Essay by Norbert Lynton

Though it began late, we are looking back on a career of over fifty years. Lynn Chadwick considers he became a sculptor in 1948, when he was thirty-five. He had been working as architect's draughtsman and expecting to qualify as an architect. It was the architect Rodney Thomas - himself the author of sculptures with movable parts - who had encouraged him to make mobiles, usually as part of exhibition designs. The published catalogue of his work begins with more than fifty mobiles and stabiles in a variety of forms and materials, culminating in two commissions for the 1951 Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition: a stabile to stand outside the Regatta Restaurant and a mobile to hang in the Riverside Restaurant. The stabile, Cypress, was a tall and lissom construction of brass rods and copper sheet. The mobile was inside the other restaurant, an iron and steel arrangement of floating leaf shapes and disks. Four more mobiles were commissioned, bought or publicly displayed that year, including the triumphant standing mobile The Fisheater in iron and copper, made for the Arts Council of Great Britain and shown at the RBA Galleries and then at the Tate.

Some of these creations hint at nature but we need their titles to take the hint. The first item in this exhibition too, Bullfrog, assembled from cast units so that some of its elements are moveable though not in themselves mobile, need not be any sort of animal though one happily accepts the association. In the later months of 1951 and then on into 1953, Chadwick developed this theme of a stable construction parts of which pivot. Into some of these he incorporated lumps of glass, most famously in his 1952 sculpture The Inner Eye which was bought later by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The first mobiles were in wood, with string and wire; the major ones were in metal. To make these he got himself trained in oxy-acetylene welding and then also the trickier arc welding required for non ferrous metals such as copper. From the start he insisted on being his own craftsman-fabricator, to have that intimacy with the process that promotes inventive action. Also, it is physical labour, requiring time and involving danger, as well as constant thought for the viability of the hanging or standing, always in some sense balancing, assembly that will be the finished sculpture. They varied widely in character, some light and essentially linear, others more weighty and thus also grave. The lumps of glass in The Inner Eye and other 1952 constructions gives them a magical, otherworldly quality.

No one thought these sculptures threatening. They might suggest animals or insects, and by 1953 he called some of them Beast, but they were more curious than awesome, and those that moved with currents of air conveyed much the same natural ease as the Calders from which they at first derived. By 1953 they had been given a tag, one of those enduring phrases by which well-meaning critics, meaning to guide the public's approach, unwittingly condemn, or at least imprison, an artist's work. David Sylvester's 'Kitchen Sink School' is an instance of it, a phrase he used in 1954 which others adopted as a ready label for paintings by Jack Smith, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves. Not only the general public but curators still want these painters' works, decades later, to fit the prescription and its association of sordidness and protest. In 1952 a group of sculptures and works on paper by Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Bernard Meadows and others, eight in all, was shown at the Venice Biennale. A recent Henry Moore stood outside the British Pavilion; inside it were sculptures by this new generation, together with paintings by Graham Sutherland and prints by the late Edward Wadsworth. Herbert Read provided the text for the catalogue. Visitors would find these new sculptures highly individual, yet they shared an anti-classical, feverish expressionism. 'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance ... Here are images of flight, of ragged claws "scuttling across the floors of silent seas", of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.' Drawing on a 'collective guilt' occasioned by a war that ended with the use of atom bombs and was followed by the new threat of nuclear warfare, these sculptors were unconsciously voicing the world's conscience and terror. Read's interpretation was echoed in many languages. The phrase 'the geometry of fear' became a favourite formulation. The sculptors did not feel it fitted them, but it fitted the tone of much European art and writing of the time and gave them a prominent place in contemporary European culture. Read credited Chadwick with 'more playfulness than the others' yet described his work as 'toys armed ... with vicious teeth and claws'.

What he might have said was that Chadwick's work owed something to Calder and something to Picasso and to Julio Gonzalez, Picasso's collaborator in the early 1930s. There is also something of English Neo-Romanticism about its linear character at this stage, an agitation echoing nature's wildness. There is nothing threatening about a dragonfly, nor is there about Chadwick's second masterpiece, the Dragonfly mobile which the Contemporary Art Society gave to the Tate in 1951. In 1952-53 Chadwick worked on his submission for the Unknown Political Prisoner competition, which culminated in the Tate's exhibition of early 1953 and the award of the first prize to Reg Butler tall and essentially linear maquette. Chadwick's gained him one of the minor prizes. It was his first 'solid' sculpture, consisting largely of iron sheet welded to make hollow forms, four of them standing on thin, single legs, a fifth supported between them. Thorn-like projections can be read as prison bars; the fifth form is slight and invites compassion. Out of working on this arose a new method Chadwick used brilliantly until about 1960: filling a construction of iron rods with a compound of gypsum and powdered iron, which sets hard and can be worked with files and chisels. Thus the armature of iron rods hidden inside many a modelled sculpture here defines its surface. In so far as the rods are straight and the 'composition' fills the volume they outline, the sculptures are faceted and suggest solid geometry. But above all they are vital, energetic, and there followed a series of sculptures suggesting figures and pairs of figures, and then the generalised ceatures he called Beasts and then also Birds. The figures often dance on their spikey legs, and of course the Teddy Boys some of them refer to were remarkable in those loose-clothing days for their tightly buttoned jackets and dramatically tapered trousers. In 1957-58 Chadwick made maquettes for the Air League of the British Empire to commemorate the double crossing of the Atlantic in 1919 by Airship R.34. His final model was accepted but then the League yielded to pressure from 'the public' and cancelled the commission. Out of this, however, came a powerful series of winged figures and then the Strangers and Watchers of 1959-60. Most of these now had to be made for casting in bronze, so great was the demand for Chadwick's art.

In 1956 he had again shown in Venice, not a small group but now nineteen sculptures and twenty-one drawings whhich formed the core of an exhibition that toured five cities on the Continent and the Arts Council Gallery in London. The variety of work on show could now be much greater, ranging from The Inner Eye of 1952 to various animals and the lifesize Teddy Boy and Girl of 1955. The pavilion's largest was filled with Ivon Hitchen's landscapes, the side galleries with paintings by 'Four Young Painters', in fact the 'Kitchen Sink School'. The paintings did not create much stir. Chadwick, however, won the International Sculpture Prize in succession to Moore, a second astounding success for a country hitherto thought incable of producing worthwhile sculpture. I wish I could say that Britain rang with joyous applause, but no: whatever foreigners might be telling us, we were still hesitating to take Moore seriously.

There was a phase in 1963-64 when many of Chadwick's sculptures were built of found iron objects, possibly reflecting David Smith's fame in the USA, and then, in 1964-66, when they became abstract and geometrical and were called Towers and Pyramids. Some of these were constructed of wood with coloured formica surfaces. Chadwick was probably responding to the new work of a yet younger generation of sculptors, all of them working with colour and in some cases with minimal forms, presented as 'New Generation' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965.

It seems at least possible that, having been lumped together with a group of supposedly anxiety-ridden harbingers of doom, and then given star status by an art world that still saw him as dedicated to paraphrasing gloomy realities, Chadwick may have felt the urge to prove that he was a man of wit and good humour as well as burdened by human concerns. Composers are allowed their scherzos as well as their graver movements, playwrights their comedies as well as their tragedies, and we all know that it can be the comedy that makes us think, the scherzo that shakes our security. The media's routines allow just one mode of expression, one meaning, to every artist.

Watchers and Dancers, Strangers and Beasts continued through the 1960s, with less emphasis on acute angles and stiletto legs, and with squarer or more blockish forms: no possible suggestion of 'fear' now, but powerful, reassuring silhouettes. A remarkable element emerged in 1969 to open up a new pursuit. Bronzes are usually presented more or less matt. Various tones can be achieved by chemical treatment, and some details may be refined, or areas smoothed, by abrasion. In 1968 Chadwick began giving selected areas of his bronzes a shiny golden surface contrasting with the rest. He did this on a large scale in a series of bronzes entitled Three Elektras. There were three Elektras in Greek mythology and drama, but Chadwick was probably referring to the rather maniacal character in Euripides. A geometricised female torso with explicit breasts ends in three legs that enable it to stand without a base. Setting up a trio of such figures, each posed slightly differently, adds greatly to their force. Their heads are roughly pyramidal but their faces are slightly raised angled diamonds and are highly polished. In photographs one could read them as masks. Face to face, so to speak, they are too eloquent for that. Though they lack facial features, they shine with presence and power. A second trio of Elektras has also areas of the torsos polished in this way. Going on into the 1970s, Chadwick explored this device systematically in a series of small sculptures, seated, standing or lying, with similar heads and often also areas of their torsos polished to varying degrees of luminosity.

Farr quotes Chadwick on what he called 'attitude': 'I would call it attitude, you know, the way that you can make something almost talk by the way the neck is bent, or the attitude of the head; you can actually make these sulptures talk, they say something according to the exact balance, whereas if they're absolutely straight ... well, I suppose that's saying something, too'. He gave much care to the exact poses of his figures and the details of their anatomy even when they strike us as firmly abstracted. The golden and reflective areas contribute to this, so that we find ourselves addressed by each work in its own way. Eloquent too is Chadwick's deft and original way of pursuing a high degree of naturalism and abstraction in the same piece. It seems against the rules of modern art to combine such contrary modes. This breaking of the moral code was shocking at the time, and the sculptures were let out to meet the public quite slowly, little ones first, larger ones not until 1972 and after. Chadwick's London one-man show of 1974 included only one piece with polished faces: Maquette I: Two Reclining Figures (1971), included in the present show. The Three Elektras (1969) with polished faces was exhibited in New York later that year; a number of maquettes with polished faces and torsos had meanwhile been shown in Brussels and Milan.

Having embarked on this adventure, Chadwick returned to it at intervals subsequently and at intervals. It was not an essential means of progressing his art though I see it as an important part of a broader development. For the moment we should consider further what he said about 'attitude'. The 1960s had brought abstract constructed sculpture into preeminence in Britain, and those who set out to challenge this sovereignty, as Barry Flanagan and Gilbert & George did at the end of the '60s, worked mainly in the abstract-surrealist mode of the former or the sophisticated performance mode of the latter It did not seem reasonable then to devote oneself, as Chadwick was patently doing, with this or that angle of legs to torso, shoulders to head, this or that pairing of male and female, with blockish (bloke-ish) forms for one and softer, affectionately modelled anatomies for the latter. The conflict between seductive and distancing forms in the same figures became quite extreme at times - see, for instance, the Pair of Sitting Figures VI (1973) and Pair of Sitting Figures XII (1975) in this exhibition - a kind of push-pull acting quite directly on our psychosexual mechanism.

To this Chadwick then added movement. Not actual or potential motion as in his mobiles or manipulable sculptures, but dynamic forms that announce movement. This was first, in 1977, with cloaked figures standing or walking, their clothes fluttering behind them. There is a hint of cat-walk about them, partly thanks to the anonimity of Chadwick's geometricised heads, echoing the blank faces of most models, and partly because of the way the figures are advancing: see Walking Cloaked Figure I and II (1978). But there is also a suggestion of the great Hellenistic Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, that now headless but ravishing woman supposedly alighting on the prow of a ship. Perhaps Chadwick knew he was bridging modern and antique, art and fashion; perhaps he did not. Artists gather many levels of memory and experience, and know in their bones much that they do not know they know in their conscious minds.

Small-scale single and then also paired figures, dramatised by billowing cloaks, occupied him for some time into the 1980s - see, for example the charming Maquette VIII High Wind (1986), a girl blown along by the wind, her hair as well as her dress so that the face is hidden. And seated figures too, again single or in pairs, as in the Miniature Figure II (1986), her regal cloak spread out behind her so that expression focuses on that, on her breasts and on her delicatedly crossed ankles. As almost always, these figures lack arms, as though, having once grown wings, their powerful shoulders demand wings or nothing. None the less, 'attitude' still rules, from the tilt of the head to the positions of the feet and the drama of the torso's rise and fall in between.

Chadwick's old interest in solid geometry surfaces again in some of the early 1980s figures, their bodies presented as geometrical compilations, as heraldry almost, recalling his exploring of abstract form in the mid-1960s: see Maquette I Diamond (1984) where the diamond form of the faces is echoed in the bodies and imposes an unprecedented staitness on the woman's waist. So unremitting are the abstract forms here that one wonders how it can also seem so natural, so relaxed, an image of human beings. Similarly, the less geometry-led Sitting Woman II (1987) is convincingly regal, in spite of her many asymmnetries and bodily softness.

In 1988 Chadwick returned to a form of construction he had essayed in 1966: building hollow forms from angled sheets, now not of wood with formica but of cut sheets of steel joined at their edges, sometimes with added colour. These pieces could resemble figures, abstracted in varying degrees - Sitting Couple (1990) - or animals as in Crouching Beast (1990): note how even here the angle of the head, the position of the legs, express the moment. Chadwick continued to use bronze for his main adventures. In 1991 he began to model figures going up and down stairs, making this theme so much his own that one wonders he had not had it up his sleeves all along, motion surely being kin to 'attitude' and physical movement having been his initial business. Stairs he calls them, curtly, but of course it is the figures' movement, towards or past each other, that is the subject. They are always female in these sculptures, and the cat-walk thought arises again as we assess the shifting silhouettes of their bodies and clothing and of the spaces between them - in effect, the timing of their coming and going.

It is a very remarkable career that is illuminated here in a selection of work from forty years. Chadwick has always had his admirers; he was thirty-five when he had his first one-man show and six years later he was crowned with the international prize at Venice. Other international prizes followed, and then also the award of a CBE at home. With that, though, it seems Britain had done all it could. Public commissions have come from abroad, as well as further honours, but then came the Air League debacle, when Lord Brabazon of Tara, aviator and politician, dubbed Chadwick's full-size model for the monument a 'diseased haddock', thus condemning not only this artist but all modern art in a manner all-too familiar here.

The suggestion offered here is that Lynn Chadwick, while ignoring the dictates of successive avant gardes, into and away from abstraction, into and then again out of technical processes - assembly, modelling, construction - followed his own path in ways we can now recognise as both purposeful and refreshing. It has never been difficult to admit the charm of some of his sculptures and the dramatic force of others, but we can see now that his embrace of (if I dare call it this) the low-brow high life of fashion, as earlier he had used the low-life stylistic gambit of Teddy Boys and Girls, places his art in a particular relationship between the ancient business of making three-dimensional images, august or familiarly inviting, entertaining or awesome, and the still relatively novel business of having sculpture comment on daily life in the modern world. There is a Pop strain in Chadwick that needs acknowledging, echoed in the sci-fi intimations of some of his more solemn figures. He has been a comedian as well as a knitted-brow dramatist. The 'geometry of fear' tag continues to shape our expectations, making it hard for us to admit the versatility and many tempers of the man. He has gone on performing brilliantly on the world's sculptural stage in spite of our hesitations.

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor: With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1996, Lypiatt Studio, Stroud, 1998. Dennis Farr contributed to this volume an essay on Chadwick's work, as well as a biographical summary and a bibliography; Eva Chadwick compiled the illustrated catalogue which is its principal offering, as well as lists of exhibitions, public collections, and other data. A first edition was published by Oxford University Press in 1990 and reprinted with corrections in 1992. Six years later it was possible to update the book, making it the essential starting point for anyone working on Chadwick's work and life. I readily acknowledge my debt to it, both to its plentiful array of visual and verbal information and to Farr's thoughtful essay. I have also benefited from re-reading Alan Bowness's little book on Chadwick in the 'Art in Progress' series edited by Jasia Reichardt for Methuen in 1962 and a few short catalogue essays, notably those by Werner Schmalenbach in the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hanover catalogue for the Armitage and Chadwick show presented there in 1960 before touring to seven other centres in Germany and Scandinavia, and Rungwe Kingdon's in the summary catalogue of a one-man show at the Cleveland Gallery, Middlesbrough in 1995. I have had many opportunities to see Chadwick's work from at least 1961 on, in solo and mixed exhibitions and in public collections and I have met him a few times over the years and have gained some direct knowledge of the man and the artist.

Read's quotation is from T.S.Eliot's poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Showing a major sculpture by Henry Moore (who had won the International Prize for Sculpture at the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948) close to the entrance to the British pavilion was intended to remind the world of the new sculptors' genealogy: Read referred to Moore in his essay as 'in some sense no doubt the parent of them all'. Those who knew Moore's work would have been ready to contrast Moore's usually rounded, organic forms, speaking of anatomy and landscape, and the more directly figurative drawings and sculpture into which the experience of war had led him, with the younger sculptors' reliance on constructed and modelled forms, often with thin and spiky elements and little connection with the ground. Significantly, the Moore chosen to stand outside the pavilion was his Double Standing Figure of 1950, a mostly linear configuration nine feet high, modelled but presenting thin, bony elements including two sharp triangles at shoulder level and thin double heads that have nothing human about them. So the Moore, too, could be taken to support Read's account of the sculpture inside, as indeed could several of the recent Sutherlands in the pavilion's main gallery, notably the fourteen-foot canvas Origins of the Land (1951; commissioned for the Festival of Britain) that confronted visitors as they entered.

Farr and Chadwick, op.cit., page 11.
Art historians were then showing scholarly interest in Victorian sculpture, a subject largely disdained previously, especially in the sculpture of the 1880s and '90s when, on the Continent as well as in Britain, artists enriched not only the visual appeal but also the meaning of their figures (many of them with names from history or literature) by combining diverse materials in one sculpture. These studies culminated in such British publications as Benedict Read's Victorian Sculpture (1982) and Susan Beattie's The New Sculpture (1983; both Yale University Press), but Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read had been collecting and researching into the subject for some time, as was demonstrated in 1972 when the Royal Academy presented the exhibition 'Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Art: The Handley-Read Collection', accompanied by a catalogue for which Lavinia Handley-Read wrote the 'The New Sculpture' section. I must not assert a direct connection between this fine academic work and Chadwick's work, but am reluctant to ignore the possibility that some such impetus may have encouraged him to break a rule of purity that Modernism had brought in in reaction against this lavishness.

Norbert Lynton is an art historian and critic who has spent many years teaching in art schools and universities and also writing, especially on modern art. He has also been responsible for many exhibitions (during the 1970's he was director of exhibitions at the Arts Council) in Britain and abroad. His books include The Story of Modern Art and monographs on Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore, Jack Smith and William Tyler. He is working on a book on William Scott.