Bernard Meadows was a key figure in Modern British Art, gaining prominence through his inclusion in the 1952 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where critic Herbert Read coined the term ‘geometry of fear’ to describe the tense, expressive forms of post-war British sculpture. Meadows’ works -often featuring crabs and birds- reflected the anxieties of the time, serving as metaphors for human vulnerability. By the 1960s, his practice shifted towards a more optimistic visual language, aligning with the decade’s changing cultural outlook.
Bernard Meadows, like so many of his contemporaries, such as Geoffrey Clarke and Eduardo Paolozzi found success and acclaim through his inclusion in Herbert Read’s selection for the 1952 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
It was in the catalogue for this show that Read coined the term ‘the geometry of fear’, an attempt to capture a particular quality of these young artists’ work, with their spiky and attenuated forms that spoke to the existential crisis of the post-war period, as humanity tried to reimagine itself, burdened by the knowledge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Read’s catalogue text was certainly inspired by Meadows’ iconic crab sculptures:
‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws “scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.’
In the 1950s, crabs and birds were the mainstay of Meadows’ iconography. He wrote that, 'Birds can express a whole range of tragic emotion, they have a vulnerability which makes it easy to use them as a vehicle for people’ and in a statement written for Bryan Robertson, who curated his second solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1959, Meadows also observed: ‘I look upon birds and crabs as human substitutes, they are vehicles expressing my feeling about human beings. To use non-human forms is…less inhibiting: one is less conscious of what has gone before and is more free to take liberties with the form.’
In the 1960s, however, Meadows did not continue to plough the ‘geometry of fear’ furrow, much as perhaps his gallery and the market would have liked. Instead, like his contemporary Kenneth Armitage, he looked to find a new sculptural vocabulary that spoke to the nascent optimism of the 1960s. An element of joy returns.
