Kenneth Armitage 1916-2002

bidding is closed

Description

Kenneth Armitage CBE, RA
Linked Figures
signed with initials twice and stamped with foundry mark GUSS H.NOACK BERLIN
bronze with a mottled green patina
height 98cm., 38½in.

Provenance

Sale, Sotheby's, London, 23rd June 1966, lot 1, whence purchased by Mr and Mrs Kreitman

Exhibited

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July - August 1959, no.2 (plaster exhibited).

Literature

Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London, 1962, illustrated (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, KA13, p.143, illustrated p.27 (1951 cast).

Catalogue Note

Conceived in 1949 at Corsham and cast in Berlin in 1960 in an edition of 6.

Two Linked Figures was Armitage’s first major sculpture to incorporate the theme of figures grouped into a single form, and as such is the genesis of a series of sculptures that develop this theme for much of the next decade. Originally sculpted at Corsham Court, the home of the Bath Academy of Art, in 1949, it was not cast in bronze until 1960. The casting was by the German foundry of Noack, and the introduction to them was a direct result of Armitage’s move from Gimpel Fils to Marlborough Fine Art in 1959.

The sculpture is also one of the first works he produced that has two very definite sides, and the forms of the heads, arms and hand would all reappear in his sculpture of the next few years.

‘The flatness in much of my recent work was the result of several interests, but mostly it was a device by which I could achieve area without actual bulk’ (the artist, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London 1962 (unpaginated)).