Lynn Chadwick

Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) was one of the most important British sculptors of the postwar era and a defining figure of the generation that reshaped modern sculpture in the United Kingdom. Born in London, Chadwick studied at the Merchant Taylors' School and then worked as an architectural draftsman from 1933 to 1939, an experience that would inform his lifelong feeling for aerodynamic form and structural balance. He served as a pilot during the Second World War, and it was only after the war that he began to consider a life as an artist. Initially he designed furniture, textiles, and some architectural projects before he began to build mobiles similar to those executed by Alexander Calder, whose work was at first unknown to him. His first mobile, made of aluminum and balsa wood, was shown at the Aluminum Development Stand at the Builders' Trades Exhibition, and the positive public reaction to these works led to his first solo exhibition at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London in 1950. Chadwick soon discarded these kinetic, moving elements from his sculpture, but he continued to use his own particular mode of construction and assemblage rather than the prevailing norm of carving or modeling.

Chadwick and his art essentially came of age after the war, an energetic yet unsettled time of great artistic experimentation when a new existential anxiety, a kind of postwar traumatic syndrome, confronted both the deep-seated traditions of human representation and a nascent attraction to modern abstraction. He was closely associated with the so-called "Geometry of Fear" sculptors, a group that also included Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage, Bernard Meadows, and Eduardo Paolozzi. In the 1950s Chadwick employed skeletal lines and rough planes and surfaces that were organized into generalized images of people and animals. His first major success came in 1953, when he was among a dozen semifinalists for the Unknown Political Prisoner International Sculpture Competition, receiving an honorable mention. In 1956, at the age of forty-one and just six years into his art career, he won the first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in a competition that included Alberto Giacometti, and with that award came international fame and enormous financial success. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1964 and a French Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985.

In the 1960s Chadwick's work was partly eclipsed by the increasingly abstract tendencies in modern sculpture, but he still enjoyed a lucrative career into the 1980s. His sculptures during this period were human figures cast in bronze and clad in rough drapery, sporting geometric pyramidal and rectangular heads. These works blended the surreal with a monumental quality more often associated with the large-scale works of Henry Moore. In 1988 Chadwick was again invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, for which he created a pair of seated figures, male and female, titled Back to Venice. These expressionistic, figurative works of welded iron and bronze earned him renewed international acclaim.

Chadwick worked for many years from Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, his home and studio complex. His sculptures are held in the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn, and other major international collections, and he remains one of the most collected British sculptors of the twentieth century.