‘The restless stirring of their vast cloaks enables them to make their own weather – where they are it is always windy, however still the weather. One notices how Chadwick’s characteristically crisp, sharp outlines seem to cut into the surrounding atmosphere.
Chadwick’s male and female figures have come to occupy an iconic place within 20th century British sculpture. Like the curvaceous forms of Moore’s bronzes or the pierced motifs of Hepworth’s, they are immediately recognizable and forcefully felt.
Chadwick’s talent was acknowledged early as part of the generation of post-War British sculptors who represented Britain at the 1952 Venice Biennale. Four years later, in 1956, he was awarded the International Grand Prix for sculpture – ahead of Alberto Giacometti and the youngest artist to ever win the prize. It was a meteoric rise for someone with no formal training who had turned to sculpture only six years previously. His background was as an architectural draughtsman - the formal practices of which can be seen in the way he used lines, angles and steel rods in his work, particularly of the 1950s, and with the solid sense of structure in works such as the present.
Coupled figures first appeared in the 1950s and were a persistent theme throughout his career. In the 1970s these evolved to incorporate winged figures, in turn leading to cloaked figures, majestically realized in his monumental Pair of Walking Figures – Jubilee from 1977. This was the first incarnation of his Jubilee series, conceived to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. He continued to explore the theme through the 1970s and 80s, including the present example.
(image from Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Lund Humphries, 2014, p.333)
‘Walking figures, their cloaks or robes blowing out behind them, provided Chadwick with a theme capable of sustaining endless variations, of which Maquette Jubilee II 1983 is a particularly dramatic example. […] In Maquette Jubilee II the robes form an elaborate butterfly-wing shape behind the two figures, supporting them too, but now imbued with a baroque exuberance that transcends the merely practical. Chadwick has enjoyed creating a fantastic shape for its own sake, rather as some of his female figures carry their skirts like a fan-tailed pigeon displaying its plumage.’
In the present work, the figures stride forward ceremoniously and possess a noble, regal quality, while their billowing garments provide a dynamic sense of motion. It also allows Chadwick to juxtapose curves with the more angular forms of the figures themselves, as well as explore themes of balance - the extravagant extending mass of cloaks counterpoised against the slight legs. Although semi-abstract, Chadwick distinguishes the male and female forms, the latter being softer and rounder. She is given a triangular head, the male figure a rectangle. As Chadwick explained:
‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses.’
These faces are always blank, with Chadwick instead looking to body language and the relationship between the figures to instill his figures with a certain attitude. ‘If you can get their physical attitudes right,’ Chadwick explained, ‘you can spell out a message’ (quoted in M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 147).
Chadwick’s couples reveal his distillation of human nature, avoiding a naturalistic representation yet presenting an archetypal character. Expressing the essence of his figures, they serve as universal symbols, their poignancy elevated by the subtle interplay between them.
‘These are not simply geometrical constructs, fantasies based on the human figure. They are meant to give the sense that these are beings with an internal life – a quasi-human personality of their own. One of the problems faced by contemporary sculptures is that, if they choose (as Chadwick does here) to make monumental figures, these are detached from any firm social or religious context. They have to exist in their own right, or not at all. In a sense, this means that the sculptor, rather than illustrating a myth, has actually to invent the myth – to send the spectator’s imagination into new and speculative paths. Chadwick’s figures are alien, unsettling presences, intruders into the world of the ordinary.’