Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain

Kenneth Armitage, Francis Bacon, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Prunella Clough, Elisabeth Frink, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Reynolds, Graham Sutherland, William Turnbull

Marlborough Fine Art London is delighted to present Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain. The exhibition showcases works by the ‘geometry of fear’ group of post-war sculptors who were influenced by trail-blazing artists such as Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti.

In 1952, art critic Herbert Read curated the British Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture, the exhibition introduced a group of young British sculptors to an international audience. Those on show included Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002), Reg Butler (1913-1981), Lynn Chadwick (1914- 2003), Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014), Bernard Meadows (1915-2005), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and William Turnbull (1922-2012). Read coined the term ‘geometry of fear’ to describe their new angular and metallic style of sculpture:

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’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

Splintering and adrift, human and inhuman, these ambiguous forms were emblematic of a period that precariously straddled the horror of the past and promise of the future.

This turn away from the direct hand-carved sculpture popularised by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth towards a more raw approach owes much to the influence of French sculptor Germaine Richier. 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.

In 1950, Reg Butler exhibited with Germaine Richier in London-Paris: New Trends in Painting and Sculpture at the ICA, London. Butler’s sculptures depict the human form as fragmented or on the precipice of metamorphosis.

While Butler’s participation in the 1952 Venice Biennale marked his introduction to the international stage, his reputation was cemented the following year when he won the prize for The Unknown Political Prisoner. Likewise, Lynn Chadwick was subsequently selected as the lead sculptor at the 1956 Venice Biennale where he won the grand prize for sculpture, becoming the youngest ever winner.

While the distorted human figure became a prominent motif for many of the artists associated with the ‘geometry of fear’ group, for others, like Bernard Meadows, it was animal imagery that resonated most with the collective societal trauma of the war. Visceral depictions of birds and crabs acted as vehicles to express human emotion.

A student of Meadows, Elisabeth Frink’s (1930- 1993) sculptures are similarly informed by her experience of war and its reflection on humanity. Frink’s warrior figures display a fragile ‘hyper-masculinity’, whose violent proclivities are juxtaposed with an uneasy vulnerability.

The ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors were shown at the Biennale alongside the paintings of Graham Sutherland (1903-1980). Although he was a generation older, his hybrid angular forms resonated strongly with the sculptures on display. While Sutherland’s inspiration stemmed from the natural world, Prunella Clough (1919-1999) depicted post-war industrialism as Britain began to recover and rebuild from the shadow of war.

Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain emphasises 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.