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Lot Essay
Bursting with dynamism, Cloaked Couple V, 1977, epitomises Chadwick's unique visual vocabulary and one of his most renowned subjects. During this period Chadwick reflected on his career, looking back at the ground-breaking exhibition at the XXVIII Venice Biennale, in 1956, where he was awarded the prestigious International Grand Prix for Sculpture. It was this victory that truly launched Chadwick to international prominence, earning him a wealth of critical praise around the world, and cementing his position as a leading figure in the artistic landscape of post-war Britain.
During the 1950s, Chadwick introduced coupled figures into his oeuvre, a subject that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career. Chadwick bestowed his figures with symbols of gender, knowingly or not referring his work to the canons of ancient art. As with the Egyptian examples, Cloaked Couple V is marked by a clear division of gender, the forms and accoutrements of the figures suggesting a male-female coupling. This is revealed most clearly in the treatment of the forms – the woman is more lightly and curvaceously built, her shoulders sloping at a gentler angle and her body appearing softer and rounder than that of her male partner. He, in turn, occupies a weightier stance, his thick-necked mass and angularity more forcefully expressed, while the addition of a deep fissure to his body, which runs the length of his torso, reveals a sharper sense of form. In addition to this, the artist incorporates geometric symbols into his sculpture in order to identify the gender of his characters, applying two differently shaped heads to each. A common feature of his idiosyncratic artistic vocabulary, the square or cube typically denotes a male character, while the triangular or pyramidal shape is used to identify a female one.
Chadwick explained: ‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98).
This balance of mass was fundamental to Chadwick. Indeed, within his works there lies a series of balancing idioms, with the artist playing with the parameters of mass and space; angular and organic forms; and the naturalistic and abstract. Chadwick explained the importance of such practice, ‘In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales – you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in ibid., p. 98).
During the 1950s, Chadwick introduced coupled figures into his oeuvre, a subject that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career. Chadwick bestowed his figures with symbols of gender, knowingly or not referring his work to the canons of ancient art. As with the Egyptian examples, Cloaked Couple V is marked by a clear division of gender, the forms and accoutrements of the figures suggesting a male-female coupling. This is revealed most clearly in the treatment of the forms – the woman is more lightly and curvaceously built, her shoulders sloping at a gentler angle and her body appearing softer and rounder than that of her male partner. He, in turn, occupies a weightier stance, his thick-necked mass and angularity more forcefully expressed, while the addition of a deep fissure to his body, which runs the length of his torso, reveals a sharper sense of form. In addition to this, the artist incorporates geometric symbols into his sculpture in order to identify the gender of his characters, applying two differently shaped heads to each. A common feature of his idiosyncratic artistic vocabulary, the square or cube typically denotes a male character, while the triangular or pyramidal shape is used to identify a female one.
Chadwick explained: ‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98).
This balance of mass was fundamental to Chadwick. Indeed, within his works there lies a series of balancing idioms, with the artist playing with the parameters of mass and space; angular and organic forms; and the naturalistic and abstract. Chadwick explained the importance of such practice, ‘In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales – you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in ibid., p. 98).