Kenneth Armitage Catalogue.Indd
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Kenneth Armitage How Many Miles to Babylon? 1 1 2 3 Kenneth Armitage 1916 – 20 02 How Many Miles to Babylon? Jonathan Clark Fine Art In association with The Kenneth Armitage Foundation 4 How Many Miles to Babylon? How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again. Traditional nursery rhyme It is hard now to imagine the heights of enthusiasm that greeted the British Council’s sculpture exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Just like a pack of 1990s YBAs, this group of new generation sculptors - among them Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi and Kenneth Armitage - became front page news that summer. British sculpture had turned out to be edgy and cool, a new choir of voices for the post war world. For Armitage more than anyone else, it meant being catapulted into the international arena. Even before he had time to return home from Venice, his London studio had been visited by Alfred Barr, the Director of MoMA in New York, who was quickly securing two bronzes for the museum. Peggy Guggenheim and Elsa Schiaparelli also purchased pieces. Academics of the eminence of Herbert Read and Philip Hendy wrote intensely about this new existential art; and for the rest of the 1950s, culminating in his own retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1959, institutions and private collectors sparred to acquire Armitage’s work at a remarkable rate. It was a golden platform from which to develop the eagerly anticipated next phase of his career. Armitage’s work from the 1950s is entirely distinctive, unmistakably his own, and its species of forms would have seemed eminently suitable for later evolution and development. If he had gone in this direction, Armitage would have travelled a well- trodden path, one selected by numerous artists (including sculptor colleagues) who went on to build bountiful careers: the distinguishing idiom that marked their earliest successes - the particular visual language that was each artist’s first identifying plumage - is safely re-used, repeated and expanded, and becomes the artist’s mother tongue, and eventually his sole route of continuation. The well-trodden path is, often, a narrowing one. 2 3 For Armitage, this behaviour was counterintuitive. His spirit was loyal to The only way forward was by offering a human sacrifice, so lots were the obverse team, the team of those with a specific appetite for risk, for drawn. The choice fell upon the king’s daughter, who was to be bricked real gear change, of those rare artists with a devotion to deep-rooted up in the walls of the fort. However, as she had a new-born child, an innovation, those who relish throwing away their visual phrasebook, who aperture was left so that the child could be breast-fed: a startling - and can present us with idiosyncratic rewards, where it is the startling that telling - starting point for a series of sculptures, showing something becomes inspirational, and the meat of art is more to do with a struggle of the layers of resonance that Armitage perceived in mythological for new ideas than a comfortable reinterpretation of old ones. subjects, and - in his treatment of the tale - his extraordinary ability to convey something horrifying and intellectually disturbing with The new phases of work that Kenneth Armitage embarked on during characteristic and belligerent wit: the sculptures themselves are as the 1960s veered significantly away from the sculpture he was making much playful as they are mysterious. The result is a subtly controlled in the ‘50s, increasingly to the alarm of devoted collectors. Although achievement of considerable and confusing power. he might have been tempted into a wilful reaction to critical success (Armitage was always cussed about art world praise), his fundamental The reaction to these works was lively. Armitage recalled that Alan stimulation was that originality in art - the very process of being Bowness was ‘angry with me for making the pieces, and said that a innovative - was an affirmative act in itself, and was simply and more terrible legend of human cruelty and stupidity can hardly be determindly to be sought out. For the next thirty years Armitage was to imagined’. When the sculptor Bryan Kneale saw the works, he said he maintain an extraordinary degree of purposeful innovation, not solely in could never see light switches again in the same way. Roland Penrose the repeated conception of entirely new projects (that often ran against found in them the power of story-telling, and how it breathes life into Installation at Documenta III, Kassel, Germany, 1964: the sculptural tide), but also in his radical approach to new materials. inanimate matter. Left: Figure on its Back (large version) 1961; Right: Mouton Variation 1964 Installation at Middelheim Park, Antwerp: It is a sometimes unsettling, sometimes astonishing perfomance, and As an indication of how quickly Armitage shifted into near fully Left: Wall 1965; Right: Pandarus (version 8) 1963 one with few parallels. Picasso had that same ceaseless fascination abstracted forms within only a few years of his 1959 Whitechapel with innovation, that same compulsion to look anew - and also had retrospective, the ‘Pandarus’ sculptures, begun in 1963, have only the that same experience of his mature art taking many years to be as fully very loosest figurative associations, being more like towers and funnels appreciated as his earlier work. Interestingly, Picasso was the one artist than body-like shapes. Their interest appears more in the shadows whom Armitage repeatedly admired. He had seen his work at the V&A and spaces created by sculptural forms, in the ridges and joins of British Council exhibition in 1947 and then met him in Paris in 1953, sections, in the circumstances of their structure. They do seem to hint many years later admitting that ‘The thrill of Picasso’s constant wizardry at some idea of communication - musicians apparently saw them as never left me’. trumpets - and perhaps the greatest clue is in the name: Pandarus being a character in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ who acts as a Armitage’s greatest fascinations - the abiding themes of his work - thread go-between, trying to bring the two lovers together with rhetoric and through this radically changing landscape of his later sculpture, emerging linguistic fireworks. discernibly, sometimes obliquely, in recast, novel forms. Themes such as his dogged commitment to the human figure, joyful and unfashionable; The same year, 1963, Armitage began another Chaucer-inspired his admiration for Neolithic art, first encountered in his Irish childhood; undertaking, involving drawings he had been making to illustrate ‘The his love of story telling, of the truths inherent in myth and legend; and Reeve’s Tale’, a project that was to occupy him for decades. Armitage KA in front of the Reichstag building, Berlin, 1968/9 the conspicuous tenor of his voice, that peculiarly English amalgam of had a life-long love of Chaucer - he kept recordings of experts reading The Forest 1965, with KA in the background intellectual inquiry and self-effacement, in which serious and arcane his favourite poem ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ in Middle English, which he ideas are offered up with wit and vivacity, and with a desire to appeal to himself would read aloud at the drop of a hat. It is an obsession that an audience far broader than one or two art world critics. provides real clues into his taste for narrative, for wit, for an untutored audience, and for the brash delights of bawdiness. The irreverent The sculptures made for ‘The Legend of Skadar’, which Armitage Englishness of a Canterbury pilgrim, perhaps. began in 1965, drew all these themes together. This project was sparked, so he said, by hearing a blind Yugoslavian folk-singer perform A decade on from the Whitechapel Gallery retrospective, Armitage, on Radio 3, rendering an ancient tale about a king who tried to build then in his 50s, was standing by a desk being cross-examined in a fort, the walls of which kept collapsing, pulled down by an evil spirit. the back room of a police station in East Berlin, the wrong side of 4 5 Checkpoint Charlie. His belongings were scattered on the floor, his turning world. He had always adored this wilderness, but it wasn’t West German friends had melted away, and this being part of the until he had spent time abroad and returned home that the Richmond Eastern Bloc, there was no diplomatic protection and no certainty of oaks became a significant subject for his art. getting back over the border at all. Armitage had just been to see the famous political cabaret artist Wolf Biermann, who was under house One day in 1975 he had his ‘revelation’. ‘I suddenly saw them. arrest, to interview him as part of a film he was making, Armitage in And it was a bright day in spring with blue sky and little white Berlin. It took some hours of questioning, of judicious answering, but clouds, and everywhere I looked it was a revelation, the trees were he did eventually get released and turned up in West Berlin soon after. alive. There was a slight breeze and they were moving slightly. They looked like huge animals all over the place. And from then It is an episode that not only shines a light on Armitage’s approach to on I was hooked absolutely.’ For the next eleven years Armitage risk, but also on the new confluence of ideas he was to find in Berlin propagated a wondrous forest of sketches, sculptures, carvings, in the late ‘60s (a far more provocative place than the later Berlin of casts and constructions, culminating in a ten foot high commission David Bowie).