Lynn Chadwick CBE, RA

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Mr & Mrs Roger Vanthournout, Belgium (acquired from the above in 1980. Sold: Sotheby’s, New York, 7th November 2006, lot 75)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

London, Marlborough Fine Art Gallery & Zürich, Marlborough Gallery, Chadwick, Recent Sculptures, 1978, no. 11

Art International, no. 22/1, January 1978, mentioned p. 5
L’Œil, no. 274, May 1978, mentioned p. 87
Nico Kostern & Paul Levine, Lynn Chadwick: The Sculptor and his World, Leiden 1988, illustration of other cast in colour pp. 95 & 110
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Farnham, 2014, no. 769, illustration of another cast p. 333

The majestic Pair of Walking Figures - Jubilee, dating from 1977, is one of Chadwick’s most impressive and dynamic sculptures. The monolithic, stately figures stride forward and Chadwick seems not only to have cast their clothing in bronze but the very air that they stir as they move by. Dennis Farr and the artist’s wife, Eva, discuss the importance of movement in his work: ‘Chadwick has always been intrigued by movement, either actual or implied, in his sculpture. From his early mobiles to his dancing Teddy Boy and Girl series of the 1950s to his cloaked walking women with windswept hair of the 1980s, he has explored figures in motion. Sometimes their cloaks and draperies flow out in the wind from behind them, or are caught by a gust and wrap themselves around the figures. This essentially lateral progression gives place to a vertical rhythm in his groups of, usually two, figures’ (D. Farr & E. Chadwick, op. cit., p. 15).

In the 1970s Chadwick conceived a simple, yet striking distinction between his male and female figures. Men were depicted with rectangular heads, whilst women were endowed with triangular ones. It is clear that in the various manifestations of the Jubilee series that the female figures possess a more characterised form and general assertiveness than their male counterparts. Both figures’ heads are gently inclined which gives the whole work a sense of determination. Chadwick expressed the need for his work to possess ‘attitude’, he explained that he would bestow this quality by ‘the way that you make something talk by the way the neck is bent, or the attitude of the head; you can actually make these sculptures talk, they say something according to the exact balance, whereas if they’re absolutely straight… well, I suppose that is saying something too’ (quoted from the British Library project Artists’ Lives, 1995, F 4564-B, p. 333).

Other casts from this edition are in the collections of Le Parc du Château, Saint-Priest, Rhône and the Museo Ruffino Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo Internacional, Mexico City.