Kenneth Armitage 1916-2002

Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Contemporary British Painting & Sculpture, October - November 1964, no.5 (another cast).

Tasmyn Woollcombe (ed.) in association with the Artist, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, 1997, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, KA20, p.143 (where height given as 23cm.; 9in.), illustrated p.31 (larger version).

Conceived in 1952.

Kenneth Armitage’s Family Going for a Walk of 1951 is, along with his People in the Wind of 1950 (see lot 109), one of his two 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 1950s, a new generation had emerged onto the international sculpture stage.

Like People in the Wind, the sculpture exists in a number of variants and sizes and thus attests to the ways in which Armitage was exploring the theme of interlinked figure groups. As with People in the Wind, Family Going for a Walk combines both movement and humour, but achieved this by different means. Whereas the tall attenuated forms and outstretched hands of People in the Wind border on caricature, Family Going for a Walk merges them into a clear single unit, the thin central slab which would be a feature of Armitage’s group sculpture for the next five years. The arms have become more schematised, something that would be pushed even further in the later group sculptures, such as Seated Group, 1952-54 (see lot 107).