Reg Butler 1913-1981

New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Reg Butler, January – February 1955, no.42, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (another cast);
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Reg Butler, October 1961-January 1962 (catalogue untraced);
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Contemporary British Painting and Sculpture, October – November 1964, no.10, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (another cast);
London, Tate Gallery, Reg Butler, November 1983-January 1984, cat.no.51, illustrated, p.65 (another cast).

Conceived in 1954 and cast in an edition of 6. Casts of this sculpture are in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Male figures are rare in Butler’s oeuvre, and when they do appear, they are generally found to be holding or operating some kind of machinery. Manipulator is one of Butler’s earliest large-scale bronze sculptures and holds a network of rods whilst his head is thrown back. The figure is lifted off the ground on a grid similar to that which was to become a feature of his female figures during the decade.

Commentators have noted the comparisons between Butler’s sculpture and the work of Francis Bacon, and indeed their work had been shown together at the I.C.A., along with that of Germaine Richier, in the London/Paris exhibition in 1950. Both artists also exhibited regularly with the Hanover Gallery in London throughout the decade, and thus there are grounds for such connections. The anguished face of Manipulator, whilst not as distorted as that of The Oracle of 1952 and Circe Head of 1952-3, still carries a clear message of torment, and seems to derive originally from the screaming figure in the right hand panel of Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Coll. Tate), and the framework on which Manipulator stands may be compared with the constructions which appear in Bacon’s paintings, such as that found in Study of a Nude (Coll. Robert & Lisa Sainsbury, U.E.A.) of 1952-3. However, the intentions here are very different from that in Bacon’s work of the period which was demonstrating an ever-increasing tendency towards violence. Manipulator seems to be a questioning figure, and indeed the head is very similar to the upturned head of the same date entitled Study for Third Watcher and thus we may see a strand of the ideas of the earlier Unknown Political Prisoner Sculptures carried through to the sculptures that followed.