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Reg Butler 1913 -1981 Study for Girl with Vest, 1955 Inscribed, numbered and stamped with foundry mark on base 'RB 4/8 Susse Fondeur Paris' Bronze. Cast at Susse Fondeur, Paris in an edition of 8. 10 1/4 x 4 3/8 x 3 1/2 in, 26 x 11 x 9 cm Provenance Private Collection, Italy Exhibitions London, ICA, Christmas Fair, 1955 London, Hanover Gallery, 1957, cat. no.16 Literature Garlake, Margaret, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Perry Green, 2006, illus. p.30, cat. no.156 p.144 After the Second World War Butler was among a number of British sculptors who responded to the nuclear age, exploring the relationship between humanity and machine. Coupling together Freudian theory, Surrealism, and 'primitivism', Butler investigated the body under various kinds of stress; a theme that would be an important part of his 1950s oeuvre. Critics identify his works from this decade as some of the most powerful expressions of post-war anxieties. During this period Butler began his central, most compulsive subject: the sensual female body. Encouraged by his reading of Freud, he gradually narrowed his focus, concentrating on what he referred to in the notebooks as 'the Girl idea'. These two works, both entitled Study for Girl with Vest from 1955 and 1959, display Butler's investigation into contortions of the female figure. Butler's two Study for Girl with Vest are in parts tender and sensuous, while also coarse and unfinished—a lump of raw material. The elongated forms directly contrast with the organic curves of Moore's smooth yet solid reclining figures which were ubiquitous at the time. Indeed, Butler remarked that 'I often try to get the mass in my figures up in the air like an explosion, supported as efficiently as I can on thin material… the whole feeling of this lump of flesh in space dissociated from the ground'.