Birmingham Post 19.02.2010 Raymond Mason, Sculptor Of
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Birmingham Post 19.02.2010 Raymond Mason, sculptor of Birmingham’s Forward monument, dies. The artist who regrettably proved that forward thinking can lead to backward behaviour has died. Raymond Mason, a distinguished sculptor, is remembered in Birmingham for his controversial 1991 work, ‘Forward!’, a £200,000 fibre-glass statue which stood for a time in Centenary Square. He died in Paris on February 13, aged 88. Many locals took pride in the distinctive cream-coloured work, which became known locally as the Lurpak sculpture because it appeared to be carved out of butter. It was supposed to represent the city’s early 1990s renaissance, but in 2003 it was burned to the ground, a wanton act of vandalism by teenagers who showed little appreciation for the art of optimism and inner city regeneration. Mason trained at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts, the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Art. From 1946, he lived and worked in Paris. Mason is best remembered for his style of tightly packing figures together. His works went on display at McGill College Avenue in Montreal; the Tuileries, Paris; Georgetown, Washington, DC and New York’s Madison Avenue. He was also a close friend of the late Nobel Prize winning scientist, Maurice Wilkins, who went to school in Birmingham and worked at the city’s University, where he made important breakthroughs in the study of DNA. Forward! carried a reference to DNA - a homage to his good friend. Whether it was admired or lampooned, Forward! quickly took on an iconic status within the city of Birmingham, and beyond, which made its fiery demise even more shocking. Claire Jepson Homer, who was working at the nearby Birmingham Rep Theatre, said at the time: “The statue suddenly turned into a big cloud of smoke. It was quite a sight really.” Guardian 25.02.2010 The sculptor Raymond Mason, who has died aged 87, was born and brought up in Birmingham, but left for Paris soon after the second world war. Friendly with many fellow artists, he was very much a European, even looking distinctly French. Nevertheless, he returned to the city of his birth at key moments – and in 1991 created there the huge outdoor work Forward, which locals dubbed the Lurpak statue owing to the buttery colour of its polyester resin material. On a scale far greater than his framed, sculpted pictures of the early 1950s, his public installations were in demand around the world. In 2003, his optimistic vision of Birmingham was destroyed by arsonists. Naturally, he was enraged, but after a week, he recovered his natural sangfroid, and never mentioned it again. Mason was the son of a Scottish motor mechanic and taxi driver, and a vivacious English mother. He grew up in hard times near a factory and, from an early age, suffered from asthma, which kept him away from school in the mornings. This sedentary life made him studious, and he was always drawing, but exam nerves cost him a place at grammar school. Although thereafter his studies became erratic, he never regretted attending the George Dixon secondary school instead, because a teacher there recognised his skill and persuaded him to concentrate on art. The teacher also assured him that the Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts contained many pretty girls. Mason applied, and won a scholar- ship to study there in 1937. At the outbreak of the second world war, he volunteered for the navy, but was invalided out in 1942 because he was shortsighted. He returned briefly to Birmingham, before another scholarship took him to the Royal College of Art (then evacuated from wartime London to Ambleside, in the Lake District), and on to the Slade (removed to Oxford), whose director Randolph Schwabe became a particular support to Mason. At the end of the war, he returned to London, then followed his friend Harry Bomberg, the son of the Swedish consul in Birmingham, and his wife, to Paris in the summer of 1946. He obtained a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux Arts (with help from Schwabe, who knew Charles de Gaulle, and put in a good word for him). Mason describes in his entertaining book At Work in Paris (2000) how he looked up Constantin Brâncusi in the telephone directory and was invited to visit his studio. The great sculptor did everything for himself, sometimes calamitously, and in a bread-shop queue “would sing to while away the time. And because he looked such a nice old man, people would give him money, thinking he was a street singer.” Alexander Calder and Eduardo Paolozzi became friends. Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso were acquaintances, and he told Francis Poulenc that he could hear his piano from his own studio. The composer replied: “My dear sir, that must be my maid.” He knew Henry Moore, and recorded such Moore pomposities as: “After all, Raymond, I am the one who invented the hole.” Mason’s mother died in 1958, and on his return to Birmingham, he was so struck by the redbrick terraces of his childhood that he made some watercolours. “The clouds rolled away and suddenly a great sunset lit up the redbrick city. With emotion, I realised that when that sun sank, the moon of modern times would rise and all would be white concrete.” From this came the oil Birmingham in Memoriam (1958). Back in Paris, his thoughts about people in a city consolidated. Reflecting on Alberto Giacometti and Balthus (whom he also knew), this thinking brought about distinctive sculptures, framed like pictures, invariably urban in setting, and depicting Parisian locations such as the Place de l’Opéra and the Boulevard St Germain. Through the 1960s, with changing materials and increasingly bold colours, these grew into large, freestanding works such as The Crowd, a group of figures in bronze installed in the Jardin des Tuileries (1963-67); and, with its almost Chaucerian world of rolling breasts and barrows, The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables From the Heart of Paris, 18 February 1969 (1969-71), marking the closing of the market at Les Halles. His St Mark’s Place East Village (1972), with its view from the window of a Manhattan coffee shop, had a gaudy, cartoon charm; The Aggression at 48 Rue Monsieur-Le-Prince (1975) showed a murder scene; and A Tragedy in the North: Winter, Rain, Tears (1975-77) a mining disaster in the northern town of Liévin. Mason worked on this from photographs, since when not in Paris, he lived in Provence (depicted in The Grape-Pickers, 1982). His wife, Janine Hao, ran a gallery next to his Paris studio. Mason had a continually alert intelligence. If some thought his Birmingham installation Forward erred towards the facile optimism of Soviet realism, he was concerned to show that “a sculpture is not simple, it is symbolic. It is a vehicle for human thought.” He was preoccupied latterly by the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001, and this inspired one of his most memorable works, which went through several versions. He did not stop working, even in his 80s, joining the huge demonstrations against Jean-Marie Le Pen on Mayday 2002 in Paris, and producing work that again showed his preoccupation with the human crowd, this time in the difficult medium of india ink. Exhibitions of his work, including a retrospective at the Serpentine gallery in London in 1982 and one at the Pompidou centre in Paris in 1985, drew record crowds. He was looking forward to a retrospective to be held at the Musée d’Art Moderne this autumn. Janine survives him. Raymond Grieg Mason, sculptor and painter, born 2 March 1922; died 13 February 2010. The Times 01.03.2010 Raymond Mason: sculptor Raymond Mason was by his own estimation the most English of Englishmen, even though by domicile and social milieu he was an adopted Parisian of 63 years’ standing — and in his sculptures entirely sui generis. From the 1950s on he developed his own unfashionable genre, the large-scale plaster relief, initially low-relief cast in bronze, and later very high-relief, cast in resin to facilitate the application of high, even lurid, colour. His work was always controversial, not because it was incomprehensibly abstract or conceptual but because of what was felt to be its vulgar popularity and excessive approachablity. It might be art, but could anything so cartoony possibly be fine art? His vision was sometimes compared to that of Stanley Spencer, but was equally likely to be compared with that of Robert Crumb. His major piece in Britain, Forward!, installed in Birmingham (1991), was destroyed by vandals. Raymond Grieg Mason was born in 1922 in Birmingham; his father was a Scottish motor mechanic whose partner went on to become Lord Austin; his mother came from a family of Birmingham publicans; and Raymond’s playground was the street — the theme of much of his later inspiration. He was educated at St Thomas’s Church of England Junior School and George Dixon Secondary School in Birmingham. Any arguments his parents might have had about his early determination to be an artist were silenced when he won a scholarship to the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts in 1937 at 15. With the outbreak of war he was called up to the Royal Navy, serving for two years before being invalided out. He resumed his art studies at the Royal College of Art, which had been moved to Am- bleside, Cumbria. He survived, unhappily, for one term and in 1943 he moved to the Slade School of Fine Art, which had been evacuated to Oxford.