Lot 159
Geoffrey Clarke R.A. (British 1924-2014) §
Bird I, 1954
£6,552
Auction: 28 October 2022 from 10:00 BST
Description
unique, iron and stone
Dimensions
Provenance
Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner after the 1955 exhibition.
Footnote
This work also has a variant title of 'Rook'.
Exhibited:
Gimpel Fils, London, Recent Sculpture, Drawings and Engravings by Geoffrey Clarke; Collages by Austin Cooper, January 1955, no.17.
Literature:
LeGrove, Judith, Geoffrey Clarke: A Sculptor's Materials, Bristol, 2017, pp.112-113 (illustrated);
LeGrove, Judith, Geoffrey Clarke: Sculptor: Catalogue Raisonné, London, 2017, p.40, no.578 (illustrated).
Geoffrey Clarke was included in Herbert Read’s selection for the 1952 British Pavilion at Venice Biennale. It was in the catalogue for this show that Read coined the term ‘The Geometry of Fear’. 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 Venice. 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 [which found equivalents, too, in the paintings of Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland]. Bird One can be seen almost as the pendant to Clarke’s Complexities of Man (1951) now in the Tate. Both works resonate with human angst, but also with something deeper and more compelling. In Bird One, this is realised in the juxtaposition of the smooth, beautifully carved stone egg with the scored and rough surface of the nest and the spiky form of its protective parent, its head and beak striking out into space. The mass of the egg weights and centres the work, lending the initially terrifying form of the bird an underlying warmth and humanity, its primal scream turning to a song of motherhood.
