Feature: Exhibition - Modern British Sculpture at Royal Academy of Arts from January 22 to April 7

Published: 20 January, 2011
by JOHN EVANS

The most comprehensive show devoted to ‘modern British sculpture’ since the 1970s opens on Saturday

ROYAL Academician and Hamptead artist Sir Anthony Caro was the inspiration behind this show, the first comprehensive look at “Modern British Sculpture” for more than 35 years, with the aim of raising public awareness.

But for co-curator Dr Penelope Curtis, now director of Tate Britain and formerly head of the Henry Moore Fundation, the aim was to focus on sculptures rather than sculptors and to ask questions about each of the three elements – what’s modern, what’s British, even what is sculpture?

Together with sculptor Keith Wilson they have chosen some 120 pieces which deliberately challenge and encourage an examination of influences on the “British” scene. 

In part answer to their own questions, they include not only photographic and video material; their centrepiece features a reconstruction of Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall alongside banners depicting Jacob Epstein’s controversial Cycle of Life figures created for the BMA’s building in The Strand, from 1906-8; there is a recreation of Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton’s an Exhibit, of 1957, Perspex panels hanging from steel wires; but they also place Barbara Hepworth’s spherical wood and string Pelagos of 1946 in the same gallery room as a Chinese bowl, which might be thought to be contemporary with its leafy scroll design but is from the Jin dynasty (1115-1234).

The challenges continue, with works as varied as the basalt Statue of Moai Hava from Easter Island, c1000, part of a leopard from 4th century BC Halicarnassus, a reclining Aztec figure from the 16th century and others on loan to illustrate the wealth of material to be found by artists attracted to London’s museums in the early part of last century. Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Leon Underwood, Betty Rea, Frank Dobson and others have works exhibited nearby.

Fans of Anish Kapoor, whose 2009 RA show was such a success, and/or Antony Gormley, will however be disappointed that neither features in this show. But Damien Hirst is represented by his dirty Let’s Eat Outdoors Today (rotting flesh, sauce, beer, flies, etc) alongside Jeff Koons’ clean vitrine of a basketball in a tank.

Key pieces include Alfred Gilbert’s Queen Victoria jubilee memorial, here compared with Genghis Khan, 1963 by former Academy president Phillip King. Work by his predecessors, Frederic Leighton and Charles Wheeler also touch on “authority,” “establishment” and the RA’s role in shaping British sculpture over the period.

Wheeler’s bronze Adam from the mid-1930s is exhibited in the room next to American-born Epstein’s monumental 1938 full-frontal alabaster figure of the same name, alone worthy of drawing the crowds.

So this truly is a show of juxtapositions: the abstract and figurative; private and public; and of the relationship to other disciplines, from ceramics to architecture and moving image.

Hepworth’s Single Form and Moore’s Reclining Figure are compared as different approaches to postwar “public” works.

The other day in his studio, a former piano factory in Camden, Sir Anthony Caro, now 86, declared: “I’m still an abstract sculptor…” And his own innovative, painted steel and aluminium Early One Morning from 1962, is in the exhibition.

He said: “You start to break your own rules and hope that the younger generation calls one into question.” 

It’s a real key to this show which tries to “break the mould of old conceptions” through its chronological series of themed galleries.

But, Sir Anthony added, sculpture is “very physical… a very real thing, not to do with illusion”. In the old days it was the poor relation, “…painters were allowed on the high table, sculptors were the tradesmen.”

Though William Tucker’s own work is not included, exhibited close to Sir Anthony’s piece is a magazine article by Tucker in 1969, in which he wrote: “In effect sculpture has become part of the world of artefacts which we inhabit, marked off only by the stated intention of the artist and the context in which the work is seen.”

• Modern British Sculpture, January 22-April 7 at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1. £12, concessions available. Bookings 0844 209 0051 www.royalacademy.org.uk