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Lot Essay
The present work is an important and unique piece which Chadwick created at a crucial point in his development as a sculptor. In 1944 he had returned to the architect's office of Rodney Thomas and, influenced by his employer, began working on mobile structures, which led to his first solo show at Gimpels in 1951. Dating from this year, Balanced Sculpture shows the progression that Chadwick made from mobile to stabile at this time. Similar to The Fisheater, 1951 (Tate, London) (fig. 1), the present work has a static base, however, unlike the larger Tate piece, the emphasis has shifted from the mobile element to the more solid supporting structure.
The balanced sculptures (fig. 2) were described by Robert Melville as, 'bow-legged, ponderous structures, armed to excess against aggression ... They are conceived as object-beings. They contain suspended, sharp-toothed inner structures which swing or revolve when disturbed, and seem more likely to injure the object being itself than its hypothetical antagonists. This mobile component is a nightmarish symbol of the last flicker of nimbleness in a creature which has lost the power to advance or retreat under the compulsion to make Kafka-like preparations against attack' (see exhibition catalogue, Venice, XXVIII Biennale, British Council, 1956).
The spiky aspects of the present work bring to mind the phrase that Herbert Read coined to unify the British Council's choice for the exhibition New Aspects of British Sculpture shown at the Venice Biennale in 1952. He wrote, 'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance ... Here are images of flight, of ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear ... They have siezed Eliot's image of the Hollow Men, and given it an isomorphic materiality. They have peopled the Waste Land with their iron waifs' (Exhibition catalogue, New Aspects of British Sculpture, British Council, Venice Biennale XXVI, 1952). Created at a time when the world was still recovering from World War II and the shock of the devastation caused by the atom bombs dropped in Japan, Balanced Sculpture conveys a strong sense of uneasiness and strange aggression that was to characterise the collective fear of entering the nuclear age.
The form of the sculpture clearly links Chadwick's work to other British artists including Graham Sutherland (see lot 26). Margaret Garlake's comments about Sutherland's work of the 1930s could also be applied to the forms seen in the present work, 'Sutherland's own transformations of insignificant roots and plants into images infused with intense hostile vitality and for the luxuriant, spikey vegetation which was a definitive neo-Romantic motif. The twisted gorse, which has sprouted menacing prehensile terminals, suggests a mutation between plant and animal or human organisms, a dissolution of the barriers between species' (see New Art New World British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 90).
The present owner was art critic for The Spectator (1946-1956), Art Editor and Assistant Editor for Picture Post (1949-1953) and Editor of House and Garden (1955-1957).
The balanced sculptures (fig. 2) were described by Robert Melville as, 'bow-legged, ponderous structures, armed to excess against aggression ... They are conceived as object-beings. They contain suspended, sharp-toothed inner structures which swing or revolve when disturbed, and seem more likely to injure the object being itself than its hypothetical antagonists. This mobile component is a nightmarish symbol of the last flicker of nimbleness in a creature which has lost the power to advance or retreat under the compulsion to make Kafka-like preparations against attack' (see exhibition catalogue, Venice, XXVIII Biennale, British Council, 1956).
The spiky aspects of the present work bring to mind the phrase that Herbert Read coined to unify the British Council's choice for the exhibition New Aspects of British Sculpture shown at the Venice Biennale in 1952. He wrote, 'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance ... Here are images of flight, of ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear ... They have siezed Eliot's image of the Hollow Men, and given it an isomorphic materiality. They have peopled the Waste Land with their iron waifs' (Exhibition catalogue, New Aspects of British Sculpture, British Council, Venice Biennale XXVI, 1952). Created at a time when the world was still recovering from World War II and the shock of the devastation caused by the atom bombs dropped in Japan, Balanced Sculpture conveys a strong sense of uneasiness and strange aggression that was to characterise the collective fear of entering the nuclear age.
The form of the sculpture clearly links Chadwick's work to other British artists including Graham Sutherland (see lot 26). Margaret Garlake's comments about Sutherland's work of the 1930s could also be applied to the forms seen in the present work, 'Sutherland's own transformations of insignificant roots and plants into images infused with intense hostile vitality and for the luxuriant, spikey vegetation which was a definitive neo-Romantic motif. The twisted gorse, which has sprouted menacing prehensile terminals, suggests a mutation between plant and animal or human organisms, a dissolution of the barriers between species' (see New Art New World British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 90).
The present owner was art critic for The Spectator (1946-1956), Art Editor and Assistant Editor for Picture Post (1949-1953) and Editor of House and Garden (1955-1957).