Concordia
Merchant Taylors’ School
Class notes
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All visitors to Sandy Lodge will know the great sculpture,
the Beast by OMT Lynn Chadwick RA (1914-2003), which
graces the lawn outside the Music Department. Those of a
light blue persuasion will know it has a handsome partner in
the grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Now the other members of the Beast’s family are reunited
in an installation in the Royal Academy’s Annenberg
Courtyard, as part of celebrations to mark the centenary
of Lynn’s birth. A slew of transatlantic shows and a new
biography will also celebrate the ‘Henry Moore of metal’.
The Daily Telegraph reports:
“The British sculptor Lynn Chadwick was born a hundred
years ago this November and his life is being celebrated
with a new biography, a catalogue raisonné of his work, an
exhibition currently in the Royal Academy courtyard and,
next month, exhibitions at commercial galleries Osborne
Samuel, Blain/Southern and Blain/Di Donna, in London,
Berlin and New York.
Chadwick may not be as well known as Henry Moore, but
he was once tipped to be his successor, and even beat the
favoured Alberto Giacometti to win the Sculpture Prize at
the 1956 Venice Biennale. One of the so-called “geometry of
fear” artists who took the art world by storm in the Fifties, he
had a meteoric rise to fame. Self-taught as a sculptor, he held
his first exhibition in 1950 and within six years had achieved
international renown, with legions of collectors in America
and Europe for his welded iron sculptures. His spooky, spiky
The Inner Eye was bought by the Museum of Modern Art in
New York.
But what comes over most forcefully in Michael Bird’s new
book is how quickly the fashion-driven art world abandons
its heroes. “It won’t last,” the artist Max Ernst warned
Chadwick at the height of his success – and indeed it didn’t.
As he told the critic Philip Oakes in 1974: “It’s not that I’ve
been forgotten – just completely neglected.” Associated
firmly with the Fifties and its angst-ridden post-war art,
Chadwick was superseded in the Sixties by pop art, and by
the new abstract sculpture of Anthony Caro.”
The re-evaluation is long overdue.
LynnChadwick
Centenary of OMT’s birth celebrated
with Royal Academy installation
The photographs of the Annenberg Courtyard installation
are from the RA website, photographer, Benedict Johnson.
