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4 In 2005 Osborne Samuel commemorated the 1954 ground-breaking exhibition, Nine Abstract Artists, and republished Lawrence Alloway's influential book. The artists – Victor Pasmore, Kenneth & Mary Martin, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams, Adrian Heath, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and William Scott - embracing formal abstraction, constructivism and a tachiste approach to painting, became synonymous with Alloway's book. At the same time a group of sculptors, the core of this current exhibition, were championed internationally by the British Council throughout the 1950's. Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull and Henry Moore were the artists selected for the British Pavilion in the 1952 Venice Biennale, entitled `New Aspects of British Sculpture.' Read wrote of the sculptors, "these new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, of ragged claws `scuttling across silent seas,' of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear." The term Geometry of Fear captured and continues to capture the imagination but it is not the full story of this defining moment in the history of British art. The term has become synonymous with the `spiky' metal forms of Meadows, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Armitage and Turnbull. There is no doubt that Meadows' crabs, threatening and scuttling, express much deeper emotions than simple anatomical representation. However, as Margaret Garlake candidly wrote, "the essential quality of the sculpture was produced and defined by the artist's adventurous and inventive attitude to materials and techniques." This includes Moore and Hepworth's carvings, stringed work, puncturing the solid form; it includes the work of Paolozzi studded with found objects and machine parts and it includes the carvings and constructions of Adams. Whether the materials were constructed, welded or carved, they were imbued with an energy beyond the physical form. Henry Moore wrote, "for me a work must first have a vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement, physical action, frisking, dancing figures and so on but that a work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this powerful vitality we do not connect the word Beauty with it." 1 This from the `father figure' of 20th century British sculpture who paved the way, gaining the International Sculpture Prize at the first Venice Biennale after the War in 1948. The British Council curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennales and Moore was later to acknowledge the role the Council played in launching his own career onto the international stage, alongside so many sculptors and artists of the post war generation. Another important body, the Royal Society of Arts, was given the task of creating an event to commemorate the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at Crystal Palace. The centenary celebrations became the 1951 Festival of Britain. The remit of the Festival was `to display the British contribution to civilization, past, present and future, in the arts, in science and technology and industrial design…. The Festival must aim to bring into being new works of art ….And in many other ways leave behind Introduction 1 Sculpture & Drawings, Vol 1 (1957) p.XXXi – taken from Hebert Read Modern Sculpture