Lot Essay
Conceived in 1964, and cast in an edition of three, First man represents a pivotal moment in Frink's work. Her earlier warriors and falling and flying figures seem to be preoccupied with understandable pessimistic post-war concerns while as Sarah Kent notes First man looks forward to a more complex representation of the male figure in her sculpture: 'He [First man] stands naked and bemused, his hands, head and feet not yet fully differentiated, as though the process of development is not yet complete. He is a large, full-bodied man whose embryonic features suggest that he could go either way - his senses dulled into boorishness or heightened into self-awareness. The sculpture is optimistic in its implication that insensitivity, aggression and blinding ambition are not innate masculine characteristics, as Desmond Morris would have us believe, but are qualities encouraged through the process of socialization' (see B. Robertson, op. cit, p. 60).
Edwin Mullins comments on the present work, 'It is an archetypal Frink standing figure. It looks forward, not back. What is new about First Man is evident if one compares him with the Warriors. Firstly, this is plainly a man, no longer some sort of armour-plated mythological creature. He is a nude man, what is more. The surface, which had once been rough and craggy, often in defiance of anatomy, is now almost smooth, thinned down in the legs and face, rounded out in the belly and chest. Most of all, no longer is he threatening, but monumental. He is a figure of awe, not of menace. He wears that placid dignity that is to become a characteristic of Elisabeth Frink's later work in bronze' (op. cit., intro.).
Edwin Mullins comments on the present work, 'It is an archetypal Frink standing figure. It looks forward, not back. What is new about First Man is evident if one compares him with the Warriors. Firstly, this is plainly a man, no longer some sort of armour-plated mythological creature. He is a nude man, what is more. The surface, which had once been rough and craggy, often in defiance of anatomy, is now almost smooth, thinned down in the legs and face, rounded out in the belly and chest. Most of all, no longer is he threatening, but monumental. He is a figure of awe, not of menace. He wears that placid dignity that is to become a characteristic of Elisabeth Frink's later work in bronze' (op. cit., intro.).