes) and lengthening its raised arms, Chadwick transforms the mood to gaiety. The theme is continued in the sculpture’s crumpled surfaces and less severely tailored outfits. Still stylish, the composition suggests a joyous abandon to the music.

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.

The Artist
Louis Nossel, USA (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, USA (c. 1990’s)
Osborne Samuel, London

D. Farr & E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 1947-2003 , Farnham, 2014, p.340, 801s (another cast)

Tokyo, Ueda Gallery, Lynn Chadwick , April 1983 (another cast)

Chadwick’s sculptures seldom appear completely still. From his apprenticeship of making mobiles for exhibition stands, in the 1940s, he continued to devise works which oscillated or spun. Bullfrog (1951) is an early, saw-toothed example, Ace of Diamonds II (1986–96) a late geometrization. Between these extremes are Chadwick’s figures: static in reality, but never quite so. Viewers with any imagination will notice that they have frozen only momentarily, and that once our backs turn, their interrupted activity will be resumed.

The degree and nature of this implied movement varies across Chadwick’s career. In the 1950s, beasts appear to lunge or strain menacingly, birds to tense before seizing their prey. Figures engage in pairs, dancing, conversing, eyeing one another. As singles or in groups they appear to watch, although this is never a passive occupation. While at first these figures existed on their own terms, by the early 1970s they interacted with their surroundings. Couples walked. They lay or sat on blocks. Their robes, which were treated with increasing realism, were lifted by air currents or by the figures’ momentum.

Maquette III High Wind (1980) is a beautiful example of this development. The figure, shoulders back, inclines slightly forward, and as she walks, drapery presses close to her contours, before funnelling, filled and raised by the wind. We might think of it as a chaste Marilyn Monroe moment – the train of her cloak billowing upwards, playfully. Yet there is no sense of voyeurism. Borrowing from his Elektra figures, Chadwick renders the head as a polished facet, reflecting light and the viewer’s gaze. 

The Artist’s Estate
Osborne Samuel represent the Craxton Estate

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).

The Artist’s Estate
Osborne Samuel represent the Craxton Estate

Craxton’s early visits to Greece, and in particular his discovery of Crete in 1948, transformed his painting. The different quality of light was one factor, but equally significant was a new focus on the figure. He began to draw the shepherds, priests, sailors and children he encountered, both as portraits and as figures in the landscape. This development he saw as belonging to the spirit of his new surroundings, Mediterranean artists being ‘fundamentally interested in people’. 1

Craxton’s Mother and Child depicts an archetypal image with fresh insight. The palette is one he discovered in Greece: the particular shade of blue used as backdrop, the contrasting yellow of the mother’s dress, and the red or blue lines deployed to define form. Although clothing identifies the figures as twentieth-century, their frontality and flattened perspective draws from Byzantine mosaics Craxton saw and admired in Istanbul, Italy and Greece, encounters he described as ‘disruptive and strengthening’. 2

1. John Craxton in conversation with Simon Martin, Pallant House Gallery Magazine, No. 11 (2007).
2. Craxton, in ‘John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941–1966’ (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967), p. 10.

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, in 1992
Private Collection, Malaysia
Osborne Samuel, London

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 Number Three August 1970 intensify by virtue of their blurred edges. Amorphous forms – keyholes, seeking to enclose and subsume – float upon the colour ground: orange, greens and purple 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, London

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 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.

Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York
Private Collection, purchased from the above late 1960s
Private Collection, UK, since May 2010

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon , Andrew Ellis Publishing Ltd, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, cat. no.152, p.62
Toby Treves, Peter Lanyon: catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings and three-dimensional works (London: Modern Art Presss, 2018), cat. no. 494, p. 512, illustrated (colour) p. 513.

‘Paintings by Peter Lanyon’, Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York (30 January – 17 February 1962), cat. no. 10, illustrated (b&w) on the cover of the catalogue.
The cat. raisonne states that Cloud was not exhibited at San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 1963 (although Causey states that it was)

To know and understand landscape was the motivation that urged Lanyon onwards as a painter. Born in St Ives, he spent his youth painting the north coast of West Penwith, and in particular Porthmoina Cove, with its steep inlet and granite outcrop known as Battleship Rock. He sought always to encounter landscape as fully as possible. In a passage contrasting Ben Nicholson’s and Barbara Hepworth’s responses to Cornwall, Christopher Neve described how Lanyon ‘would lie on clifftops and concentrate on the sensations of pressing himself to the ground, seeing the clouds move, feeling the world turn, knowing that it was this that he wanted to brush widely into his paintings with such conviction that they could be recognizable as their elements to a mackerel or to a gull as to a man’. ₁

While the flight of birds sometimes registered in Lanyon’s paintings, it did not seem to enter his consciousness as a further way of experiencing landscape until the war. He tried to enlist as a pilot, but was rejected on health grounds, serving instead as an RAF flight mechanic. In 1944 he flew occasionally in transport aircraft, an experience he described to his sister as ‘getting into my blood’. ₂ Yet it was not until the summer of 1956 when, seeing three gliders circle over a cliff above him, he resolved to learn to fly.

The timing was fortuitous. Early In 1956 the Tate held an exhibition of ‘Modern Art in the United States’, which featured a room of paintings by the Abstract Expressionists: the first significant showing of their work in Britain. In the following year Lanyon’s first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York. Travelling there for the opening, Lanyon met Mark Rothko, who subsequently visited him in Cornwall. He was deeply struck by Rothko’s work, and it seems likely that the impact of Abstract Expressionism encouraged a freer approach to painting. Thus it was that when Lanyon finally enrolled with the Cornish Gliding Club, in 1959, his painterly language was developing in tandem to express the new experience.  

The sensation of gliding is different from powered flight. It makes the pilot acutely conscious of weather and air currents, as every change is transmitted through the body of the glider as a jolt or shudder. Scanning the landscape, the pilot watches for features that will affect flight: clouds, cliffs, dark or light patches on the ground. In November 1960, Lanyon described gliding as ‘more sensual than I had guessed. The air is a very definite world of activity as complex and demanding as the sea.’₃ It was also a realm of danger, although as Lanyon explained,

Without this urgency of the cliff-face, or of the air which I meet alone, I am impotent. I think this is why I paint the weather and high places and the places where solids and fluids meet. The junction of sea and cliff, wind and cliff, the human body and places all contribute to this concern. ₄

Cloud (1961) is painted thickly, in several layers, such that the weave of the canvas scarcely remains visible. Muted tones, loose brushstrokes and the painting’s expansive scale suggest the immense, enfolding nature of the subject. In his search for new perspectives on landscape, Lanyon was drawn to the paintings of Turner and Constable, in particular Constable’s cloud studies, where he perceived ‘man taking part in the play himself and not as spectator … anticipating twentieth-century journeys into space’. ₅ Gliding allowed Lanyon the same interaction with the subject, such that Cloud is depicted from within, its contrasts of white and petrol-blue invoking upcurrents and intimations of turbulence: premonitions of rising or plummeting. Lanyon’s approach to creating these new glider paintings was captured in a review by Lawrence Alloway in October 1960:

Soft and amorphous veils of colour are a painterly code for the ways in which light models insubstantial cloud layers or catches the movement of tides and winds in water seen from above. … His method of painting, pulling a loaded brush until the paint thins out atmospherically or curving the brush so that one edge is softer than the other, is highly gestural, but charged with a kind of meteorological sensitivity. ₆

Such weather paintings, anticipated before Lanyon had taken up gliding, were now imbued with a fresh response to light and space. Cloud registers a crystallised moment – an internalisation of sight, sound and sensation – before the experience dissolves and is replaced.

₁ Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in Twentieth-Century English Painting (London: Faber, 1990), p. 133.
₂ Lanyon, letter to Mary Schofield (30 March 1944), quoted in Toby Treves and Barnaby Wright (eds), Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings (London: The Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015), p. 15.
₃ Lanyon, letter to Martin Butlin (28 November 1960), quoted in Soaring Flight, p. 44. Lanyon was describing Thermal (1960), now in the Tate collection.
₄ Lanyon, ‘A Sense of Place, Notes on My Painting in General’, The Painter and Sculptor, Vol. V, No. 2 (Autumn 1962), p. 3–4.
₅ Lanyon, ‘An illustrated Slide Lecture on English Landscape’ (1964), quoted in Soaring Flight, p. 87.
₆ Lawrence Alloway, ‘Light Waves’, review of exhibition at Gimpel Fils, Weekly Post (29 October 1960), quoted in Soaring Flight, p. 114.

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

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

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, and theatre design. Notable projects 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. The present drawing is an illustration for Alain-Fournier’s “The Wanderer,” part III, chapter I.

George 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 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.

The artist’s family
Osborne Samuel, London

Illustrated Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)

Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)
Crane Kalman Gallery, London (1986)
Gillian Jason Gallery, London (1990)
Bridge Gallery, Dublin (1997)
Penwith Gallery, St Ives (1996)

The context of St Ives, where Denis Mitchell lived from 1930 until the late 1960s, was critical to his creative development. Trained as a painter, he undertook piecemeal employment as his young family grew, working as a market gardener, fisherman and tin miner. In 1949 he became principal assistant to Barbara Hepworth, and that same year he carved the work he regarded as his first sculpture. Ballet Dancer, which was admired by Ben Nicholson, abstracts gently from the human form, rendering it as two stacked rhomboids, pierced to indicate the dancer’s angled legs and raised arms. From some angles a body is clearly discernible, but as it turns, the outline dissolves into abstraction, to become an exquisitely balanced combination of forms.

In 1952 Mitchell’s work was exhibited in ‘The Mirror and the Square’, at the New Burlington Galleries in London, alongside sculpture by Hepworth, Chadwick and Caro. The exhibition aimed to explore the urgent issues of realism versus abstraction, although its extent and diversity proved too great for most to draw any firm conclusions. Yet Mitchell’s adherence to abstraction was already clear. During his ten years as Hepworth’s principal assistant, he would hone his instinct for carving and the purity of form, exploring the abstract implications of enfolding, modular or asymmetrical structures, even when his titles implied figurative origins.

When Mitchell turned to bronze in the 1960s, by necessity using a local sand-casting foundry at St Just, he brought a remarkable degree of sophistication to the process, filing and polishing the somewhat rough casts to create sculptures that were both elegant and aesthetically unified. Patrick Heron, in his introduction to Mitchell’s exhibition at the Marjorie Parr Gallery in 1969, wrote,

… a Mitchell is a form, usually a single, rather streamlined form, enclosed as it were by a single skin … In such art, intuition and intellect are always inextricably locked. ₁

Roseveor (1985), a woodcarving, exemplifies this premise. The split monolith appeared as a formal device in Mitchell’s work in the early 1960s, around the same time that John Hoskin (like Mitchell, a one-time member of the artists’ cricket team at St Ives) was also exploring its form. Hoskin used welded steel to create a series of linear split columns. Mitchell, essentially a carver, created volumetric forms which curve and taper, ‘conceived’, as Heron recalled, ‘under the maker’s hand’. ₂

Mitchell had worked with assistants since the early 1960s, among them Breon O’Casey. By the mid-1980s his assistant was Tommy Rowe, like Mitchell a fisherman, a sculptor and former assistant to Hepworth. Mitchell returned to earlier sketchbooks for ideas, choosing those he now felt he could alter and perhaps improve. Roseveor thus relates to Argos (1974), as well as to Boscawen (1962), sculptures with an upright form and a characteristic ‘U’ or ‘V’ shape. Detecting in Mitchell’s sculpture an affinity with Nicholson, whose white reliefs were carved from a single piece of wood, then meticulously painted in coat after coat of Ripolin paint (‘always getting to the heart of things with practicalities’), O’Casey nonetheless discerned the greater influence of painters such as John Wells or Roger Hilton:

There is a shape of Roger Hilton’s, a large lump with two uneven horns, that you can see, for example in [Mitchell’s] Geevor, or Talland. ₃

Mitchell seldom used yew for his carvings, the only other known instance being Torso, dating from 1951. Yew possesses a characteristic warmth, orange-brown to purple in colour, with a natural lustre and pronounced grain that can be seen clearly in Roseveor. Consummately carved, Roseveor also evokes a primal quality, redolent of the non-western carvings Mitchell admired and collected.

₁ Patrick Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’, exhibition catalogue (London: Marjorie Parr Gallery, 1969).
₂ Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’.
₃ Breon O’Casey, in Denis Mitchell and Friends, exhibition catalogue (Dublin: The Bridge Gallery, 1997), p. 11.

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, 15 May 1986, lot 181.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner
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.

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.

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.

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 
Private Collection, Australia, 1980’s
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculptures and Drawings, Sculpture 1980-86, Volume 6 , Lund Humphries, London, 1999, cat.no.791
John Hedgecoe, The Sculpture of Henry Moore , published by Collins & Brown, 1998, no. 669, p. 242

“From very early on I have had an obsession with the Mother and Child theme. It has been a universal theme from the beginning of time and some of the earliest sculptures we’ve found from the Neolithic Age are of a Mother and Child. I discovered, when drawing, I could turn every little scribble, blot or smudge into a Mother and Child.” ₁

Moore’s words, well known as they are, still prompt thought. As a young artist in the 1920s, he spent hours studying the collections of the British Museum in London and Musée de l’Homme in Paris. His drawings make clear the impact of these discoveries as well the agility with which he was able to transform his themes: moulding, caressing, even on occasions harrying his material. What emerges is one of the most profound studies, in the twentieth century, of a single subject: the mother and child.

A cursory selection, from across Moore’s career, demonstrates this breadth. A heavy-set, somewhat foursquare Mother and Child (1924–5), carved from green Hornton stone, contrasts with a translucent alabaster Suckling Child (1930), which tenderly fragments and abstracts from the human form. From the next decades we might choose Moore’s serenely Northampton Madonna and Child (1943–4), a Mother and Child (1952) in which a ravenous-beaked child is restrained at arm’s length, and the tiny, almost toy-like Mother and Child: Wheels (1962). If the 1960s proved relatively sparse, the 1970s saw a regathering of momentum as well as a scattering of Moore’s approach: from sculptural picture frames, reliefs and egg forms to homages – recalling Pisano, Rubens, ‘Paleo’ and the ‘Gothic’.

The distinction between the ‘mother and child’ and ‘Madonna and Child’ is significant. When Moore was approached to create the Northampton Madonna and Child (1943–4), he was initially hesitant as to whether he could produce a religious rather than secular work of art:

It’s not easy to describe in words what this difference is, except by saying in general terms that the ‘Madonna and Child’ should have an austerity and a nobility, and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday ‘Mother and Child’ idea.₂    

Exploring the idea, Moore produced a series of maquettes. The proposed context and medium required a certain solemnity, reflected, in the chosen version, by the weight of drapery around the Madonna’s knees, and the breadth of her capacious lap, as she shelters the child. As Moore wrote, ‘I have tried to give a sense of complete easiness and repose, as though the Madonna could stay in that position for ever (as, being in stone, she will have to do)’. ₃

Such immobility provides a useful measure against which to compare studies of the mother and child unconnected to a religious context. Perhaps the greatest change, as Moore moved from the 1970s into the 1980s, would be an increased sense of intimacy and domesticity. Neither mother nor child is required to remain still. A child scrambles over its mother’s reclining figure, or balances on her knees, arms reaching towards her breast. In the drawings, Moore depicts the mother from behind, gently rocking the child, as it turns, or rests its head on her shoulder. These are informal poses, for which the most obvious precedent is Moore’s series of rocking chair sculptures, from the late 1940s to 1950.

Maquette for Curved Mother and Child (1980) continues this rocking theme. The mother’s body tilts as she cradles and rocks the child, such that her arms and the child’s outstretched limbs intertwine. The mother’s legs are cocooned in a closely fitting dress, emphasising the counterbalancing twist of her torso. A similar curve characterises the form of Seated Mother and Child: Thin (1980), where the child is supported upright on the mother’s hip. In Maquette for Curved Mother and Child, however, the arc is present in every aspect of its composition: from the mother’s neck to her spine and legs – even the child’s loose-limbed body – each element twisting in a slightly different direction. Moore’s maquette was enlarged in 1983, gaining in stylization if perhaps losing the immediacy of this diminutive version.

Moore acknowledged the impact that life may exert on an artist’s work, and how the birth of his daughter, in 1946, ‘re-invoked’ for him the mother and child theme. ₄ If this is the case, the fresh approach of the later works may indeed have resulted from the birth of his grandchild, in 1977. Maquette for Curved Mother and Child captures a joyous, carefree moment, witnessed as if at close hand.

₁ Moore, in Henry Spencer Moore, photographed and edited by John Hedgecoe (London: Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 213.
₂ Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 267.
₃ Ibid.
₄ See Moore, in Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, p. 66.

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

Thomas Agnews & Sons Ltd (No.38900)
Arthur Jeffress (Pictures), London
Mrs Digby Morton (purchased from the above)
Hence by decent.

With the Aurthur Jeffress (Pictures) original label on verso and that of Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd (No 38900)

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.

Private Collection, UK

Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan (Farnham: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012), p. 87, illustrated p. 88.

Olympia, London, 2002, # 248

Keith Vaughan was only twenty when he set up a darkroom in his family home to develop his own photographs. His subject would remain, principally, the male figure. The darkroom doubled as a studio where he could photograph models, but he also took many reels on Pagham beach, in Sussex, against a backdrop of shingle, tangled nets and the weathered hulls of boats. ₁ In these the figures are often silhouetted, their torsos braced, stretched or turning; at other times they are loose-limbed, sunbathing or playful. Vaughan acknowledged that these forms provided source material for his paintings without needing to consult them. The imagery, once rooted in his subconscious, ‘just emerged when called’. ₂

These photographs were both coded and covert, in that for many years they were little known. For Vaughan, photography granted a freedom he lacked in everyday life – justifying and legitimising a studied observation of the male figure. The resulting compositions draw their strength from a knowledge of how light could enhance the structure of the figure. When Vaughan developed the ideas as drawings, he abstracted and simplified, while retaining the sharply defined musculature, leanness and angularity of the originals. One example, a pencil Study of Two Figures (1948), bought by Peter Pears, was later used as a cover for Vaughan’s Journals. ₃

Comparing this drawing and Landscape with Nude Bathers (1948), it is easy to see that they originate from similar source material. The drawing shows two nude figures with a tree, one half-turned, the other facing forward. Neither figure is complete, suggesting a cropped or closely focused photograph. In the painting, the basic composition is identical – two figures and a tree – yet the right-hand figure is slightly distanced and thus shown more completely. Intriguingly, for a ‘nude’, it is also, quite visibly, clothed. Useful comparison perhaps ends there. The drawing, almost exactly half the size of the painting, is executed with a bounding, energetic line and dense hatching specific to its medium.

Through colour, and through a volumetric, almost sculptural approach, Landscape with Nude Bathers takes the subject in a different direction. It is clear, from a statement written contemporaneously, that the relationship of figure to landscape preoccupied Vaughan:

The articulation of the arm-joint in the shoulder is the articulation of the branch in the tree-trunk, and the folds of the shirt round the arm pit are the folds of the bark around the tree joint. Hands are like leaves. The taut, tight curve of the spine is only warmed and more human than the curve of the tree trunk. Each part of the one is interchangeable with the other, yet the harmony is achieved without losing a shred of separate identities, the one a human being, the other a tree in the garden. ₄

This description relates pertinently to Landscape with Nude Bathers, pointing attention to the green of the left-hand figure’s spine which echoes the tree trunk. Hands may not be leaves, yet they grasp the tree’s limbs. Each figure interacts closely with the tree, the right-hand figure’s legs pressed so closely against the trunk as to join it. The conjunction was noted by John Berger in 1951, when he wrote of Vaughan, ‘the vulnerability of his figures (their nakedness is like trees stripped of their bark) is poetically compelling’. ₅

The palette of Landscape with Nude Bathers painting unites its figures with the landscape, in a soft green, blue, and ochre totality, as colour migrates from flesh to water to bark. Although the effect is quiet, a charged atmosphere pervades the scene. The tree provides a cruciform structure, offset by a blue-grey reverberation suggesting cloud, hill or headland. Reinforcing this is a vector from left to right, in the downward stroke of the branch and the imagined gaze from figure to figure, which pinions and exhilarates the landscape. Only the clothed figure’s gaze is overt, returning us to the beach at Pagham, and what might be witnessed – and recalled – through the lens of the camera.

₁ Philip Wright, ‘Keith Vaughan: the Pagham photographs’, in Keith Vaughan: On Pagham Beach, Photographs and Collages from the 1930s (London: Austin / Desmond Fine Art, 2017), p. 8.
₂ Vaughan, quoted in ‘John Ball in Conversation with Nicholas Goodison’, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings (London: Osborne Samuel, 2007), p. 12.
₃ Keith Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, ed. Alan Ross (London: John Murray, 1989).
₄ Keith Vaughan, ‘Statement’ (c. 1948), in Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work (London: Constable & Co., 1990), p. 143.
₅ John Berger, New Statesman (10 November 1951), quoted in Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan (Farnham: Lund Humphries, in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012), p. 88.

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.