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. He gained admission by the unusual step of holding an impromptu exhibition of his paintings on the railings outside. Spending his wartime evenings firewatching in the Ashmolean Museum, Mason was deeply impressed by its collection of Classical sculpture. He had concentrated on painting, but at the Slade he met his fellow student Eduardo Paolozzi and turned his attention to sculpture.

His earliest sculptures were abstract, or anyway abstracted, in much the same way as Paolozzi’s, but he seems always to have been a figurative artist at heart, and soon after he moved to Paris in 1946 he reverted to a representational style for his first reliefs, inspired by the buildings and street life around him.

A French state scholarship took him to the Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris; and in 1947 he exhibited coloured abstract sculpture in the exhibition Les Mains eblouies at the Galerie Maeght. A friendship begun in 1948 with that other roamer of the streets, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, influenced Mason to return to figurative work; but since he had no proper studio until 1953, he was forced to sketch out in the street — thus reinforcing his observation and interest in the crowd as a phenomenon in itself with its own rhythms and forces. An exhibition in 1950 at the Hôtel Crystal in Paris with Mimi Vogt, and a visit to Barcelona in the same year, were followed by travel to Greece.

In 1952 Mason produced the work which he regarded as the true start of his career: Man in the Street, a low relief of a man’s head set against the architecture of an empty street corner. The face is sensitive, though the eyes are hollow and unseeing; the architecture is evocative of Pompeii or Italian Renaissance relief sculpture. Mason began to exhibit at the Salon de Mai.

In 1953 he acquired a studio in the Latin Quarter, in whose busy, village-square atmosphere he lived for the rest of his life. In 1954, the year Mason met Picasso (who praised his Englishness in art) at Vallauris, Helen Lessore gave Mason a one-man show, with another in 1956, at her Beaux Arts gallery in London, which was the occasion of a friendship formed with Francis Bacon; while in Paris the painter Balthus also became a firm friend.

As Mason became better known, in Paris at least, he moved from relatively small reliefs to bigger works, crowded with detail, such as Carrefour de l’Odéon and Place de l’Opéra, while his travels produced bird’s-eye views of Rome and the intricate, people-packed Barcelona Tram (1953). This was his first celebrated work, seen outside the railway station, with a score of figures rendered in a style linking naturalism to a dignified, formal monumentalism akin to Roman grave sculpture and Donatello’s reliefs.

From 1956 to 1982 he pursued his career in France, and was not taken very seriously in British art circles; he was working towards his unique amalgamation of naturalism, realism, caricature, simplification, populism, expressionism, and the monumental, which left critics nonplussed and uneasy over its intentions and effects. Mason’s relief views of townscape — such as that as seen from the windows of the Encounter magazine offices in Haymarket, done in 1956 — and his reliefs of verdant landscape were not considered as high art.

But this did not prevent the Compagnie Marie Bell from inviting him in 1959 to design the set and costumes in grandiose Classical style for what became a famous production of Phèdre; and in 1960 he opened an art gallery with his wife, the Galerie Janine Hao, named after her. A series of street scenes culminated in 1965 with The Crowd: a sculpture with 99 figures, inspired by the stream of people on the Boulevard St Michel in Paris. This brought him into the orbit of the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris where he had four exhibitions from 1963 and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York with four exhibi- tions from 1967.

He produced ever more ambitious scuptures, climaxing in The Departure of the Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, 28 February 1969, a scene bustling with (mainly grotesque) life and vigour, which elicited in France comparisons with Daumier. It was a monumental work of visibly genuine senti- ment and Mason’s first polychrome sculpture, to the alarm of many of his artistic friends.

The work which cemented Mason’s international reputation was A Tragedy of the North, Winter, Rain and Tears (1977), which reflects on a monumental scale the tragedy-stricken response to a mining disaster in the Pas de Calais. It can be seen as the third panel in a triptych of dramatic pieces, pre- ceded by Monument for Guadaloupe (1976) and The Aggression at 48 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince on 23 June 1975 (1978), but it was the Tragedy of the North, exhibited in Paris, New York and London, and acquired by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, that really clinched Mason’s international reputation.

From 1982, the year of his Venice Biennale showing, and his Grape Pickers, another intractable sculp- tural subject with its rows of vines, cast in polyester resin and painted, Mason received attention in Britain, with a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery and in Oxford, and an Omnibus television pro- gramme about him.

Mason was honoured with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1978, being raised to the rank of Officier of the order in 1989.

He is survived by his wife Janine and three stepdaughters.

Raymond Mason, sculptor, was born on March 2, 1922. He died on February 14, 2010, aged 87.

The Telegraph 03.03.2011

Raymond Mason

Raymond Mason, who died on February 13 aged 87, was an artist in the British narrative tradition of Hogarth and Stanley Spencer, sculpting complex crowd scenes packed with detail; despite this, he made his home in Paris, where he was part of an artistic set that included Giacometti, Picasso and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Mason tirelessly composed complex sculptures in which every element finds its place and where the viewer’s movements continually reveal new relationships of shape and colour. His work always had a story to tell – by turns tragic, epic and comic – and did so through his concern for composition, and by his new and painterly exploration of perspective in sculpture.

In his large pieces, nearly all of crowds, he was conscious of reviving the great tradition of sculpture: figurative, polychromatic, and universal in its subject matter. One of his most celebrated and monumental works isThe Crowd (1965), a tumbling mass of 99 figures which was cast twice in bronze and is now installed in Paris and New York.

But he also continued to work in plaster and then began to have his figures cast in resin so they could be painted. Works in this new format depict, for example, the closing of the centuries-old market of Les Halles in Paris; the anxious waiting after a mining disaster; an “illuminated crowd” stretched between wonder and despair; a group of grape-pickers; students demonstrating in the Latin Quarter; the history of Birmingham and his own lifelong engagement with that “heart” of England.

Everywhere there are profound and recognisable human passions, a sense of place (the figures appear nearly always in a setting) and a reaching out both to the humanity of the viewer and to his desire for form, to his joy in art. But he also continued to work in plaster and then began to have his figures cast in resin so they could be painted. Works in this new format depict, for example, the closing of the centuries-old market of Les Halles in Paris; the anxious waiting after a mining disaster; an “illuminated crowd” stretched between wonder and despair; a group of grape-pickers; students demonstrating in the Latin Quarter; the history of Birmingham and his own lifelong engagement with that “heart” of England.

Everywhere there are profound and recognisable human passions, a sense of place (the figures appear nearly always in a setting) and a reaching out both to the humanity of the viewer and to his desire for form, to his joy in art.

Raymond Grieg Mason was born on March 2 1922 in Birmingham to a Scottish motor-mechanic and a publican’s daughter. He was educated at George Dixon secondary school before winning a scholarship to Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts. Called up in 1939, he joined the Navy but was invalided out in 1941. He won a painting scholarship to the Royal College of Art before returning, the following year, to Birmingham, where he earned a living producing portraits.

After being evacuated to Oxford he met Eduardo Paolozzi, then turned to sculpture, which he studied at the Slade at war’s end. Keen to learn about his new medium, he visited Henry Moore in Hampstead; in 1946, he left for Paris, which was to become home for the rest of his life.

For a couple of years Mason lived a makeshift existence. Then he met Alberto Giacometti, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose example encouraged him to forsake abstract for figurative work. In 1952 Mason produced Man in Street – a low relief of a man’s head in front of a building – which he considered the starting point of his career as a professional artist: “To get a spark, one thing has to strike another,” he said. “So I sculpted the head and straightaway I put the façade of a house behind it. And that’s how it started.”

It was also at this time that Mason first met Picasso. This was in the south of France, where Mason was later to acquire a small farmhouse. He also became friendly with Francis Bacon, and Mason’s entry into Paris’ celebrated cultural milieu was completed in 1955, when the artist Balthus introduced him to a salon whose members included Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Poulenc and Jacques Prévert.

He was a welcome addition to the scene. A great storyteller, Mason was unsurpassed in the art of the anecdote. Drawing in the Musée Rodin when it was closed to the public, he once found his sketches being assessed by Paul Newman, who had arrived in a limousine for a four-hour private visit. Mason recalled that Newman – no doubt fearful of being quoted – refused to issue any utterance in their conversation apart from “uh-huh”.

On another occasion, while dining at Le Grand Véfour, Mason found himself at a table next to Bill Clinton, with whom he immediately struck up a brief but laughter-filled acquaintance.

Once Mason was drawing his own sculpture, The Crowd, in the Tuileries Gardens. A stranger watched him for a long time in silence and eventually remarked: “You draw really well. But why are you drawing that shit?”

Mason gradually established an international reputation, chiefly through his monumental works. He joined successively the galleries of Claude Bernard in Paris and Pierre Matisse in New York, then the Marlborough Gallery in New York and London; and large, well-attended retrospectives were held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Mason’s originality is less evident than that of Moore or Giacometti, but in work like The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, 28 February 1969, with its mastery and exuberant treatment of both the grave and the droll, it may prove as lasting. This piece, dense in its vision of the world’s plenty, moves from level to level of a midwinter night’s dream, ordering the procession of sad but rapt market workers; a lovers’ kiss; a Harlequin; an offering to the night sky of a crate of oranges; and, rather than a Christ, a market gardener in majesty.

A powerful baritone (he would listen to opera, especially Verdi, while working on his larger pieces), Mason remained quintessentially English, with his Church shoes and sports jacket from the Old England store in Paris.

That was also true in a more inward sense, through his memory and imagination permeated by the Birmingham of his childhood, by its industrial architecture, its deep-red brick complementing the green of the countryside, its sense of work and of purpose, and above all its workers and its crowds. Championed by André Malraux, and photographed several times by his friend Cartier-Bresson, Mason was appointed OBE and was made an Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Yet he remained at once famous and hardly known, admired by artists whom the public admire and ignored by most critics, with certain of his best works only to be seen in his flat on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

His monument to Birmingham, Forward, installed in Centenary Square and inaugurated by the Queen in 1991, was destroyed by vandals in 2003.

Raymond Mason’s funeral was held in St Eustache church, the crowd gathering in front of his piece Departure, which is installed there; the organ was played by his friend, composer Jean Guillou. He is survived by his wife, Janine Hao, and three stepdaughters.

The Independent 12.03.2010

Raymond Mason: Artist celebrated for his sculptures in relief depicting vibrant humanity.

One of the most distinctive artists of the past 60 years, Raymond Mason is best known for his sculptures in relief.

He chose this mode for its potential to concentrate experience, for its capacity to articulate space (and the relationships within it) and for its power of engaging the viewer in an unfolding narrative. His reliefs range from shallow to exceptionally deep, and from small-scale tableaux of great intricacy to works so large in scale that the viewer has the sense of being part of the scene created. In all types, Mason showed almost uncanny mastery of depicted distance. Each relief is powerfully evocative of both time and place. Concerned at once with humanity en masse and with the particularity of the individual, Mason’s sculpture, though itself static, conveys a strong sense of movement, both through the space of the chosen scene and (for its figures) through the vicissitudes of life. He was also an exceptional, swift and accurate draughtsman.

The son of a motor mechanic and a barmaid, Mason had a lasting attachment to the townscape of the Birmingham of his childhood, making lovingly detailed watercolours of its red brick terraces and factories. Proud of the city’s achievements and believing in its promise, in 1991 he created Forward, a 9m-long free-standing panorama of Birmingham’s history, embracing industry, politics, science and the arts. It stood in Centenary Square from its inauguration by the Queen till its destruction by fire in 2003.

Invalided from war service in the Navy, Mason resumed study at art school in Birmingham before moving to the Royal College of Art, and next to the Slade (in Oxford and London). Then, during a short-lived abstract period, he visited Paris in July 1946 and remained there for the rest of his life. His interest in humanity was too great to sustain an abstract practice and in Paris he was permanently affected, successively, by the work of two great, somewhat older artists, both of whom became close friends. He met his moral hero, Giacometti, in 1948. In 1955 he met Balthus, later writing that he “recognised the [contrasting] second pillar on which a new art of the figure and of the figurative world could be built.” Balthus’s large pictures were “dense with subject matter and sumptuously painted. Here was the contemporary but complete art I had been seeking for so long”. Their power depended upon “the artifice of composition, that sublime intellectual activity which I consider to be the ne plus ultra of art”. Mason’s work shows both these influences, while being unmistakably his and taking quite different directions.

He fell in love with Paris, becoming for nearly 60 years an exceptional interpreter of its street life (whether at moments of drama or in the pattern of daily life that he delighted to observe) and of its venerable and beautiful façades and urban vistas. He loved the concept of an architectural setting animated by human life, almost as if on a stage. He was preoccupied by the ways in which indentations articulate architecture and light reveals form.

His work is suffused by a sense of history. Walks with him through the ancient streets of his beloved Latin Quarter were a revelation, building by building. In his Twin Sculptures (1988), paired reliefs in a courtyard in Georgetown, a close-packed group of contemporary citizens look and point to the top of an opposite building where a vision appears in a cloud of L’Enfant and Washington planning the future city. Mason’s watercolours of the interiors and exteriors of historic Paris buildings complement his panoramic reliefs of Paris, London, Edinburgh, Rome, New York and Hong Kong. In 2001 he drew memorably the massive figures at Abu Simbel. Mason’s studio of nearly 60 years was at the end of a narrow courtyard near the Luxembourg Gardens. Top-lit and white with plaster dust, it was a survival from another age. When he moved in he was just beginning the remarkable sequence of reliefs of his first maturity. Though his best-known early work is Barcelona Tram (1953), the motifs were chiefly figures in contemporary Paris settings, rich in detail. The works had an existential flavour, while the beautiful austerity of their patinated bronze gave them an almost archaic character.

Such qualities were consonant with the vision of Helen Lessore, at whose Beaux Arts Gallery, London, Mason showed. Her A Partial Testament (1986) includes a perceptive chapter on his work. This phase culminated in The Crowd (1969), the large bronze representing humanity flowing like a river, one cast of which overlooks the Tuileries Gardens. With his wife, whose name it bore, Mason directed from 1960-66 the Galerie Janine Hao, next to his studio. Galleries by which Mason would be represented in later years included Claude Bernard (Paris), Pierre Matisse (New York) and Marlborough Fine Art (London).

Though Paris and Mason made each other their own, he remained one of the most intensely English of artists, driven alike by the narrative impulse, by feeling for place and by a love of intricate detail. Known from his Birmingham childhood, Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England, with its human “story” and minutely observed vegetables, was a talisman, but he also loved deeply the work of Hogarth, Wright of Derby, Thomas Jones, Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer.

Among his friends were two contrasting masters of figures seen in settings, Francis Bacon and Paula Rego. Equally, he was highly regarded in a circle that included the Paris artists Jean Hélion, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Anne Harvey, Avigdor Arikha and Sam Szafran. An outstanding monograph on his life and work (1994) is by Michael Edwards, an authority on Racine, whose Phèdre Mason designed for the Théâtre du Gymnase in 1959.

In the 1960s he began to paint some of his sculptures in colour, among them the first of several reliefs representing the landscape around his second home, in the Luberon, with its furrowed hills, vistas of vines and magnificent cloudscapes. With the completion in 1971 of one of his most celebrated works, The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, the move into colour was confirmed decisively. The change disconcerted many of his admirers, even as it heightened the human expressiveness of his work and, as intended, enabled it to engage an audience extending far beyond the upper reaches of the art community.

He later recounted: “I only sculpt in plaster and had long been distressed to see the marvellous light of that medium vanish the moment it was cast in bronze; all the more so since my sculptures at that time depicted outdoor scenes”. In place of bronze, he had the 17-piece plaster of the Departure moulded by Haligon in epoxy resin, which he had identified as a perfect support for acrylic paint. Thereafter, his arresting work was regarded with a certain reserve by many in the art world who believed modernist credentials to be imperative, while app-ealing both to the “man in the street” (one of his works’ titles) and to a trans-national range of artists, writers, collectors and curators. His retrospective exhibitions at, for example, the Serpentine (1982), the Centre Pompidou (1985) and the Musée Maillol (2000) were enormously successful.

Mason described The Departure... as “an elegy for the demise of the central fruit and vegetable market of Les Halles”. Before a backdrop of the doomed market buildings there moves an intricate, compressed yet clearly articulated procession of market traders, bearing their produce, which Mason displays with loving fidelity. An anthology of centuries-old French types, their faces were created by a sculptor who admired Daumier’s coloured clay heads of French parliamentarians, made in the 1830s in coloured unfired clay. Rising behind the ensemble is the church of Saint-Eustache, in which an example of this sculpture has long been installed (and where his funeral took place).

Equally renowned is Mason’s painted deep relief A Tragedy in the North (1977), in which the grim impact of a mining disaster in Liévin is reflected in the faces of the local community gathering outside the pit. On seeing it, Jean Dubuffet observed to Mason: “You’ve managed to put into your work a popular, public dimension that I’ve never been able to do”. Subjects of other reliefs on this scale included grape-pickers at work beneath a southern sun and student demonstrators marching up the Boulevard St Michel.

Often taking years to complete a sculpture, Mason painted every stroke of its surface with meticu- lous care. One of his grandest works, however, An Illuminated Crowd (1986), on a Montreal plaza, is in monochrome light ochre. It presents a flowing transition from four-square confidence to tumbling chaos and is perhaps his most metaphysical conception. In any gathering, Mason was a forthright participant, unafraid to voice his opinions yet often telling disarming stories of amusing discomfitures he had suffered. Among his many writings, his At Work in Paris (2003) is both an autobiography and a response to the work of great artists over the centuries, including Giotto, J.-L. David, Manet and Rodin. The style is direct, even robust, but conveys Mason’s love of human idiosyncracy and the subtlety and delicacy of his perception of motives and feelings. It also abounds in humour and captures much of the magic of his presence as an inspired raconteur (so often merged with his delight as a connoisseur of wine).

While he felt scorn for much contemporary art, the obverse of such reaction was always affirmative, as in this response to minimalism and developments from it: “What... can a work of art contain? At this hour of simplification the reply seems to be – the least possible ... I work diligently on each sculpture... intending it to satisfy ... every person ... who looks at it.”

He did so to the end. Though he told Anthony Rudolf that he ate sardines for lunch daily and would live to 100, it was not to be. The asthma that plagued him from childhood led to his death, in the room next to his studio, beside his Birmingham In Memoriam (1958), a panoramic view past terraced housing to a magnificent sunset over the old heart of the city that modern development was destroying. His art was made, however, for this and future generations. At his death the much younger sculptor Ron Mueck wrote: “I cannot remember there not being a Raymond Mason book on my shelf... The strong pulse of Life in his work always impressed me greatly. When I look at Mason’s work it feels like seeing clearly through someone else’s eyes. That can be an unsettling experience, but rewarding when it is a vibrant, unique vision of the world.”

Raymond Greig Mason, sculptor and painter: born Birmingham 2 March 1922; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres 1978; OBE 2002; married Janine Hao (three stepdaughters); died Paris 13 February 2010.