Kenneth Armitage 1916-2002

Gimpel Fils, London
E.C. Gregory, purchased from the above, December 1952
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner
 

Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.) in association with the Artist, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, KA10 (wherein height given as 9in.)

Kenneth Armitage’s People in the Wind of 1950 is, along with his Family Going for a Walk of 1951 (see lot 25), one of his best-known and most popular early sculptures. It was included in the landmark exhibition of eight new British sculptors (Robert Adams, Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) at the 1952 Venice Biennale which not only provided an immediately prominent platform for Armitage’s work, but was also the occasion for the coining of Herbert Read’s famous phrase, ‘the geometry of fear’. Whilst Read’s attempt to see a Jungian collective unconscious tendency within the work of the artists shown has been much questioned by art historians and critics, what is undeniable is that during the 1950’s, a new generation had emerged onto the international sculpture stage.

 Armitage was not particularly well known at the time of this exhibition, although since 1946 he had been teaching sculpture at Bath Academy of Art, the far-sighted academy run by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis at Corsham Court. The Ellis’s recruited some remarkably talented young artists onto the staff and Armitage’s contemporaries included William Scott, the potter James Tower (whose work shares a close affinity with Armitage’s sculpture) and later, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost. As a relatively new teacher, Armitage himself admitted that he was very much learning on the job and it is with Two Linked Figures of 1949 (see lot 26) that his first mature and distinctive style appears. Armitage had become interested in the way in which groups of figures massed together such that a spectator registered the single mass before the individuals; ‘Joining figures together I found in time I wanted to merge them so completely they formed a new organic unit – a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary’ (the artist, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London 1962 (unpaginated)).  

The stylised figures push forward into a stiff wind, coats blowing behind them, and whilst there is nothing to give any sense of individual identity, Armitage gives the piece huge movement and humour.

 ‘Here Armitage is in the tradition of Degas and the unposed gesture, except that, whereas Degas often found his subjects among professional experts in movement (ballet dancers, racing horses), Armitage works within his everyday experience of everyday people’ (Norbert Lynton, ibid., unpaginated) .