Kenneth Armitage, R.A.

Acquired by the family of the present owner in the 1960s

New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., An Exhibition of Recent Sculpture by Kenneth Armitage, March 1962, cat. no.10 (another cast);
London, Marlborough Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, 1962, cat. no.8, illustrated (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, KA95, p.144

Structurally sound. Minor surface dirt and dust has gathered in the crevices, and there are some occasional signs of casting residue and oxidation. The right hand figure's extending arm was previously bent and has subsequently been straightened by professional founders. The work appears in good overall condition. Please contact the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Towards the end of the 1950s, Kenneth Armitage was at a crossroads. In just over a decade from his being de-mobbed out of the Army, he had become one of Britain’s most celebrated young artists, with his work in museums and major private collections around the world, following on from his showing at  international biennales such as Sao Paulo, Documenta and Venice (twice, in 1952 and 1958).

Yet Armitage himself, despite the success, felt a deep-seated need for change. As he commented to the American documentary maker and photographer Warren Forma in 1963, in a taped interview later published in the book 5 British Sculptors (Work & Talk): ‘I think about the work I was doing ten or fifteen years ago, the work which incorporated screen shapes, membranes, flat surfaces stretched across verticals, without volume or weight, in which there were illusions of groups or figures, all of which were very tentative and slight and, in a normal sense, unsculptural.…I found a growing restlessness about the tentative nature of this work….The result was  that my work became rounder and heavier.’

Although one has to take this comment with a certain pinch of salt, as an artist speaking from deep within a new phase of work, looking back on what has gone before, Armitage’s sculpture from 1959 to 1963 – up to the Pandarus series that Forma was filming him working on – is more solid, less ethereal, as well as distinctly more abstract than that of the early 50s. The Visitors, like the monumental Monitor of the same year, still has much in common, though, with those early works, with its three linked figures forming a flat, single body, from which attenuated limbs extend out into space, suggesting the fragility of the individual as it steps away from the mass. Yet this central core is no longer a ‘membrane…stretched across verticals’; each figure carries their own weight, sectioned off from the next.

The heads, too, are significantly larger and whilst they are flat-faced, geometric and without expression, they capture and return our gaze in a way his work previously had not. And it was the head that was to become the new focus of Armitage’s work of the early 60s – thus the choice of Pandarus, the noisy and garrulous go-between from Chaucer’s Troilus & Cressida, who in the artist’s hands literally becomes all mouth. Somehow this seemed to suit the times: as Britain slowly hauled its way out of the wreckage of the war towards the confidence and affluence of the 60s, so the individual could emerge from the shadows and have something more to say.