Reg Butler

Purchased by the present owner at the Venice Biennale, 1952

Venice, British Pavillion, Venice Biennale, 1952, cat. no.115;
London, Tate, Reg Butler, November 1983 - January 1984, cat. no.31, illustrated.

Sandy Nairne and Nicholas Serota (eds), British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century (exh. cat.), Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1981, illustrated p.145;
Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2006, cat. no.98, illustrated p.131.

Structurally sound. The metal base sheet is very slightly loose on its base in the lower right corner. There is some minor, very light oxidisation and verdigris with some very light traces of surface residue visible upon close inspection but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. The composite stone base has some tiny nicks, nips and a tiny repaired loss in the upper right corner, with a small loss to the white paint in the lower left corner, with further traces of light surface dirt visible. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Woman Standing was acquired for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952 by legendary director, Alfred H. Barr, who had seen it at the Venice Biennale. Barr, however, was not alone in spotting Butler and the other young sculptors whom Herbert Read had selected for the British Pavilion as serious new talents, whose work described a world still struggling to come to terms with both the liberation of the concentration camps (and their implication on our conception of humanity) and the onset of a new political terror that would coalesce into the Cold War.

Major public institutions and private collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim were also struck by the power of this new work, created by a group of artists barely out of army fatigues and disrupted art educations: Butler, Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Palozzi and William Turnbull. Their work was both optimistic – in that the human figure was still considered a necessary subject for enquiry – and also deeply pessimistic about what had happened to humanity in the recent years. As Read wrote in his introduction to the show: ‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance. Here are images of flight, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear. Their art is close to the nerves, nervous, wiry. They have seized Eliot's image of the Hollow Men... They have peopled the Waste Land with iron waifs’ (Herbert Read, New Aspects of British Sculpture, 1952, un-paginated).

Read gave Butler’s work the greatest prominence in the Venice show: his wrought-iron Woman of 1949 was placed by the Pavilion’s entrance, next to Double Standing Figure by Henry Moore (who played the ‘grand old man’ to Read’s ‘Young Turks’) – a dialogue between the two artists that continues to this day in the recent hangs of Tate Britain. Yet MoMA took this further, including Butler in two highly significant surveys exhibitions, the first a major statement on contemporary art of the day – The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors in 1955 ­– and the second a defiant challenge to the hegemony of abstraction as the mode of serious cultural expression - New Images of Man in 1959.

In these shows Butler’s work is placed in context with – and is seen as equal to - that of great European sculptors such as Giacommeti, Germaine Richier and international painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. This conceptual link between Butler and Bacon in particular has been lost to today’s audience, although it is easily apparent when one looks at their work side-by-side. Both artists explore that point at which the human form loses its human qualities: Bacon, at this moment, veers towards the animal beneath, whereas Butler’s figures become hollowed-out, quasi-mechanical (the welding rods from which they are made becoming stunted limbs, the fragile skin punched from metal plates). His are not the bright shiny androids of 1950s and 60s science fiction, but junk yard assemblies of 70s and 80s dystopian visions of the future. Like Paolozzi’s sculpture of the late 50s, Butler’s figures look like they have been dug up, remnants not of an ancient past but a used future.

In Butler’s sculpture of this period, form is intrinsically allied to the process of a work’s making. Construction defines the final image. As Margaret Garlake writes about the small wire sculptures, of which Maquette for a Standing Woman is one of the finest examples, comparable in quality to the Tate’s Study for Woman Resting (1950), they are drawings made in three-dimensions:  ‘To bend the wire, cut the metal and solder the pieces together was a way of thinking manually…’ (Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2006, p.58). And when Butler re-imagined these models on a larger scale, the different physical demands of forged and welded iron necessarily demanded adaptation of the original. As such, these wire ‘sketch models’ stand alone, un-copied – the purest manifestation of Butler vision of a ‘New Image of man’, brittle but resolute.