Michael Ayrton (1921-1975), originally called Michael Ayrton Gould, was born to notable parents - his father, Gerald Gould, was an essayist and poet; whilst his mother, Barbara Ayrton, was a Labour politician and suffragist. After a liberal childhood, Ayrton’s teenage years were tumultuous, and he began studying art after being expelled from school at the age of 14. His father’s disapproval led him to adopt his mother’s maiden name. During the 1930s, he studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art and St John’s Wood Art School, then he continued his studies in Paris, where he and John Minton shared a studio and were taught by Eugène Berman. Ayrton also travelled to Spain and attempted to fight in the Spanish Civil War for the Republican side, however he was rejected for being too young.
Ayrton participated in a broad and eclectic range of projects during his career. In 1938, he was tasked with designing the stage scenery and costumes for John Gielgud’s Macbeth. In the 1940s, he took up a position teaching drawing and stage design at the Camberwell School of Art, and also took part in the BBC’s popular radio programme The Brains Trust. There were solo exhibitions of his drawings and paintings at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1949 and at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1955.
The discovery of Greek landscape and mythology shaped the rest of his career. He travelled a lot around Greece and took a keen interest in Greek Mythology. He particularly became transfixed by the myth of the Minotaur and Daedalus’ labyrinth and embarked on a long-term exploration of this theme. Ayrton described this shift in his focus:
“Since 1964, most of my work has been concerned with the image of a man in a labyrinth... Thus the maze has come to serve for me as an image of my own life and indeed of any individual’s life. Every man, it seems to me, makes his maze out of his experiences, his circumstances, his hopes and fears, and in it he lives, so that the shape of it identifies him. Every maze is therefore different, for each is personal and yet various. Each is a prison and a sanctuary, a journey and a destination...it contains him wholly and he extends it all his life.”
With growing interest in sculpture, Ayrton looked to Rodin and Giacometti for inspiration and found the Proto-Renaissance sculpture of Giovanni Pisano to be particularly influential. His desire to interpret mythological ideas in figurative form manifested primarily in the medium of bronze sculpture – with which he received technical advice from Henry Moore. He also produced a variety of literature on the subject, including a pseudo-autobiographical novel entitled The Maze Maker. Upon reading this book Armand Erpf, the eccentric American millionaire, commissioned an artist to design him a maze of his own based upon Ayrton’s numerous sketches and paintings - the Arkville Maze on Erpf’s estate in Delaware, New York, consists of 1,680 feet of stone pathways with a large bronze Minotaur at the centre.
Though he is best known for his sculpture, Ayrton preferred to refer to himself merely as an ‘image-maker’; his diverse ventures across the arts have led to his description as a 20th century Renaissance man.
A major retrospective exhibition of his work took place at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1977, and his works are today held by important collections including the Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
