Lynn Chadwick

Accordingly, Chadwick became a trainee draughtsman, working first at the offices of architects Donald Hamilton and then Eugen Carl Kauffman, and finally for Rodney Thomas.

[4] Chadwick took great inspiration from Thomas, whose interest in contemporary European architecture and design had a significant effect on his development.

[5] Very few of these works survive; they were made of wire, balsa wood and cut copper and brass shapes, often fish-like and sometimes coloured.

[6]Desiring a better family life and more room to work, Chadwick left London in 1947, eventually settling in the hamlet of Upper Coberley, near Cheltenham.

[12] In August 1949 one of Chadwick's small mobiles was placed in the window of Gimpel Fils, which promoted modern British art.

[13][14][15] The following year, he held his first one-man show there, which led to critical attention and several major commissions: two for the 1951 Festival of Britain complex, Tower and Cypress, and one, Green Finger, for the Battersea Park Open Air Sculpture Exhibition that year[5] In Spring 1950, British architects, artists and designers were making plans for the celebrations surrounding the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Architect Misha Black then commissioned Chadwick to make a large fixed sculpture for the garden of the Regatta Restaurant, Stabile (Cypress), made from copper sheets and brass rods.

[10] In January 1952, Chadwick was asked to present to the selection committee of the XXVI Venice Biennale, resulting in his being one of eight young British sculptors who were invited to exhibit at the Biennale, including Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull.

[20] The poet and art critic Herbert Read wrote the introduction to the catalogue for this show, called New Aspects of British Sculpture.

[21] He described Chadwick's work, in what was to become a long-held interpretation, situating it alongside quotes from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land against the backdrop of the Cold War:[22] These new images belong to the iconography of despair, of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt.

Here are images of flight, of ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

[10] He had started to develop a technique that fused solid form with the plastic energy of his earlier works, creating an "armature" of welded steel rods and a method of composition that played on the expressive potential of the framework and "skeletons" of his figures, while also constructing a firm, tactile "body".

In 1954 having discovered the medium of "Stolit", an industrial stone compound of gypsum and iron filings which could be applied wet before setting, and when dry, chased to achieve the surface Chadwick desired – sometimes textured, sometimes smooth.

In 1956, Chadwick was chosen by the British Council as one of the lead sculptors to represent Britain at the XXVIII Venice Biennale.

[5] Following this critical esteem, Chadwick was talked of as the natural successor to Henry Moore as Britain's leading sculptor and artistic ambassador.

Also in 1957, the Air League of the British Empire commissioned him to make a sculpture to commemorate the round trip flight across the Atlantic Ocean by the Airship R34 in 1919.

During the 1960s, Chadwick's work, which had been situated by critics within the aesthetic of post-war sensibility, fell victim to changing fashions during the rise of Pop Art.

[5] In a catalogue essay on an exhibition of Chadwick's sculptures and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in January 1962, Herbert Read noted that Chadwick has consolidated his style and subject matter since winning the 1956 Sculpture Prize at Venice, saying ..."He is still preoccupied with states of attention or alertness in the human figure or the animal.

His aim is to incorporate a moment of maximum intensity, and this he does by the most direct means – the reduction of bodily attitudes to their magnetic lines of force"... [29] During the 1960s, Chadwick began to work in a more abstract style, producing works such as King (1964), which were influenced by Easter Island figures, as well as a series of colourful "Pyramid" and "Split" sculptures – clean geometrical shapes made from Formica on wood.

Chadwick is said to have delighted in the properties that steel afforded; no matter how dull the weather some facet of the sculptures would catch and reflect the light.

[33] In 1991, he introduced the motif of a pair of female figures climbing and descending short flights of stairs, captured in contrary motion.