LYNN CHADWICK IN MID-CAREER:

It is in the nature of Art, as of Life, that each succeeding generation rises to challenge the one before, and, just so, be challenged in its turn. The Young, after all, are always with us. But it does not follow that it is only the Young that count. For to test, and challenge, and react against, is not at all to supplant, and of course the Young too grow old. The mistake is only to forget that for artists, as for everyone else, a career is a thing of a lifetime, and that the work goes on, to be judged at length on its merits in the light of that whole career, early and late. We may be ever susceptible to youth and novelty, looking always to the rising star, the latest thing, while letting even a Rembrandt die in poverty and neglect, but the world still turns, and goes on turning. And what may have become suddenly unfashionable, or been forgotten entirely, will come round again too in its turn, back once more into the light to be celebrated at last just for what it is.

All this, if only in part, encapsulates Lynn Chadwick’s career, from first to last. It is not that he died in penurious obscurity exactly, for while, over many years, he had suffered in his critical reputation at home, it remained high, and he successful, abroad, and it was indeed beginning to enjoy a fairly robust recovery at home in his final years. And of course he had been spectacularly successful in his early career, one of that immediate post-war generation of sculptors that in the 1940s and 50s rose vigorously to question the by-then established modernist authority of Moore and Hepworth. Associated especially with such sculptors as Reg Butler, Geoffrey Clarke, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and Kenneth Armitage, his work in particular seemed epitomised in Herbert Read’s handily memorable epithet, plangent with post-war insecurity, as ‘the geometry of fear’.

But, Young British Artist in sort that he was at that time, he was not as young as all that. Born in 1914, he had toyed with qualifying as an architect before the War, and had then seen active service as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, flying principally against U-Boats in the long battle for the North Atlantic. In 1944 he returned to architecture for a while, but his interest then shifted more towards exhibition design and design in general. He had begun making mobiles and quasi-sculptural objects as early as 1946, as part of his work for Industrial and Trade Fairs, but it was not until 1949, when he was already 35, that he first showed his work, as sculpture as such, in a Fine Art context. He was almost immediately successful, taken up at once with major commissions for the Festival of Britain, and, by 1952 he was being shown by the British Council at the Venice Biennale, where four years later he would win the International Prize for Sculpture. By the end of the 1950s his was a truly international reputation.

But was the mood, if only the British critical mood, already changing? Goodness knows, the 1960s were to have their fearful moments too, with such things as Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and Vietnam alone more than enough to sustain the relevance of Read’s ‘iconography of despair’, his ‘collective guilt’, his ‘geometry of fear’. But then again, at the very turn of the decade, had we not all been told, on the highest authority, “we had never had it so good” ? Here now, in defiant spite of all, was suddenly a cooler mood, libidinous, hedonistic, ironical, self-indulgent. Were not those twisted wires and spikey totems, those ravening beasts and sinister figures of Chadwick and company, all fraught with abstracted anguish, now just a bit old-fashioned? Angst was out.

The critic, John Russell, writing of Chadwick in ‘Private View’ in 1965, says as much, remarking that “something in his work (had once) touched on an almost universal need”. However, so he goes on, “In his sculpture, that imagination seemed for a while to be blocked. Time and fashion did not deal kindly with his work. People tired of an idiom which, only a year or two before had carried everyone along with it. The man/ bird/ insect figure began to look rhetorical.” Only a year or two before indeed: how quickly times change.

But for the true artist, of course, fashion isn’t everything, indeed anything at all. Though dealers, critics and collectors may turn elsewhere, the artist has only to stay true to himself. And what we see here, at just this crisis, if crisis it was, is Chadwick doing just that, getting on with the work as he saw it. Russell too, with a defensive prescience, hedging his bet, half-concedes the point himself, even as he seems to damn him with his qualified praise. “The new pieces”, he concludes, “have a tough, spare, concise, concentrated quality which suggests that Chadwick in his fifties is anything but a spent force.”

Such as it was, any problem was rather the critic’s than the artist’s. And given the luxury of hindsight, where we can now see that Russell was quite wrong, caught up as he was in the short-term critical excitement of that mid-sixties, Pop-Art, Post-Painterly, post Beatles’ First LP moment, was in seeing Chadwick as having suffered over those previous few years some kind of ‘imaginative block’ at all. Though to the critic an artist’s work may seem no longer of the moment, trapped in and by its past, that is never necessarily to say there is no work at all. And Chadwick had certainly remained active enough throughout the period that Russell adumbrates, whatever doubts and insecurities he may have suffered by any adverse critical response to his work around that time. Over the ten years from 1956 to the end of 1965, the newly-published catalogue raisonne, by Dennis Farr and the artist’s widow, Eva Chadwick, lists some 335 works of all sizes, some welded but most cast in bronze from the metal-and-plaster working model. Making sculpture is a highly physical and labour-intensive process, and such a rate of production, consistently well into double figures year on year, hardly bespeaks doubt-ridden inactivity.

What Chadwick indeed was doing through all those years, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, was working steadily through the transitional phase in his work that would determine its entire subsequent course. All periods are transitional, of course, if any development is taking place in an artist’s work, but this in particular was to set the pattern and the imagery, and at last the scale, of the monumental work of his later years. It is this period of the artist’s mid-career, through his forties and into his fifties, which this small exhibition admirably illuminates.

It begins in 1956, with images still characteristic of the work by which Chadwick had first achieved his reputation, and all worked by an idiosyncratic technique of filling in a facetted metal structure with a cement or plaster compound before casting it in bronze – a ‘Beast’ and a ‘Fish’ in this case, abstracted and geometrical to a degree, fraught with spiky menace. Then there are the figures – here two paired, abstracted figures, of 1957, examples of a compositional device that had intrigued since at least 1953. Then come another beast, a ‘Bird’ grounded like a stealth bomber, a Winged Man maquette for the R4 Airship Memorial, both of 1958, and a large, totemic standing figure, the faceless, armless ‘Trigon’ of 1961.

For a work of art there is never an escape from the moment of its making, and these are all utterly, unmistakably of their time, vested still with that particular aesthetic of abstracted, threatening, despair, as highly-wrought in the making as metaphorical in the image – though their ‘fearful geometry’, it must be said, seems now imbued with less immediately circumstantial, more universal an authority. All stand as they must, not just for what and as they are, but for when they were. And yet, which here is the crucial point, they also stand as markers for all that is to come. For Chadwick would return, and return again, to every one of these themes and images – the paired figure, the totemic figure, the primal beast – even to the very end of his working career.

This mid-life snapshot shows it all. Here is the representational sculptor that in essence he always was, no matter how abstracted or stylised his reference. Even when apparently completely abstract, as here with the two small ‘Pyramids’ of 1965, the image would always bear at least some external reference or suggestion – formal, architectural, mechanical, metaphorical. But more to the point, we see, too, how, as the 1960s wore on, so the closer working of the surface, and the direct touch of the hand, though ever implicit, fall away, to leave instead a more impersonal material fact, and more ambiguous, hieratic and, above all, more monumental a human presence. Here the two small ‘Electra’ figures of 1969, with their denser bodies and polished faces, are what mark perhaps the moment when that balance shifted at last. As metaphorical in his work as he ever was, from now on, it would be not so much the human predicament, as the eternal mystery, that concerned him

William Packer

August 2006

Selected Exhibitions

Exhibitions which span more than one year appear only under the year in which they began. The month(s) for each exhibition is (are) given when known.

One-man and Two-man

1950
Gimpel Fils, London, June (14 mobiles)

1952
Gimpel Fils, London (with Roger Hilton), June (14 sculptures, 7 drawings)

1956
XXVIII Biennale, Venice (with Ivon Hitchens), June-October (19 sculptures, 21 drawings) and subsequently at:
-Wiener Secession, Vienna, November (20 sculptures, 12 drawings)
-Städtische Galerie, Munich, December 1956-January 1957 (no catalogue)
-Musée National d'art Moderne, Paris, February-March 1957 (no catalogue)
-Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March-May 1957 (27 sculptures, drawings)
-Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (without Hitchens), May-June 1957 (27 sculptures, 33 drawings)
-Arts Council Gallery, London (without Hitchens), July-August 1957 (26 sculptures, 29 drawings)

1957
Saidenberg Gallery New York, April-May (15 Sculptures)
Waddington Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec, September (sculpture and watercolour) (no catalogue)

1958
Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris, May (12 sculptures)

1959
Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, July (26 sculptures)
Galerie Daniel Cordier, Frankfurt, October-November (sculpture and drawings)

1960
Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover (with Kenneth Armitage), April-May (27 sculptures, 15 drawings) and subsequently at:
-Ulmer Museum, Ulm, May-June (no catalogue)
-Städtische Kunstmuseum, Duisburg, July-August (no catalogue)
-Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, August-September (no catalogue)
-Städtische Kunstsammlung, Nuremberg, October-November (no catalogue)
-Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, December 1960-January 1961 (no catalogue)
-Konstförening, Göteborg, January-February 1961 (21 sculptures)
-Svea-Galleriet, Stockholm, February-March 1961 (21 sculptures)
-College of Art Gallery, Gloucester (with John Piper), September-October (11 sculptures)

1961
M.Konedler, New York, January (20 sculptures)
Käthe-Kollwitz Gymnasium, Dortmund, May-June (no catalogue)
Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Lynn Chadwick, Merlyn Evans, VI Biennale de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna, September-December and subsequently at:
-Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (with William Scott and Merlyn Evans),
January-February 1962 (15 sculptures, 15 drawings)
-Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (with William Scott), April 1962 (15 sculptures, 10 drawings)
-Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, August 1962 (no catalogue)
-Instituto de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima, September-October 1962 (15 sculptures, 10 drawings)
-Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, November-December 1962 (no catalogue)
-Museo Nacional de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, January-February 1963 (no catalogue)

John Walter Gallery, Cheltenham, November (7 sculptures, 12 drawings, 3 lithographs)
Marlborough Fine Art, London, November-December (34 sculptures)

1962
Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Japan (with Kenneth Armitage), August-September

1963
Forum Galleries, Bristol, January-February (10 sculptures, drawings and lithographs)
Galleria Blu, Milan (with Kenneth Armitage), January (8 sculptures, 5 drawings)

1964
Galerie Wilhelm Grosshennig, Düsseldorf, May-June (22 sculptures)
Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Aalborg, Denmark, September-October (no catalogue)

1965
Knoedler Galleries, New York, April-May (no catalogue)

1966
Galerie Günther Franke, Munich, January-February (21 sculptures, drawings)
Marlborough New London Gallery, October-November (61 sculptures, 6 lithographs)
Galerie Wilhelm Grosshennig, Düsseldorf, October-November (19 sculptures, 12 drawings)

1968
Gallerie Gérald Cramer, Geneva, March (no catalogue)
Galerie D'Eendt, Amsterdam, November-December (no catalogue)
Galleria Blu, Milan, June (37 sculptures)
Theo Waddington Galleries, Montreal, Quebec (no catalogue)

1969
Gallerie Withofs, Brussels, October-November (36 sculptures)
Dorsky Gallery, New York, December 1969-January 1970 (no catalogue)

1970
Court Gallery, Copenhagen, May (31 sculptures, drawings)
Kunstpavillon, Esbjerg, June-July (no catalogue)
Gallerie d'Eendt, Amsterdam (with Kumi Sugaï), October
Holbaek Museum, Holbaek (with Lucebert), November (no catalogue)

1971
Galeria Wspólczesna, Warsaw, February-March (no catalogue)
Dorsky Gallery, New York (no catalogue)
Charlottenborgs Efterársudstilling, Copenhagen, September-October (24 sculptures)

1972
Galleria Blu, Milan, March-April (24 sculptures)
Galerie Zodiac, Geneva (no catalogue)
Gallery Moos, Toronto, Ontario, April-May (18 sculptures)
City Art Gallery, Gloucester, September-October (39 sculptures, drawings) and subsequently at:
-City Art Gallery, Plymouth, November-December
Waddington Galleries, Montreal, Quebec, September-October (no catalogue)

1974
Marlborough Fine Art, London, January-February (40 sculptures)
Jiyugaoka Gallery, Tokyo, May (no catalogue)
Marlborough Galerie, Zurich, July-August (no catalogue)
Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Rome, October-November (no catalogue)
Galerie Farber, Brussels, March-May (no catalogue)

1975
Galleria Toninelli, Milan, January (no catalogue)
Galerie Carlssen, Göteborg (no catalogue)
Arte Contacto Galeria de Arte, Caracas (in collaboration with Marlborough Gallery, New York), March (14 sculptures)
Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town (no catalogue)
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (no catalogue)
Marlborough Godard, Toronto, September (no catalogue)
Hokin Gallery, Chicago, November 1975-January 1976 (no catalogue)
Court Gallery, Copenhagen, December 1975-January 1976 (30 sculptures)

1976
Stroud Festival (no catalogue)
Galerie Farber, Brussels (with Victor Pasmore), November-December (sculpture, drawings and graphics)

1977
Arte Contacto Galeria de Arte, Caracas, May (20 sculptures)

1978
Burleighfield International Arts Centre, Loudwater, High Wycombe, Bucks. (with David Burnham), January-February (no catalogue)
Marlborough Fine Art, London, February-March (33 sculptures),
and subsequently at:
-Marlborough Galerie, Zurich, April-May
-Court Gallery, Copenhagen, June (41 sculptures)
-Galerie Nova Spectra, The Hague (with Roger Gillet), June (no catalogue)

1979
Galerie Ninety-nine, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, February (no catalogue)
Galerie Tytte Funch, Aalborg, Denmark, February (no catalogue)
Century Galleries, Henley-on-Thames, March (sculpture and drawings) (no catalogue)
Keys Gallery, Londonderry, March (31 sculptures), and subsequently at:
-David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, April
-Arts Council Gallery, Belfast, July-September
Stokefield House, Thornbury, Avon, April-May (no catalogue)
Galerie d'Eendt, Amsterdam, September (no catalogue)

1980
Galerie Regards, Paris, March-April (no catalogue)
Galerie Farber, Brussels (no catalogue)
Galerie Municipale d'Exposition, Saint-Priest (lent by Galerie Regards), May (no catalogue)
Fondation Veranneman, Kruishoutem, Belgium (with Karolus Lodenkämper), October-December
Theo Waddington Galleries, Toronto, Ontario, November-December (no catalogue)

1981
Theo Waddington, Montreal, Quebec, January-February (no catalogue)
Galeria Freites, Caracas, September (20 sculptures)

1982
Christie's Contemporary Art, New York (with Victor Pasmore), November (28 sculptures) (no catalogue)

1983
Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh, February-March (24 sculptures)
Gallery Ueda, Tokyo (with Victor Pasmore), April (12 sculptures)
Galerie Herbage, Cannes (no catalogue)
Artcurial, Paris, June-July (no catalogue)
Margaret Fisher, London, September (no catalogue)

1984
Theo Waddington, Montreal, Quebec, March-April (no catalogue)
Marlborough Fine Art, London, October-December (24 sculptures)

1985
Harmony Hall, Ocho Rios, Jamaica, February (no catalogue)
Galerie Ninety-nine, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida (with Dario Villalba), March (no catalogue)
Marlborough Gallery, New York, December (29 sculptures)

1986
Gallery Nii, Osaka, Japan, March-April (31 sculptures)
Galerie Aeblegaarden, Copenhagen (with Victor Pasmore)
British Embassy, sponsored by Christie's Contemporary Art, September (no catalogue)
Beaux Arts, Bath, September-October (23 sculptures)
Galleria Blu, Milan, November (20 sculptures)
Dennis Hotz Fine Art, Johannesburg, November-December (no catalogue)

1987
Erika Meyerovich Gallery, San Francisco, December 1987-February 1988 (24 sculptures)

1988
Galerie Ninety-nine, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, February (no catalogue)
Goldman-Kraft Gallery, Chicago, April-June (no catalogue)
Galeria Freites, Caracas, May (27 sculptures)
Waddington and Shiell, Toronto, Ontario, June-July
Galerie Nova-Spectra, The Hague, September-October

1989
Marlborough Fine Art, London, November 1989-January 1990 (15 sculptures)
Galerie Aeblegaarden, Copenhagen, January-February (14 sculptures)
Beaux Arts, Bath, April 1989 (15 sculptures)
Marlborough Gallery, London, November-January 1990 (16 sculptures)

1990
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Sofia Imber, Caracas, November-February 1991 (102 sculptures, 22 drawings, 10 lithographs)
Ann Jaffe Gallery, Bay Harbour Islands, Florida, February-March (no catalogue)

1991
Marlborough Gallery, New York, April (16 sculptures)
Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, Pennsylvania, May-July (30 sculptures) (no catalogue)
Galerie Am Lindenplatz, Liechtenstein, June-July (16 sculptures)
The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, April-May (68 sculptures, 22 drawings, 10 lithographs) and subsequently at:
-The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, June-July
-The Hakone Open Air Museum, August-September
-The Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto, September-October
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, September-February 1992 (61 sculptures)
From the Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art, State Museum, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (no catalogue)
Galeire Nii, Osaka, October (16 sculptures)

1992
Hong Kong Land Property Company, Rotunda Square, Hong Kong, January-February (17 sculptures)
Ann Jaffe Gallery, Bay Harbour Islands, Florida, January-February (no catalogue)
Gallery Universe, Tokyo, February (14 sculptures)
Galeria Blu, Milan, April-May (15 sculptures)
Galerie Marbeau, Paris, Autumn (15 sculptures)

1993
Galeria Freites, Caracas, January-February (26 sculptures)
Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, May-July (18 sculptures, 4 drawings)
Millfield School, Street, Summer (39 sculptures)
Court Gallery, Copenhagen, January-February
The Economist Plaza, London, September-January 1994

1994
Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York, April-May (no catalogue)
Beaux Arts Bath, June-September (36 sculptures)

1995
The Minories, Colchester. July-September
Cleveland Gallery, Middlesborough, September-October (46 sculptures)

1996
Gimpel Fils & Berkeley Square Gallery, London (simultaneously) March-May (60 sculptures)
Yeh Gallery, Seoul, Korea, May-June (15 sculptures)
Soho Square, Golden Square, Mount Street Gardens, London, July-October (6 sculptures)

1997
Philarmonic Centre for the Arts, Naples, Florida (in association with Freites-Revilla Gallery), February-March (35 sculptures)
Fondation Veranneman, Kruishoutem, Belgium, May-July (no catalogue)
Galeria Freites, Caracas, June-July (39 sculptures)
Freites Revilla Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida, June-July (39 sculptures)
Galleria Blu, Milan, November (20 sculptures)

1998
The Edwin A.Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, January-April (5 sculptures, 28 drawings, 6 lithographs)

1999
Beaux Arts, London, May-June (24 sculptures)

2000
A selection of Sculptures from the Collection of the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngetown, Ohio, March-June (22 sculptures, 4 lithographs)
A selection of Sculptures from the Collection of the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, June-October (26 sculptures, 4 lithographs)
Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, Canada, June-July (34 sculptures)

2001
Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida, February-March (33 sculptures)
Beaux Arts, London, May-June (24 sculptues)
JGM Galerie, Paris, June-July (no catalogue)

2002
Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Palm Desert, California, March-April (34 sculptures)
Tasende Gallery, Los Angeles, California, November-December

2003
Tasende Gallery, La Jolla, California, January-February (13 sculptures, 7 drawings)
Kunsthandel Frans Jacobs, Amsterdam, January-March (8 sculptures plus 24 others, 2 drawings)
'Coming from the Dark', Gallery Pangolin, Chalford, Gloucestershire, May-June (28 sculptures, 6 lithographs)
Tate Britain, Duveen Galleries, London, September-March 2004 (30 sculptures)
Beaux Arts, London, October-November (28 sculptures)

2004

Lynn Chadwick & Sophie Chadwick, Trans-Art, Montpellier, February-April (no catalogue)

Dexia Banque Internationale, Parc Heintz et Galerie L’ind é pendence, Luxembourg (with Gallery Pangolin, May – October (38 sculptures, 10 drawings, 1 lithograph)

Canary Wharf, London, (with Osborne Samuel Gallery) September-November (15 Sculptures)

Celebrating Chadwick, The Museum in the Park, Stroud, Gloucestershire, October-January 2005 (14 sculptures)

2006

Beaux Arts, London, October-November (15 sculptures)