Deutscher and Hackett

‘Art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by the imagination and translated by the artist’s ability and skill… Whatever the final shape, the force behind is… indivisible. When we philosophise upon this force, we lose sight of it. The intellect alone is too clumsy to grasp it.’¹
 
Like his much-admired predecessors and contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti and Barbara Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors. Fusing extraordinary imagination with immense technical ability, his art is revered for its remarkable ability to both respond to, and transcend, its time; as Terence Mullaly reflected in his obituary of the artist, ‘…he produced objects eloquent of both the grandeur and the dilemma of man. They are highly idiosyncratic, yet their message is universal.’² Born in London in 1914, Chadwick studied architectural drafting and design after his World War II service as a pilot, before emerging during the fifties as a sculptor with a singularly distinctive and dramatic style. Following two solo exhibitions at Gimpel Fils, London, he was propelled to fame in 1952 as one of seven young British sculptors invited to exhibit at the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1952, and in 1956, was awarded the Biennale’s highest honour – the prestigious International Prize for Sculpture. Over the subsequent decades, Chadwick has exhibited to widespread success in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, and today is represented with works in most major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.
 
Although Chadwick’s first creations were – quite appropriately, given his flying experience – abstract mobiles and elegant suspended constructions of metal and glass, it is his timeless architectonic forms combining elements of the human and mechanical such as Sitting woman, 1985, for which he remains most highly acclaimed. Evolving from the brooding standing figures of the sixties, and the voluminous, striding figures of the seventies onwards, the present bronze is an impressive example of the artist’s seated figure motif which, though punctuating his entire oeuvre to a certain degree, culminates during this decade – most famously in his monumental Back to Venice, 1988, commissioned by the British Council for the XLIII Venice Biennale in memory of the artist’s extraordinary achievement thirty-two years earlier.
 
Capturing the rarefied essence of something human, universal, contemplative and at times, elegiac, Sitting woman invariably beguiles and attracts, drawing in the viewer yet at the same time, revealing little. Like the best of Chadwick’s mysterious works, the sculpture remains powerfully elusive in its anonymous strength and silent presence – and perhaps that is the point. As the artist himself – notoriously reluctant to assign specific meaning to his work – elaborates, ‘...The important thing in my figures is always the attitude – what the figures are expressing through their actual stance. They talk, as it were, and this is something a lot of people don’t understand...’³
 
1. Chadwick, L., The Listener, London, 21 October 1954
2. Mulally, T., ‘Lynn Chadwick’, The Guardian, London, 28 April 2003, p. 5
3. Chadwick cited at http://www.gallerycenter.org/elaine_baker_chadwick.shtml

VERONICA ANGELATOS