 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2021) |
Bernard Meadows (19 February 1915 - 12 January 2005) was a British modernist sculptor. Meadows was Henry Moore's first assistant; then part of the Geometry of Fear school, a loose-knit group of British sculptors whose prominence was established at the 1952 Venice Biennale; a Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art for 20 years; and returned to assist Moore again in his last years. [1]
Meadows was born in Norwich, and educated at the City of Norwich School, After briefly training as an accountant in 1931, he attended Norwich School of Art and then in 1936 became Henry Moore's first assistant at his studio then in Kent. He participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936. He lived in Chalk Farm from 1937, assisting Moore in his new studio at Hampstead, and studied at the Royal College of Art (although his first application was rejected, due to his association with Moore) and at the Courtauld Institute.
In the Second World War, he initially registered as a conscientious objector, but when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, he withdrew his objection. He was called up to the Royal Air Force and worked in air-sea rescue, serving for a time the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he was inspired by the large crabs.
He returned to Moore's studio after the war, and helped Moore with his marble sculpture Three Standing Figures 1947 and his 1949 bronze Family Group .
He went on to find acclaim. An elm figure was exhibited in the open air sculpture exhibition at Battersea Park in 1951, alongside the Festival of Britain, which went to the Tate Gallery. [2]
He exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale a year later, alongside a new generation of British sculptors, including Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi. Their angular artworks contrasted with the more rounded styles of their seniors, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and they were dubbed by art critic Herbert Read as the "Geometry of Fear".
He held his first solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1957, with four more in the decade to 1967. He also exhibited at the São Paulo Biennale in 1957, Documenta 2 in Kassel in 1959, and the 1964 Venice Biennale. He exhibited from New York City to Tokyo and produced a stream of public and private art in Britain and beyond. His edgy pieces often based on animals and seemingly carved from shrapnel could imply Cold War menace.
Meadows' work titled Public Sculpture, a controversial assembly of stone blocks and balls of dripping and dimpled metal, was commissioned for the Eastern Daily Press in 1968 at Prospect House, Norwich. [3] It was Grade II Listed in 2018 and restored by its current owners, Alan Boswell Group, in 2022. [4] The sculpture is on permanent display outside the building alongside an illustrated panel telling the story of Bernard Meadows and Public Sculpture.
Teaching commitments took precedence over his own work. He taught at the Royal College of Art from 1948, and was Professor of Sculpture from 1960 to 1980, where his students included Robert Clatworthy and Elisabeth Frink. He was a member of the Fine Arts Commission from 1971 to 1976.
He returned to assist Moore at Perry Green, Hertfordshire from 1977, after Moore's health started to fail, and continued to help his mentor's estate after Moore's death in 1986, becoming an acting director of the Henry Moore Foundation.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park held a retrospective exhibition of Meadows’ work for his 80th birthday in 1995, with a second retrospective at Gimpel Fils in London, the first exhibitions of his works for 15 years. His most famous work is probably The Spirit of Brotherhood outside the TUC headquarters, Congress House in Great Russell Street, London.
He married Marjorie Winifred Payne in 1939. They had two daughters. He died in London.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Stephen Gilbert was a painter and sculptor from Scotland. He was one of the few British artists fully to embrace the avant-garde movement in Paris in the 1950s.
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects. His style was of the modernist school, having worked with Henry Moore early in his career. He was lauded as the greatest British sculptor of his generation.
Bernard Cohen is a British painter. He is regarded as one of the leading British abstract artists of his time.
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a Northern Rhodesian-born British conceptual artist.
Roger Hilton CBE (1911–1975) was a pioneer of abstract art in post-Second World War Britain. Often associated with the 'middle generation' of St Ives painters – Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon & Bryan Wynter – he spent much of his career in London, where his work was deeply influenced by European avante-garde movements such as tachisme and CoBrA.
Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.
Ivon Hitchens was an English painter who started exhibiting during the 1920s. He became part of the 'London Group' of artists and exhibited with them during the 1930s. His house was bombed in 1940 during World War II, at which point he moved to a caravan on a patch of woodland near Petworth in West Sussex. He worked there for the next forty years, gradually augmenting his caravan with a series of buildings. He is particularly well known for panoramic landscape paintings created from blocks of colour. There is a huge mural by him in the main hall of Cecil Sharp House. His work was exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1956.
Lynn Russell Chadwick, was an English sculptor and artist. Much of his work is semi-abstract sculpture in bronze or steel. His work is in the collections of MoMA in New York, the Tate in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
(David) Gwyther (Broome) Irwin was a British abstract artist born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, who had lived much of his life in north Cornwall. He was educated in Dorset, at Goldsmiths College and at the Central School of Art in London 1951–1954. Irwin first came to prominence in 1957 with an exhibition at Gallery One, and another at Gimpel Fils in 1959. In 1964, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, along with Joe Tilson, Bernard Meadows and Roger Hilton. In 1960, he married Elizabeth Gowlett and they had two sons and one daughter.
William Kenneth Armitage was a British sculptor known for his semi-abstract bronzes.
William Turnbull was a Scottish artist.
Andrew Sabin is a British sculptor. He studied at Chelsea College of Art (1979–1983) where he worked as a senior lecturer until 2006.
Anthony Benjamin FRSA, RE was an English painter, sculptor and printmaker. Referred to as a 'polymathic artist' by critic Rosemary Simmons when writing about his work for the Borderline Images By Anthony Benjamin show at The Graffiti Gallery in 1979.
Robert Adams was an English sculptor and designer. Whilst not widely known outside of artistic circles, he was nonetheless regarded as one of the foremost sculptors of his generation. In a critical review of a retrospective mounted by the Gimpel Fils gallery in London in 1993, Brian Glasser of Time Out magazine described Adams as "the neglected genius of post-war British sculpture", a sentiment echoed by Tim Hilton in the Sunday Independent, who ranked Adams' work above that of his contemporaries, Ken Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows.
Sea Form (Atlantic) is a 1964 bronze sculpture by English artist Barbara Hepworth. It measures 204 cm × 107 cm × 73 cm.
Ralph Brown was an English sculptor who came to national prominence in the late 1950s with his large-scale bronze Meat Porters, commissioned for Harlow New Town, Essex and is known for his sensual, figurative sculptures.
The Geometry of Fear was an informal group or school of young British sculptors in the years after the Second World War. The term was coined by Herbert Read in 1952 in his description of the work of the eight British artists represented in the "New Aspects of British Sculpture" exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia of 1952.
Leslie Tillotson Thornton was an English sculptor.
The British pavilion houses Great Britain's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Art galleries and museums | |
| Art research institutes | |
| Other | |
