Geoffrey Clarke, like so many of his contemporaries, found almost instant 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’, which later stuck as a ‘group’ name for these artists without too much in common, beyond personal friendships.
Read was attempting to capture a particular quality of these young artists’ work, in counterpoint to the subtle curves of Henry Moore, whose work also featured in the Pavilion that year. For Read, the spiky and etiolated forms of these new welded and forged sculptures, often made from iron rather than bronze, spoke to the existential crisis of the post-war period, as humanity tried to reimagine itself burdened by the knowledge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
For all the ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists, one theme seems to have been constant: that the human and the animal were interchangeable – that man had become a changeling being, easily becoming a beast. Equally, the ‘innocence’ of animals could also stand as a clear metaphor of our ability to wreak suffering on our fellow man. Clarke, Turnbull, Meadows, Chadwick and Paolozzi – perhaps more so than Adams, Butler or Armitage – all created bestiaries of creatures imbued with human emotion.
