£6,300
MODERN MADE: Modern & Post-War Art, Design & Studio Ceramics | 695
Auction: 28 October 2022 at 11:00 BST
from an edition of 6, each panel stamped with monogram, patinated bronze
Provenance:
Gimpel Fils, London.
Literature:
Bowness, Alan, Bernard Meadows: Sculpture and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1995, p. 140, no.49 (another cast illustrated).
Exhibited:
Gimpel Fils, London, Recent Sculpture by Bernard Meadows, April 1959, no. 45;
Ottawa, British Council Tour, National Gallery of Canada, Recent British Sculpture: Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Hubert Dalwood, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, April - June 1961, no. 48: this exhibition toured to Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, August - September 1961; Winnipeg, Winnipeg Art Gallery, September - October 1961; Saskatchewan, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina College, November 1961; Toronto, Art Gallery of Toronto, January - February 1962; Ontario, Public Library and Art Museum, February - March 1962; Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, March - April 1962; Auckland, Auckland Institute and Museum, July 1962; Wellington, Dominion Museum, August - September 1962; Dunedin, Otago Museum, October 1962; Christchurch, Canterbury Museum, November - December 1962; Perth, Western Australia Art Gallery, January - February 1963; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, July - August 1963; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, September - October 1963; Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, November - December 1963; New South Wales, Newcastle War Memorial Cultural Centre, January 1964; Canberra, Albert Hall, February 1964; Tokyo, Bridgestone Art Gallery; and other Japanese venues, including Kyoto, Museum of Modern Art, July - August 1964; and Hong Kong, City Hall Art Gallery, August - September 1964.
Bernard Meadows, like so many of his contemporaries, such as Geoffrey Clarke (lot 159) and Eduardo Paolozzi (lots 257-265) 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, in counterpoint to the subtle curves of Henry Moore, whose work also featured in Venice. For Read, the spiky and etiolated forms of these new welded and forged sculptures 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 50s, crabs and birds were certainly the mainstay of Meadows’ iconography. In a statement written for Bryan Robertson, who curated his second solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1959 [then one of the most cutting-edge places to show in London], Meadows observes: ‘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.’ And as the artist also wrote elsewhere: ‘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’.