Page 55 - Studio International - May 1966

Laurence Burt

London commentary by Charles S. Spencer
There is a quality reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence in the The influence of this experience can be seen in his early
career and personality of Laurence Burt; the mixture of sculpture, the huge helmet shapes which look like parts
toughness and sensitivity, egocentricity and humanism, of aeroplanes or racing-cars. During this period he took
not uncommon in the northern working-class, from which, his first steps towards becoming an artist. 'I never
incidentally, a remarkable number of contemporary thought I would ever be an artist. I believed people were
British sculptors have sprung. born artists, not made into them. There's no artistic
Burt is virtually self-taught. He left school at 14, ap- background in my family, except for a grandfather who
prenticed to an architectural metalworker. His four was a stonemason, but I hardly knew him.'
brothers were wood or metal workers. In 1941, at the In 1949 he enrolled at Leeds College evening school and
age of 16, he joined the army and afterwards worked for began clay modelling. Encouraged by the staff he re-
seven years as a metal-panel beater, making car wings. mained for five years and in 1954, then 29 years old,
married and with two children, he was offered the job
Born Leeds, 1925; worked of studio assistant. The salary was £8 10s, compared
as industrial metal worker and
studied in evenings at with the £15 a week he was earning in industry. 'Every-
Leeds College of Art; taught one said I was foolish. I didn't know what was going to
at Leeds College of Art happen. I just wanted to get nearer to the business of
1956-60; taught at Leicester
College of Art 1960-4; being an artist.' He decided to take the plunge.
principal lecturer, fine art Burt's skill with industrial processes was especially
department, Cardiff College useful to the College. The whole milieu was encouraging;
of Art since 1964; first one-
man exhibition Drian Hubert Dalwood was at Leeds University as the first
Galleries 1961; represented Gregory Fellow and Terry Frost and Norbert Lynton
in collections of Tate Gallery, were teaching there. But after a year Burt found he could
Welsh Arts Council, Leeds
County Council and not support his family and was forced to give up the job.
Leicestershire County The College, however, offered him a teaching post, which
Council. has been the foundation of his subsequent career at
Leicester and Cardiff. But in 1956 he was not yet a
sculptor: 'I worked like a slave. It was an important
exploratory period for the College and few people actu-
ally knew how to make things. But I still didn't do any-
thing creative.' His ideas formed slowly. He started work-
ing in iron, then in clay, casting in cementfondu. And then,
almost subconsciously, he returned to his original skill as
a panel beater and produced the remarkable series of
Helmets, one of which is now in the Tate Gallery.
The origin of these forms is a mixture of remembered
skills and romantic, literary associations. They are clearly
related to car wings but also concerned with what Burt
calls 'black space'. This concept is based on the Teutonic
war helmets in Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible—`They
were like inverted buckets with a mysterious black space
behind them, a kind of nothingness.' This concept of a
black box containing 'nothingness' figures in his very
different new sculpture. He now feels that the Helmets did
not say enough: 'Art should be concerned with contra-
diction and contrast, bound up with all kinds of experi-
ence.' He is critical of the superficiality of much contem-
porary art, for which he partly blames the galleries and
the art establishment who 'demand work on a con-
tinuously simple level'.
Certainly in the last two years, after a long trying period,
his work has changed drastically. The new sculptures
represent an effort towards a complex, diverse statement
—figurative, symbolic, poetic, intuitive, recollective and
prophetic at the same time. At first glance there is a
seeming relationship with Pop-imagery in the doll-like
figures or the irony of the contrasts; and also with Sur-
realism, even Dadaism, although this is largely a fascina-
tion with the macabre. The forms remain solid and tough,