Kenneth Armitage

Private Collection, U.K.
New Art Centre, Salisbury
Ruth Zeigler Fine Arts, New York, from whom acquired by the present owners

London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Young Sculptors, 1952 (catalogue untraced);
Venice, XXVI Biennale, Recent Sculpture, 1952 (possibly this cast);
London, Holland Park Open Air Exhibition, 1954;
Venice, XXIX Biennale, 1958 (MoMA cast);
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Kenneth Armitage/William Scott, June 1959, no.1 (MoMa cast); 
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July – August 1959, no.3, illustrated in the catalogue, pl.4 (MoMA cast);
Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Kenneth Armitage, June - July 1963, no.1427, illustrated in the catalogue.

Roland Penrose, Kenneth Armitage: Artists of our time, vol.vii, Bodensee- erlag, Amriswil, Switzerland 1960, pl.2 (another cast);
Charles Spencer, Kenneth Armitage, Academy Editions, London 1973, illustrated, p.4 (another cast);
Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.) in association with the artist, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, KA15, illustrated p.31 (another cast).

Dirt has gathered in some of the crevices but the work is in good overall condition. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Family Going for a Walk (1951), along with People in the Wind of 1950, is one of Armitage's two best-known and most popular early sculptures. It was included in the landmark exhibition of eight new British sculptors (Armitage, Robert Adams, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) at the 1952 Venice Biennale which provided an immediately prominent platform for Armitage's work and provided 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.

Armitage was not particularly well known at the time of this exhibition, although since 1946 he had been teaching sculpture at the far-sighted Bath Academy of Art, 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 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)

Like People in the Wind, the present 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. Similarly, it also combines both movement and humour, but achieves 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 stylised figures push forward together, probably against the elements, clothes and limbs melding into one mass, and whilst there is nothing to give any sense of individual identity, Armitage gives the piece huge movement and humour.

In Norbert Lynton's words, '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)

As with much of Armitage's early work, the edition sizes are not entirely clear but in answer to an undated questionnaire from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, regarding the origin of their cast of this piece, the artist responded that the cast shown in Venice in 1952 was reserved for purchase by Mme Schiaperelli, but that after protracted negotiations lasting over twelve months the sale was cancelled and the piece returned to London. The MoMA cast was made at this time at Corsham, and the Venice cast was subsequently sold to an American collection. A third cast was also sold to an American collection a little later. It appears from the artist's notebooks that a fourth cast was projected but there is no clear indicator that this was cast, although it would be in keeping with the artist's practice for the edition to have been completed later.