Page 21 - Studio International - October 1966

British sculpture : the developing scene

Gene Baro

What is sculpture? Today, the British artist working in
the medium is in a position to redefine it. This is not
necessarily to insist upon a formulation radically new or
unforeseen. Most of the work being done by the younger
men here, personal as it is likely to be in its attack, has
reference to precedents established elsewhere. In this
sense, the new sculpture is not new; what it involves
actually is a redirection of emphasis, a shift of aims and
standards—in short, the formation of an alternative
aesthetic, of principles of taste and workmanship, and of
habits of seeing.
Sculptors like Caro, Turnbull, and Paolozzi stand in
one sort of relation to these changes; somewhat younger
men, like King, Annesley, Tucker, Bolus, Scott, Witkin,
Woodham, and Piché in another. And there is yet
another response in sculptors like Barry Flanagan,
Waldemar D'Orey, Ron Robertson-Swann, Ian Spencer,
and Gerard Hemsworth, who are students or not far
from their student years. Then too, there is the somewhat
older generation affected now in its individual practice
by current shifts in sensibility, for instance, Kenneth
Armitage, F. E. McWilliam, and Bernard Meadows.
Putting these artists together in the way that I have is
not to suggest that they approach artistic questions
similarly. The groupings indicate a rough approximation
in age. The significance is that each 'set' of artists stands
in a different relation to the recent past. Caro, Turnbull,
and Paolozzi, for instance, began their serious work as
sculptors in the immediate post-war years—in the world
of Henry Moore. Their development as independent
artists coincided with the time when Moore's aesthetic
had come into wide prominence and was most influential.
The younger of the men I mention begin their work
without feeling in any marked degree the pressures of
that august authority; they are born into a world of
newly unstable artistic standards, where perhaps not
quite anything seems to go.
The debate over sculpture is not unique to the present.
It was characteristic of the period following the Second
World War, when British sculpture was seen to have
come of age internationally. This meant chiefly Moore
and Hepworth; he won the Venice Biennale sculpture
prize in 1948; she held a much-admired retrospective in
Venice two years later. Their long struggles with the
indifferent public and the privileged academy had led at
last in Britain to a generally enlarged view of the art.
The young men who followed them on the international
scene—Butler, Armitage, Chadwick, who were able to
build in adjustment to their success—must have felt in-
William Turnbull No. 4 1964 Steel painted silver Height 102 in. debted to their liberating efforts, for all the good fights
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