Head is coming from the collection of the legendary fashion designer Dame Mary Quant, OBE. Perhaps best known as the creator of the mini skirt during the Swinging London Sixties, Quant burst onto the fashion scene with a bright, chic and playful aesthetic that appealed to a younger generation of women emerging from the grey of Post-War Britain. A female icon of her day, it is perhaps no surprise that Quant was drawn to the work of Elisabeth Frink, a pioneering female sculptor working in the same period. Quant collected many of Frink’s pieces, Head being the first to enter her collection, and she developed a friendship with the artist, as well as with Frink’s contemporaries David Hockney and Allen Jones.
Please click on the image below to learn more about the fascinating link between Quant and Frink.
British fashion designer Mary Quant pictured selecting rolls of fabric from a fabric store and warehouse in London to create samples for a future collection in 1967. (Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The present work belongs to a series of Head sculptures from the 1960s which stem from a questioning and uncompromising preoccupation with masculine power that was central to Frink’s work. These Heads have an undeniable presence which both fascinate and repel, and find few counterparts in the history of sculpture. They form a distinct approach in representations of the male entirely Frink’s own, and quite unexpected to those familiar only with the softer imagery of her dogs and rolling horses.
When first confronted with Elisabeth Frink’s Heads, the sight of these polished ‘sunglasses’ on sculpture is totally unexpected, shocking even. One can be uncertain how to react, to admire or to critique? Above all, they invite intrigue and like the most engaging and timeless works of art, there is far more at work beyond the surface. On examining the sculpture further, one notices the slight smirk in the smile, the heavy features, the hard and imposingly solid shape of the head. Clearly greater meaning lies behind these goggled figures:
‘When I [Frink] moved to France I got interested in the Algerian War, which was then just only over. It still rumbled away, the horror of it. What really triggered the [Goggle Head] series were some rather extraordinary photographs of people like General Oufkir. They all hid behind dark glasses, and these became a symbol of evil for me. The title Goggle Heads was rather facetious, a way of dealing with the horror of the imagery'
This concern with masculine power originates in large part from her childhood where there was a strong male presence. Her father was a professional soldier – a figure she idolised - and as she remarked:
‘men were very much part of my early life because of the army. I used to look up to them, and hero-worship them’
Growing up in proximity to men fighting in the Second World War, many of those she met being killed in action, subsequently fed into her work as a student at the Chelsea College of Art in the early 1950s. Although a generation younger, she was associated with the ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors who had served in the war such as Chadwick, Armitage, Paolozzi and Butler and who had exhibited to such international acclaim at the 1952 Venice Biennale. Much of the work Frink produced in this period also tapped into post-war feelings of anxiety and fear, notably her ‘bird’ sculptures, tense and predatory. However, her first figurative representation of male aggression, Warrior’s Head (1954), portrayed a noble soldier who commands respect. He wears an ancient helmet which links him to a classical past and implies that he is an archetypal hero. This admiration for the military was to be expected given her father’s profession however, in tracing Frink’s career, it is fascinating to see how her representations of the male give way to a more explicitly critical approach seen in such works as the present.
The series of Heads were inspired by media coverage of Moroccan General Mohammed Oufkir, who had been accused of ordering the assassination in Paris of the exiled politician Ben Bark. Stripping any sense of male admiration, they emerged two years after Frink’s Soldier’s Heads of 1965, in which all traces of nobility or heroic ancestry were removed and replaced with brutal, scarred and mindless figures. The Heads are no longer warriors or soldiers but sophisticated criminal types, their identities hidden behind polished goggles, displaying a bullish arrogance and suaveness. The double edged point of these glasses however, is that these men lack vision and they mask a vulnerability, as Peter Shaffer wrote:
‘the constant wearing of dark glasses always speaks of impotence to me: a fear of having scrutiny returned – the secret terror of the torturer’ (Elisabeth Frink catalogue raisonné, Harpvale Books, 1984, p.11). The Heads are a direct attack on such individuals: ‘brainless, nasty people. A statement on my part about the cruelty and stupidity of repressive regimes and of the men who operated them’
After Heads followed Frink’s Tribute series in which the goggles are removed, revealing a more introverted and sensual masculine ideal. Silently suffering with down cast eyes, they epitomise endurance and stoicism and in the latter stages of her career, her men develop still into a more positive ideal: horsemen and naked figures – running, standing and seated – convey a sense of self-improvement, of conquering one’s own weaknesses rather than others. Through the continuous exploring of this theme, few artists have managed to comment so forcefully on the character of men – at best admirable and heroic, at worst cruel and destructive – as Frink through these monumental, compelling bronzes. In surveying her career, one sees the remarkable, unique and hugely significant contribution she has made to representations of the male in sculpture - not just in the 20th century but in its long and distinguished history.