Sculpture in Post-War Britain

Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain, at Marlborough Fine Art.

The exhibition explores the international impact of a group of young sculptors and artists who merged past trauma, present anxieties and future hopes into a new visual language. They were influenced by trail-blazing artists such as Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti.

Britain emerged from the shadow of WWII unequivocally altered, shaken by the collective trauma the Western world had endured while new adversaries were beginning as tensions grew between the US and the Soviet Union. Amid the harrowing memories of war and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, a young generation of sculptors sought to capture the post-war sensibility.

In 1952, art critic Herbert Read curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture, the exhibition introduced a group of young British sculptors to an international audience. The sculptors included Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Georffrey Clarke, William Turnbull, Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Paolozzi. Read coined the term 'geometry of fear' to describe the rough, sharp and twisted shapes of their works:

'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', or excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear'.

Splintering and adrift, human and inhuman, the ambiguous forms of their works articulated a new visual language, emblematic of a period that precariously straddled the horror of the past and promise of the future. The same year, Elisabeth Frink held her first solo show at London't Beaux Arts Gallery. Frink's warrior figures display a fragile 'hyper-masculinity', whose violent proclivities are juxaposed with an uneasy vulnerability.

This turn away from the smooth, monumental forms of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth owes much to the influence of Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti. Richier had staged her first London show at the Anglo-French Art Centre five years prior to the group's showing at the Venice Biennale. Her deformed, animal-hybrid figures resonated strongly with young British sculptors.

Kenneth Armitage,  Seated Woman with Square Head, 1955 

Elisabeth Frink, Warrior, 1963, (bronze)

Geoffrey Clarke, Figure, 1952, (welded iron)

William Turnbull, Fin, 1957, (bronze)

Reg Butler, Dream Machine, 1962, (pencil on paper)

Graham Sutherland, Organic Form, 1948, (coloured crayon on paper)

Graham Sutherland, Study for Horned Forms, 1960, (gouache and black chalk on paper)

Graham Sutherland, Tree Form at Convergence of Paths, 1945, (watercolour and crayon on paper)

Reg Butler, Macaw's Head, 1960-62, (bronze)

Bernard Meadows, Large 'Jesus' Crab (Lager Spider Crab), 1952-54, (bronze)

Kenneth Armitage, Untitled, 1958, (gouache and charcoal on paper)

Kenneth Armitage, Linked Figures, 1949, (bronze)

Geoffrey Clark, Effigy, 1951, (iron)

Geoffrey Clarke, Head (Found object), 1953, (iron on aluminium)

Reg Butler, Study for Sculpture - St Catherine, 1953, (shell bronze and wire)

Kenneth Armitage, Sprawling Woman, 1957, (bronze)

Reg Butler, Tcheekle (The Tower that Grows in the Night), 1960-62, (bronze)

Alan Reynolds, The Village Fair, 1952, (oil on board)

Reg Butler, Figure in Space, 1958-59, (bronze)

Alan Reynolds, January Landscape, 1952-53, (oil on board)

Reg Butler, Study for Third Warcher, 1954, (bronze)

Prunella Clough, Man with Printing Press, 1953, (oil on canvas)

Prunella Clough, Factory Interior (Wool Carding Shop), 1954, (oil on canvas)

Reg Butler, Manipulator, 1954-56, (shell bronze)

Eduardo Paolozzi, Untitled, 1953, (ink on paper)

Eduardo Paolozzi, Drawing for Sculpture, Head 1, 1954, (Indian ink and watercolour on paper)

Reg Butler, Rosamind Julius, 1951-52, (shell bronze)

 

Old Milverton

A walk up to Old Milverton

soon the ruin of Guy's Cliff House comes into view

St James' churchyard 

the extension of the graveyard

bluebells

I love that church spire

downhill now. All the planting this year is the new short wheat

over the bridge

the pond

the bridge that stands over 

the weir

and leads to the Saxon Mill, the pub

I crossed the bridge

it was still early, and the pub was empty - only walkers about

nice views of the river from here

there's always a swan's nest at this time of year here

the pub

is a great place to come for a drink or a meal and sitting outside in the summer is an added bonus

I walked to the front of the building 

then the back

and then continued on my way

past the ruins of Guy's Cliff House

along the river and eventually ended up where I had started from.

Anatomy lessons

Anatomy lessons at the Royal Academy of Arts.

As we were wandering around the RA during our last visit, we came across the ecorche figures below which were used by students who studied anatomy. Ecorche figures served as teaching aids for both artists and medical students. So they could be studied, dead bodies had their skin removed to reveal their muscles before being cast in plaster. The result is these figures we came across.

 

Anatomical Crucifixion (James Legg), 1801

This striking ecorche figure was made to settle an artistic debate. Sculptor Thomas Banks and painters Benjamin West and Richard Cosway believed that most artists' depictions did not accurately demonstrate the effects of crucifixion. To prove their point, they obtained a corpse fresh from the gallows and nailed it to a cross while it was still warm. Once rigor mortis set in, a surgeon removed the skin and Banks made this plaster cast from the flayed body. 

The body was that of James Legg, a Chelsea pensioner who shot one of his colleagues dead after an argument. Despite being in his seventies and possibly suffering from dementia, Legg was sentenced to be hanged and afterwards 'anatomised'.

Cast from an original by Agostino Carlini, Smugglerius, 1834

A young RA student, John Deare, recalled that he saw a man hanged and 'being a fine subject, they took him to the Royal Academy, and covered him with plaster'. From this mould, a cast was made. 'Smugglerius', the Academy's mock-Latin nickname for the figure, refers to the belief that the man had been a smuggler. The pose is taken from that of the Dying Gaul, an ancient Roman sculpture.

William Hunter, Standing polychrome ecorche, 1771

William Hunter, the Academy's first professor of anatomy made this ecorche figure from the corpse of Solomon Porter, a burglar turned murdered who was executed in 1771. Skin was removed from the corpse, which was then set in a pose and cast in plaster. The naturalistic paintwork and areas of deep dissection produce a powerful, if gruesome, effect.

A student at the RA Schools noted that Hunter needed 'the body fresh to cast a plaster anatomical figure from it'.

It has recently been found that Hunter removed the penis of the figure to keep as a scientific specimen for his collection. It remains in the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.