VIEW EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Willoughby Gerrish are delighted to host our third presentation on the subject of Modern British Sculpture in which we will exhibit twelve key artists of this genre.
The turn of the twentieth century gave rise to momentous change in art in Britain, with innovations and cross-fertilisation taking place at an exponential rate. This exhibition and accompanying essay will consider five themes that were key to the evolution and continuing legacy of Modern British Sculpture. The first two points of consideration are the sculptures of the early modern carvers and, subsequently, the body of work produced by the following generation of direct carvers during the pre-war years. In the former category we can decisively position the likes of Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, both of whose innovations located them as leading figures in the radical avant-garde Vorticist movement.
We find Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth at the forefront of the pre-war direct carvers, each of whom found combined influences from both tribal and ethnographic art as well as in the landscapes of their surroundings. The following two chapters include initiatives to democratise art, on the one hand, when in 1951 the Arts Council commissioned and funded works of art from across the country to put on public display in Britain and abroad – Moore and Kenneth Armitage were just two of the fortunate beneficiaries of this support. This enterprise was reinforced further by the Festival of Britain in the same year and commemorated the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a time at which British art, invention, and industry had first been publicly celebrated. Running in tandem with the promotion of the arts during the 1950s we see a distinct shift in artistic style when modern British artists responded to the ravages of war in what the art critic Herbert Read described in 1952 as the ‘geometry of fear’, an approach that saw the rise of artists such as Lynn Chadwick, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. The concluding section of the exhibition considers the move to abstraction by Anthony Caro and reflects on the lasting legacy of Modern British Sculpture.
