LYNN CHADWICK: Lynn Chadwick, who has died aged 88, was one of the few great sculptors of our age. He has been widely regarded as the successor to Henry Moore and, with the passage of time, Chadwick will come to be seen as one of the major figures in the arts of the second half of the 20th century.
Chadwick produced images eloquent of both the grandeur and the dilemma of man. They are highly idiosyncratic, yet their message is universal. They have as great an impact in major public spaces in New York or London as they do at the Hakone open air museum in Japan.
This gift of Chadwick has been widely recognised. He is represented in leading museums of modern art all over the world, including the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. Indeed, his work is included in public collections in 22 countries, from Australia to Finland. There have also been a vast number of exhibitions of his sculpture.
At the same time much has been written about Chadwick; above all there is a complete illustrated catalogue covering the years 1947-1996, the work of Dennis Farr and Chadwick's third wife, Eva Reiner.
He was born in 1914 in London and educated at Merchant Taylors' school. From 1933-39, he worked as an architectural draftsman. He served in the Fleet Air Arm as a pilot from 1941-1944.
Immediately after the second world war, in 1946, he won a textile design competition and from 1947-52, he produced textile, furniture and architectural designs. He was also a print-maker. However, his first mobile had been shown at the Building Trades Exhibition in 1947 and he had his first one-man show in 1950 at Gimpel Fils, then a gallery of considerable influence.
A period of intense activity as a sculptor followed. In 1951 Chadwick was commissioned by the Arts Council to produce work to be shown at the Festival of Britain.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, recognition of his work came worldwide. In 1953 he was one of 12 semi-finalists for the Unknown Political Prisoner international sculpture competition and was awarded an honourable mention and a prize. In 1956 he was given the greater honour of the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.
At home he was awarded a CBE in 1964 and the French created him an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985); he was in 1993 made a Commandeur of the same Order. Such honours were recognition of the fact that by the end of the 1950s Chadwick had been accepted as pre-eminent among those young British sculptors who were producing the most telling images and were leading the world. The British Council recognised this and there were Chadwick exhibitions around the globe.
As a sculptor he was self-trained, but early on he became an extremely skilled craftsmen in metal. In the studio and workshops at his home for many years at Lypiatt Park, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, he did indeed recall the great sculptors of the Renaissance, above all Cellini.
Chadwick's third wife, Eva, and his home at Lypiatt Park were central to his maturity. She was his constant companion and was practically, especially as the chronicler and cataloguer of his work, his perfect foil.
Lypiatt, too, was ideal. Both his monumental pieces of sculpture and his small bronzes looked perfect in the ample, uncluttered spaces of the house, while the rolling and hilly grounds of the park provide the ideal setting for his grandest works.
Chadwick was a big man in personal stature and his equally large imagination could encompass the human dilemma. Only great sculptors have combined his qualities of imagination and high technical ability.
Unforgettable were the occasions when he would take a friend or admirer for a drive in his Land-Rover around Lypiatt Park to see his skilfully placed major works. As you drove on the park's steep hills at perilous angles, one telling great bronze figure or group after another would come into view. Bronze was central to his art.
His simplified human figures have already stamped themselves upon the artistic imagination and have come to stand as symbols. His Three Elektras of 1969 are a token of how the human figure can be grand, dynamic and poignant; while there are few pieces of sculpture more touching than his Sitting Couple, of 1971, or more aggressive than the Beasts that he was producing as late as 1990. His seated figures are eloquent of the gravity and monumentality of the human body and in them intense emotion is suggested with the surest of means.
This is a clue as to why his simplifications work so well both in his monumental pieces and in small bronzes. The female head is reduced to a triangle, the legs are straight and spiky, drapery is shown as an austere sweeping form, but the essentials of structure or movement are conveyed.
Whether larger-than-life size or reduced down to the scale of a medal, the essentials of the image are clear.
In 1984, Chadwick produced one of the finest medals of the second half of the 20th century. At the time I was vice-president of the British Art Medal Society and commissioned the work. For a while I heard nothing and then he admitted that he was having problems creating an image appropriate for a medal. I said: "Give us your usual simplified shapes" and he then produced a great medal.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many people felt that Chadwick's work had failed to evolve - but they simply were not looking. His Stairs, 1991, with two figures passing in opposite directions, is one of the most telling representations both of movement and of human relationships in sculpture.
Similarly his High Wind IV, 1995, emphasises that in his work, he had retained in old age all the vigour and wit of his best known pieces of sculpture from his earlier phases.
Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, was transformed between September 1999 and February 2000 when Chadwick's monumental pieces were scattered about its campus. His ability to dignify the human image, while at the same time suggesting its everyday qualities, was very evident there.
He is survived by a son from his first marriage to Charlotte Secord (who died in 1997), two daughters from his second to Francis Jamieson (who died in 1964) and by Eva, with whom he had a son.
Lynn Russell Chadwick, sculptor, born November 24th, 1914; died April 25th, 2003.