What inspires my collecting is always unknown to me, it is just “If I like it”. But I rather like the simple looking Phases of the Moon by sculpture Lynn Chadwick. So different from the triangle shaped aliens he normally represents.
Lynn Chadwick, Moon in Alabama, 1963
Chadwick’s Moon in Alabama series of 1963, variations on a faceted sphere, is a sculptor’s image, yet developed with a consciousness of the potential of printmaking for changing colour ways. †
Lynn Chadwick – Moon in Alabama (colour variant), 1963
Moon in Alabama reminds one of those evil-looking mines, horned with detonators, that were sown at sea and whose shape Chadwick may subconsciously have recalled from his Fleet Air Arm days as he worked on the maquettes. ‡
Lynn Chadwick – Moon in Alabama (colour variant), 1963
Lynn Chadwick – Moon in Alabama (colour variant), 1963
Lynn Chadwick – Maquette II Moon of Alabama
Lynn Chadwick – Maquette III Moon of Alabama
Lynn Chadwick – Full Series of Maquettes and Bottom right the final piece.
J. S. Lewinski – Lynn Chadwick with Moon of Alabama,
† Alan Powers – Art and Print: The Curwen Story, 2008 – p118 ‡ Dennis Farr – Lynn Chadwick, 2003 – p52
Eric Gill – Study for the ‘Blind Girl’ in silverline, dated 9/10/1938, oddly the night of Kristallnacht.
In the 1941 Summer copy of The Countryman I was reading is an advert for the National Institute for the Blind with an Eric Gill engraving. The wood-engraving was made in 1939 for the organisation and is called ‘Blind Girl‘.
In 1934 Eric Gill carved a relief, in-situ, at Moorefields Eye Hospital, London. It depicts Christ and Bartimaeus, it is a beautiful example of Gill’s Carving on public display.
Mark 10:46-52. From the New Life Version of the Bible. Healing of the Blind Man
Then they came to the city of Jericho. When He was leaving the city with His followers and many people, a blind man was sitting by the road. He was asking people for food or money as they passed by. His name was Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus. He heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. He began to speak with a loud voice, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, take pity on me!” Many people spoke sharp words to the blind man telling him not to call out like that. But he spoke all the more. He said, “Son of David, take pity on me.” Jesus stopped and told them to call the blind man. They called to him and said, “Take hope! Stand up, He is calling for you!” As he jumped up, he threw off his coat and came to Jesus. Jesus said to him, “What do you want Me to do for you?” The blind man said to Him, “Lord, I want to see!” Jesus said, “Go! Your faith has healed you.” At once he could see and he followed Jesus down the road.
Below is a bookplate from the library of
Moorefields
Eye Hosptal Library using the design of the relief but unlikely to be by Gills hand..
Arthur Fleischmann was a Slovak-born, London-based sculptor, who pioneered the use of Perspex in sculpture. He spent time in Bali, and in Australia, where he was at the centre of the Merioola Group, before settling in London in 1948. He married his wife Joy in 1959 and their son, the photographer Dominique Fleischmann, was born in 1961.
For the 1951 Festival of Britain, Fleischmann was commissioned to produce a sculpture entitled “Miranda”. The larger than life-size Mermaid was sponsored by the Lockheed Brake and Clutch Company.
Miranda fountain in a press advert for the Lockheed Company, to the left the Festival of Britain and their logo’s are combined, 1951.
Miranda graced the exhibition area in Battersea Park and, after the Festival closed, it was transported to the Lockheed headquarters in Leamington Spa.
Arthur Fleischmann with the statue and on the sofa, the model Joyce Odiase (née Taylor). Photo by Russell Westwood, NPG, 1951.
The statue stayed at the Lockheed headquarters for nearly 50 years before “disappearing” mysteriously over the Christmas holidays of 2000.
A historic bronze statue by sculptor Arthur Fleischmann has been stolen from its home in Leamington Spa. Miranda, a bronze sculpture 2.5m long and 1.2m high, was stolen some time between 14 and 17 December 2001 from the main entrance of the AP (Automotive Products) company in Tachbrook Road.
The sculpture, commissioned by AP’s predecessor, the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company, was created for the 1951 Festival of Britain and first displayed in London’s Festival Gardens. A spokeswoman for Leamington Spa police put the value of the work at between £50,000 and £100,000. So far police have no idea as to its whereabouts or who might have stolen it.
Miranda attracted a great deal of press coverage during the Festival of Britain, in part for its unconventional portrayal of a mermaid with two legs instead of a fish’s body, and fins instead of feet.
Mr Fleischmann said at the time: “I think that mermaids with fish tails are rather dull. “Why should not a beautiful mermaid have nice legs? She can still swim with her fins on her feet. At least that is how I imagine a mermaid.”
The work, intended as a tribute to the skill and industry of the people of Britain, took three months to create and involved two models. The bronze was cast by Vincent Galizia foundry at Battersea, south London, and was returned to Leamington Spa after the Festival closed. It was set in a fountain and was listed as a Grade II building, and remained on its site until the theft. †
Front cover of Precision Magazine, 1951.
The Henry-Moore Institute acquired two terracotta maquettes of Miranda created by Fleischmann in around 1948 (at the same time that he did the portraits of the actor Trevor Howard) and these are on display in the Institute gallery space in Leeds. When a cheeky reporter quipped at Fleischmann during the Festival that everyone knows a mermaid has a tail and not two legs with fins, my father replied that he had never seen a mermaid and so couldn’t comment.
Joyce Odiase (née Taylor) in a riske shot with the maquette of Miranda.
Every time I go to Saffron Walden I walk past the Fry Gallery and into Bridge End Gardens.
My Father was born around the corner and I remember being taken to the gardens as a child. My father’s memories of the gardens were quite different from today. During WW2 they had been dug up and used to grow vegetables in the Dig For Victory campaign. They were somewhat restored but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the work was put into making them into somewhere you would want to go.
Lately they have added a visitors centre and in that is a large plaque with illustrations by Christopher Brown, below are some details of his illustrations of the garden sections and photos of mine.
The drawn plan is by Christopher Brown who studied at the Royal College of Art where he first met, then later assisted, Edward Bawden. Christopher made his first trip to Saffron Walden to visit Bawden in 1979. Over the course of subsequent visits they sometimes walked through the Garden, which was in a sorry state at the time. Returning to the town for this commission, Christopher believes Bawden would appreciate the restoration work.
Bridge End Gardens were built on fields on the edge of Saffron Walden and covers an area of 2.7 hectares (7 acres). The area was set out as gardens from around 1828 by Atkinson Francis Gibson and his wife Elizabeth.
From 1838, his son Francis Gibson – who was interested in horticulture and had also completed a garden design for his sister – began creating a new garden with the help of a local nurseryman William Chater. The hedge maze was planted around 1870, by which stage the garden was under the management of a local agent and was used as a venue for shows by the Saffron Walden horticultural society.
The site opened to the public in 1902 and the borough council took over responsibility for its management from 1918, designating it as a ‘public pleasure ground’.
In 1987, the garden was listed with English Heritage. In the same year, the maze was replanted and the kitchen garden cleared. Between 2002–2006 the garden was restored back to the 1870 plan. The kitchen garden reopened between 2009 and 2011. †
This statue I find covered with feathers or flowers, some local person is always decorating him in various organic items.
The Damned was Joseph Losey’s 1963 film for Hammer Film Productions. (It is Losey who also directed one of my favourite films ‘The Servant’ the same year).
The Damned features teddy boy thugs and nuclear science fiction, it’s really rather odd. The plot revolves around a sculpture called Freya Neilson. The sculptures featured are all by British artist Elisabeth Frink.
Frink not only lent these but also was on location for their shooting and coached Lindfors on performing the sculptor’s method of building up plaster, which was then ferociously worked and carved. According to Evan Jones (interview with the author), Frink was around for all the location shooting, seemed to thoroughly enjoy the process, and became quite good friends with Losey and members of the crew. There is no evidence that she was paid. She did receive a prominent screen credit, however, and there is anecdotal evidence that Frink welcomed the exposure, and that it enhanced her career. †
Elisabeth Frink – Bird, 1959
The experience of growing up during the war years strongly affected Frink’s sculpture. This work is one of a number of bronzes, executed in the 1950s, in which animal forms are given a menacing, military appearance. Although only thirty-eight centimetres high, this bird appears simultaneously aggressive, powerful and like a damaged but defiant survivor of a nuclear attack. Typical of the sculptor’s early work, the distressed, textured surface and spindly, striding legs of the bird recall the work of Giacometti, who Frink cited as a great influence. ‡
This post is about the 1967 gift of Henry Moore’s works to the Tate and how it never came to be. But more so, it’s about a public statement against that donation by 41 of his peers; people like Elisabeth Frink, Patrick Caulfield, Derek Boshier, Eduardo Paolozzi and Joe Tilson to name a few.
Henry Moore – Three Fates, 1941
Having been a student at the Royal College of Art from 1921 to 1924, his first major breakthrough was as part of the Seven and Five Society. The society was set up in the 1920s, mostly for painters, but in the 30s they expanded and the new members bought a more abstract stance with them. The newer members where John Piper, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and John Skeaping.
In the 40s Moore’s London Underground ‘shelter scenes’ presented his work with a human and sensitive side. From then on, a massive bulk of sculpture, drawings, paintings and books forged Moore as a great British artist.
Moore was looking how to cement his legacy as an artist. He was on, what anyone would have assumed was the peak of his forty year career.
Henry Moore – Three Piece Reclining Figure No.2: Bridge Prop
On 27th February 1967, The Times’s front page hailed news that Henry Moore intended to donate many of his works to the Tate Gallery, London.
He had enjoyed a long association with the Tate, not least as trustee, and the idea of a gift was first mooted in 1964. In 1967 he made it conditional on an extension of the Tate’s galleries. †
Flint stones in Henry Moore’s studio
The gift would have required the Tate to build a new wing to house the works. The cost to house the collection was rumoured to have been half a million British Pounds in 1967. In the weeks and months after the announcement, negotiations where held about how to raise the money, meanwhile, 41 artists wrote a letter to The Times to protest the new works, two of them, Moore’s own students.
The letter featured the phrase they all feared would happen if the works were housed: ‘publicly financed form of permanent enshrinement’ ‡.
‘Contemporary artists close to the Tape expressed their concern over so much space and funding going toward the celebration of one artist alone’ ♠.
Times 26 May 1967 HENRY MOORE’S GIFT From Mr. Craigie Aitchison and others
Sir. – References have been made in the press and in public during the last few weeks concerning the offer made by Henry Moore to the Tate of between 20 and 30 major works. We understand that the Government will be giving £200,000, and that the Tate will be raising an equivalent sum specifically towards housing these works.
We must not lose sight of the fact that this £400,000, probably only a starting figure, is public money: and considering how public this whole matter should be there has been little precise information available. What can be deduced should be viewed with concern.
We may assume that at least half the gift will be large works. These alone properly displayed would require a space twice the size of the present sculpture hall. Even if the permanent display of these pieces is not envisaged the question of storage is equally crucial.
There are great priorities confronting public patronage of the arts. The Tate has only limited space into which to expand and in which to fulfil its role as the only permanent manifestation of a living culture. London has failed so far to provide itself with museum facilities commensurate with its importance as an art centre and it will not achieve its proper place as an organic part of our world by devoting itself so massively to the work of a single artist.
Whoever is picked out for this exceptional place will necessarily seem to represent the triumph of modern art in our society. The radical nature of art in the twentieth century is inconsistent with the notion of an heroic and monumental role for the artist and any attempt to predetermine greatness for an individual in a publicly financed form of permanent enshrinement is a move we as artists repudiate.
Yours faithfully, CRAIGIE AITCHISON, DAVID ANNESLEY, GILLIAN AYRES, ANTHONY BENJAMIN, DEREK BOSHIER, ANTHONY CARO, PATRICK CAULFIELD, BERNARD COHEN, HAROLD COHEN, GARTH EVANS, SHEILA FELL, ELISABETH FRINK, PATRICK GEORGE, ANTHONY HILL, HOWARD HODGKIN, MALCOLM HUGHES, GWYTHER IRWIN, TESS JARAY, ALLAN JONES, MICHAEL KIDNER, PHILLIP KING, JOHN LATHAM, FRANCIS MORLAND, HENRY MUNDY, MYLES MURPHY, EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, JOHN PLUMB, TIM SCOTT, PETER SEDGLEY, PETER SNOW, PETER STARTUP, JOE TILSON, WILLIAM TUCKER, EUAN UGLOW, MARC VAUX, BRIAN WALL, GILLIAN WISE, ANTHONY WISHAW, BRIAN YOUNG. ‡
The works would end up going to Toronto with the art gallery there proposing to build a wing for the works and reassuring Moore with architect letters and funding plans on how they would present the collection. The galleries campaign to get the works was lead by Allan Ross, the former president of WM.Wrigley chewing gum. He stated he would donate $500,000 towards a gallery for Henry Moore in Toronto.
Ross wrote: ‘It occurred to me that we of Toronto, and Ontario, and Canada, should build a splendid classical structure to adequately house the collection you have in mind for Tate Gallery and which they for some years apparently cannot accommodate’. ♠
The Henry Moore Gallery in Toronto.
† Henry Moore by Chris Stephens, 2010. p14 9781854378767
‡ ‘Henry Moore’s Gift’, in Times 26 May 1967, in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publication, 2015.
♠ Sculpture and the Museum by Christopher R. Marshall, 2011. p79-80 9781409409106
On the corner of the road into Cambridge, in Trumpington, is a very simple looking war memorial. Up close, you notice the detail and the figures. With no information or makers mark near-by you have to google the sculptor. In this case and rather unexpectedly it is by Eric Gill. Gill is remembered today as a typographic designer and sculptor, this most famous in Britain being Prospero and Ariel on Broadcasting House, London.
The four pictograph designs (an individual design for each side) for the Trumpington Cross are subtlety arranged at the base of the cross. Below that on the pedestal are Norman looking arches with the names of the fallen from WWII between.
For Trumpington, Cambridgeshire, he created a plain ‘cross of vaguely medieval form’ adorned with four small reliefs. One of the reliefs was based on a design by the author David Jones (like Gill a convert to Roman Catholicism), who had joined Gill’s radical ‘guild […] of craftsmen’ which sought to revive the communal spirit of medieval society. †
This was memorial was commissioned by the village itself, although the Pemberton family who owned Trumpington Hall has lost their son, Francis, in October 1914 and where the main donors to the village’s war memorial fun. The memorial cross that Gill designed was unveiled in 1921 and stands outside the gates of the hall. This spot was the most prominent corner of the village, on the junction of the village street and the main road to Cambridge.‡
It is the four images carved in relief on panels at the base of the cross which are so striking. Two of these represent religious subjects – St Michael triumphant in defeating the Devil, and the Madonna and Child (the parish church is dedicated to SS. Mary and Michael) – while the third depicts St George slaying the dragon. So far, so conventional. However, the fourth panel shows an exhausted soldier returning from the war, and this is one of the most profound, though least known, images of the experience of war to appear on any war memorial in Britain or Germany.‡
The Madonna and Child side below, seams to need some restoration as it’s weathering away.
The four sides of the shaft are inscribed with the names of 36 men from WWI and on the base a later addition of 8 men from WWII and what I believe is one from a subsequent war.
† The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940 by Dr Stefan Goebel, 2007. 9780521854153 p.60.
‡ The silent morning (Cultural History of Modern War) by Trudi Tate, Kate Kennedy, 2015, 9781784991166 p.326.
