Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1110745
By the early 1950s Henry Moore had created some of his most iconic and popular works, solidifying his international reputation. The image of the mother and child had become canonical in his oeuvre, as had his ability to breathe life into his smooth surfaced bronze and stone sculptures. While his sketchbooks of shelter drawings had immortalised the tragedies of the war and propelled him onto the international stage as an official war artist, it came to the next generation of artists to work with the ramifications of both his fame and a changed society. The 1952 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale marked a turning point both for a younger generation of sculptors and British culture attempting to revitalise itself after the devastations of the war. Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, all relatively unknown artists at the time, exhibited alongside the legendary Henry Moore in a presentation entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture. Moore's sculpture Double Standing Figure stood juxtaposed to Reg Butler's Woman at the entrance to the Pavilion as a connected yet opposing pair, clearly laying the tone for this major exhibition. Emerging from the dominating shadows of Henry Moore and a recovering world, this younger generation created works filled with anxiety and twisted figures. The revolutionary group became known as the 'Geometry of Fear' sculptors, a term coined by the critic and Commissioner of the British Pavilion, Herbert Read – also the critic for Unit One's exhibition. In his catalogue essay he described how 'here are images of flight, or ragged claws "scuttling across the floors of silent seas", of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear'. However, Moore's works were not without their animality. Within the Pavilion he presented Animal Head which although smooth with its polished bronze, was not far removed thematically from Chadwick's Bird II. Moore's Standing Figure No. 1 from 1952 displays how it is too reductive to describe Moore in opposition to the so called 'Geometry of Fear' during this time, but rather there was a dialogue between the artists, however differing the outcomes may be. Each sculptor from the generation after Moore seemed to have some form of reaction or parody to his work. The critic Robert Melville wrote that in contrast to Moore, 'they have turned to modelling, manipulating and assembling techniques, to lighter and more sinewy materials. They have replaced the craft of the stonemason with the craft of the blacksmith, the industrial skills of the welder and the model and pattern maker.' For Butler it was his sexualized, angst ridden nudes, for Armitage his use of tragic, comic figures, for Chadwick it was the raw darkness of form and for FE McWilliam it was building figures from geometric shapes. Although clearly grappling with the serenity of Moore's bodies, their work also signaled a new vision of mankind and modernism. New Aspects of British Sculpture