Lynn Chadwick 1914-2003

The Artist
Gimpel Fils, London, whence purchased by the present owner

New York, Saidenberg Gallery, Lynn Chadwick, April – May 1957, no.4;
London, Gimpel Fils, Fifteen British Artists: Works from the Fifties, 8th January - 27th February 1988;
London, James Hyman Fine Art, Henry Moore and the Geometry of Fear, 19th November 2002 - 18th January 2003, no.8, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, pp.22-3.

Architectural Design, 29th April 1959, p.151;
Dennis Farr, Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, with a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1988, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, no.218, illustrated p.115.

Conceived in 1957, this work is unique.

In 1952, Chadwick was one of eight young sculptors chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Although each artist showed very few pieces (Chadwick showed four sculptures and four drawings), this exhibition was important for it was in his catalogue introduction that Herbert Read coined the oft-quoted phase, ‘the geometry of fear’. Whilst Read’s attempt to see a Jungian collective unconscious tendancy within the work of the artists shown (Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) 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.

Chadwick was central to this, and his winning of the International Sculpture Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale helped to confirm his position as a leading new artist. Chadwick’s fecundity of invention throughout the 1950’s is clear when one considers that over three hundred pieces from that decade feature in the catalogue raisonee of his work. Within that extensive body of work, a number of themes emerge, one of the most prevalent being those derived from animal sources. The Bird series, to which the present work belongs, began with the relatively small Bird of 1956, an angry and obviously flightless creature, whose main features are the rib-like structure of the body and the small stunted wings. By contrast Bird II has grown, both in physical size and its bodily development, into a creature of quieter menace. The wings, folded around the body, suggest a wide span, and the body has become sleeker, almost reminiscent of the contemporary V-Bombers, the term applied to the varied aircraft that formed the British strategic nuclear strike force in the 1950’s (Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley-Page Victor) and were seen, depending on one’s political persuasion, as either a necessary evil or the harbingers of nuclear holocaust. As such, and in a age much more politically aware than our own, a sculpture such as Bird II would have struck chords in contemporary viewers that more than justified Chadwick’s inclusion in Read’s concept of the ‘geometry of fear’.