Posts Tagged Sculpture
Alan Haydon obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 2, 2011
Arts administrator who transformed and reopened the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, as a centre for contemporary work
Alan Haydon, who has died aged 61 from cancer, was the director of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex, which he transformed into a major centre for contemporary arts. He had a vision for this modernist architectural gem to be a place where the strands of contemporary culture come together, exploring the spaces where art, film, sound and music converge. As he said: "Our task is to allow artists to work within those spaces and to build bridges for audiences to cross." The De La Warr Pavilion is now renowned for an innovative programme and as a special destination for artists, where one-off performances and collaborations crystallise.
Alan arrived at Bexhill in 1999, just as a lottery bid to support the much-needed refurbishment of the Grade I-listed building had been declined and the likes of the Wetherspoon pub chain were expressing interest in the building. At this time I was a freelancer for the De La Warr, co-ordinating a modest and underfunded visual art and education programme. Alan's single-mindedness, staying power and ability to influence secured not only the building itself, but also set the tenor of the future artistic programme. An Arts Council England award of £4.1m was gained, as well as £1.9m towards restoration and repair from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a further £2m raised from private and public sources. He safeguarded the pavilion's future prospects by overseeing the negotiations for matching revenue funding of more than £1m annually from Rother district council and Arts Council England – a previously unprecedented arrangement at this high level of funding.
The building reopened on 15 October 2005 and attracted more than 500,000 visitors in its first year. Alan orchestrated a bold and distinctive programme including Ian Breakwell, Bill Furlong, Jeremy Deller, Andy Warhol, Nathan Coley, Grayson Perry, Joseph Beuys, Michael Nyman, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and the Fall.
Alan was born in Lewisham, south-east London. He attended Eltham Green school and studied at Camberwell School of Art (1972-75), under the tutorage of David Troostwyk, a staunch conceptualist. A flirtation with the commercial art market followed, and Alan did a short stint at Sotheby's, but his motivation was more rooted in the democratic potential of art. He moved into the public arts sector, where he remained for the rest of his career, bringing his entrepreneurial spirit to the role of arts centre manager in the London borough of Hammersmith (1977-80), where he kick-started a new arts community space in Shepherd's Bush that included a ceramics studio, recording studio, cinema and theatre.
This led to roles as visual arts officer first in Hammersmith and then for Greater London Arts, where Alan drew up new policies for gallery development, public art and support for artists. He became strategy and regional development officer there between 1989 and 1991, and concentrated on the role of the arts in urban regeneration. Between 1991 and 1993 he was senior visual arts officer at Arts Council England, charged with promoting new policies to support the professional and economic status of the artist.
In 1993 he took up the post of head of visual arts at Northern Arts. Described by a former colleague as a "master facilitator", Alan carefully empowered colleagues without being overly directive – a very delicate balancing act. Lottery funds were becoming available for the first time with Arts Council England as a distributor, and he helped develop lottery-related projects in the north-east.
Alan set the new policy framework for the visual arts and crafts in preparation for the UK Year of the Artist in 1996. This was a sort of mini Cultural Olympiad, with cities and regions able to bid to celebrate the visual arts. The north-east of England became the host for this national celebration and the resulting programme was inspiring: the region now benefits from Baltic and the Sage in Gateshead and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Audacious large-scale commissions were supported by Alan and his team at the Arts Council; these included the Angel of the North by Antony Gormley and Bill Viola's The Messenger, a potent work made in response to the powerful spiritual context of Durham Cathedral.
Alan was an early supporter and board member of Matt's Gallery, in east London, and Locus+, the Newcastle-based artists' commissioning agency. In 1997 he moved south again, to become director of craft development at the Crafts Council, establishing innovative relationships with the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Creative Industries Task Force. Within two years, he had arrived at De La Warr Pavilion.
More a maverick and less a bureaucrat, his success lay as much in his character as his skill and knowledge. He had great presence, was the very best of company, with a wonderful appreciation of food, wine and lively debate, and had a penchant for beautifully tailored and brilliantly coloured corduroy suits.
Alan is survived by his wife Cat and their son Harvey; and by his son Simon, by his first wife, Eliane.
• Alan George Haydon, arts administrator, born 31 October 1949; died 9 October 2011
• This article was amended on 2 November. The caption to the first picture referred to the De La Warr Pavilion as being in the art-deco style. This has been corrected.
Hampton Court roundels restored – and their humble origins revealed
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 28, 2011
After years of detective work and months of restoration, four of the palace's 16th-century roundels are about to be unveiled
Science has revealed a surprising truth about some of the earliest and most spectacular Renaissance sculptures in Britain: the stern-faced 16th-century Roman worthies scowling down from the walls of Hampton Court palace were made out of London clay like any common house brick.
Since they were made by Giovanni da Maiano, a contemporary of Michelangelo, they were assumed to have been shipped from Italy. However forensic analysis of minute particles of the clay, part of a restoration programme which has saved some from collapse, has proved he must have set up a workshop in London in the 1520s when his grand patrons included Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII.
"Moving to London was his fundamental error," Kent Rawlingson, a buildings conservator, said. "These are really outstanding works by a major artist, but if he had stayed in Italy or even worked in the court of the king of France, there is no doubt that he would be far better known today."
After his time in England, Maiano vanished: there is no record of further commissions, or even when and where he died.
The roundels were carved in fantastic detail, which would not have been appreciated properly from ground level, but almost 500 years in the open air beside the Thames had taken its toll. Some were losing their hair and their laurel wreaths, others were riddled with cracks, the terracotta in places crumbling back into clay.
Now after years of detective work, and months of painstaking conservation including hand-carving replacement features in situ, the four judged most at risk are about to be unveiled, looking better than they have in centuries. They will then have to be boxed in again within weeks to protect them from the first winter frost. Work judged less urgent will follow on the other heads.
Wolsey commissioned the roundels for Hampton Court, the home he made so disastrously magnificent that it attracted the covetousness of his king, and became a royal palace. Maiano's bill survives: he charged Wolsey £2.6.8d each – plus 20 shillings each to install them.
The restoration work includes the plaques with their names, which are almost certainly wrong. Known for centuries as the 11 Roman emperors, Rawlingson is convinced they are really military heroes and leaders including Scipio, Pompey, and a youthful Alexander the Great.
He has been trying to piece together their history: they were moved several times at Hampton Court, with inevitable damage, so some are 16th-century roundels in 19th-century frames, others 19th-century roundels in original frames.
Henry VIII placed some on a hunting lodge he gave to Anne Boleyn, and two remain in the improbable surroundings of Hanworth. One was recorded discovered "in a dark closet", of which the palace has thousands, in the 18th century. Two more came from a lost Tudor landmark, the Holbein Gate at Whitehall, demolished in the 18th century for road widening.
"Since the palace first opened to visitors in the 18th century, they've always been admired – but we've never been exactly sure what they really were," Rawlingson said. "The truth is they are masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture, hiding in plain sight."
Neon light – Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert museum – video
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 26, 2011
Sarfraz Manzoor meets co-curators Jane Pavitt and Glenn Adamson, architect Charles Jencks and ceramicist Carol McNicoll at the V&A in London
Liver bird sculptor rehabilitated by city that tried to forget
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 12, 2011
Liverpool honours Carl Bernard Bartels posthumously, nearly a century after he was imprisoned and his plans destroyed
Liverpool seldom forgets an injustice. But for almost a century, the city has harboured one of its own, which will now be put right during a weekend of 3D projections and free concerts.
They will mark the centenary of the famous Liver building on the Mersey riverfront, topped by its pair of extraordinary birds, half eagle and half cormorant.
They were made by a talented artist who won an international competition for the commission, but was then airbrushed out of history.
Although a naturalised Briton, who had fallen in love with the country on honeymoon in 1887, Carl Bernard Bartels was arrested in 1915 at the height of anti-German feeling during the first world war, and imprisoned in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. At the end of the war, he was forcibly repatriated to Germany, separated from his wife, children and the home in London where they had lived for 20 years.
Worse was to come, as Liverpool city council admits in citations accompanying the posthumous award of citizen of honour to Bartels during the centenary celebrations between 22 and 24 July. "We are setting the record straight," said Wendy Simon, the city's cabinet member responsible for culture and tourism. "There was very strong anti-German feeling at the time, especially when the Lusitania was sunk in 1915 on her way to the port. It didn't last, even with the second world war, because we're a very multicultural city and famously welcoming. But it was too late by then for the man who gave us our famous Liver birds. He just got forgotten."
Rehabilitating the artist proved tricky, even in the last decade, because the 1915 xenophobia saw his drawings and blueprints for the 5.5-metre (18ft) copper sculptures destroyed, while false trails appeared to have credited foundry designers or the architect of the Liver building, Walter Aubrey Thomas.
Bartels himself accepted the cold-shouldering after a long and difficult struggle to return to the UK, where he eventually resettled and carried out commissions for Durham Cathedral and a number of country mansions.
"He also made artificial limbs for servicemen in the second world war," said his great-grandson Tim Olden, a graphic artist from Southampton who is one of 13 family members travelling to Liverpool to receive the award. "But it's only very recently that he has started to get real recognition. My mother took a 'let things lie' attitude, but one of her last wishes was to go and see the birds, and Liverpool gave her a warm welcome."
The visit in 1998 began Liverpool's rediscovery of Bartels, including his skill as the first person to sculpt a nonexistent bird only previously portrayed in drawings and paintings. He also managed to create a male and female, giving rise to the scouse legend that one or the other flaps its wings if a virgin or an honest man walks along Pier Head.
Silence; Folly for a Flyover; 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Memorial – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 9, 2011
Assemble's ingenious Folly for a Flyover is one of three new works currently enhancing London's public spaces
It's quite a time, in London, for Doing Something or Other in Public Places. On Monday the statue of Ronald Reagan was unveiled outside the US embassy, or "Man in Suit Standing on Large Anti-Terrorist Bulwark Disguised with Plants", as it could equally well be known. This week, Yuri Gagarin will be taking up permanent residence on the Mall. On Wednesday, about five minutes' walk from the Reagan statue, a fountain called Silence was officially opened outside the Connaught hotel.
It is the first work in London by 69-year-old Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who inspires in some critics wonder verging on hysteria, for his zen-like minimalism, his severe discipline and his craftsmanship. I don't go all the way with this adoration – his work is often heavy-handed and overworked – but I'm happy to report that Silence is a soothing oval of water, wrapped around two pre-existing trees, such that they appear to grow out of it, with periodic whirls of vapour emerging. It is part of a larger improvement of Mount Street, home of celebrity restaurant Scott's, paid for by the Duke of Westminster's property company Grosvenor, the City of Westminster and the Connaught hotel. The street is being made more friendly to pedestrians, and less cluttered with signs.
As Mount Street was never exactly a slum, I don't quite know why it was earmarked for an upgrade, when improvement projects in less-favoured streets struggle to get off the ground. Actually, I do know why: it's because the money is there, and there are obvious benefits to business in doing such work. It's genuinely generous of the Connaught to sponsor Silence, but with its associated paving and remade taxi drop-off, it does also give them a gracious be-fountained forecourt that, on their cramped site, they never had. This part of London is slowly becoming all foyer: pavement, shop interior, hotel reception, restaurant and apartment block lobby are becoming a continuous tissue of nice stone and little trees in square pots that don't know if they're outside or inside. Which, given that this part of Mayfair is about this sort of thing, is fine.
What interests me more is another site of water and masonry, with an intervention achieved for a fraction of Ando's (undisclosed) budget. This is Folly for a Flyover, a structure built in under four weeks, its materials costing a total of £20,000, which will stand for six weeks as a venue for films, concerts, boat rides and cheap coffee. The location is under two concrete bridges, carrying the eastbound and westbound A12 at the point where it crosses the Hackney Cut, a man-made addition to the River Lea. This is in Hackney Wick, east London, on the northern fringe of the 2012 Olympic site.
The folly is by the same group of architecture students and others who created last year's Cineroleum, a cinema temporarily made out of a disused petrol station, which was the brightest and best work of the 2010 pop-up boom. The group did not have a name then, but it has now got round to calling itself Assemble. Like Cineroleum, the folly has been built by limitless volunteer energy and ingenuity, and by enlisting helpful partners through enthusiasm: these include the Barbican, and the architecture and art practice muf.
The structure consists of a sloping bank of seats for watching films and events, which then turns and grows to form a café in the shape of a house. The house is cute/sinister, toy-like, as something out of a child's drawing or a fairytale, standing improbably in the forgotten concrete world beneath the flyover. The structure is scaffolding holding up some wobbly-looking bricks, which turn out to be made of reclaimed timber – oak, pine, yellowish opepe and reddish jarrah from railway sleepers. Each of the 10,000 bricks has been sawn from longer lengths by volunteers, and drilled with holes so they could be strung together by wires. The wall is in fact not masonry, but woven, and its elements can be reused after it is taken down.
It's an endearing-looking object, but more important is the way it brings to life a spot few will have known was there. The place is powerful, under the roads, with Piranesian columns, the water of the Hackney Cut and a slot of clear air, like an elongated oculus, between the two Roman-scaled bridges. Usually, it is also desolate and possibly scary, but by putting stuff and events there with a certain wit and spirit, Assemble have revealed its weird beauty. By having daytime events, boat rides and a cheap café, the Folly is also reaching a wider catchment than the largely twentysomething crowd who patronised Cineroleum.
The folly is a thing in motion: it is about the enjoyment of actions, with other people, from the building to the events. Back in west London, in the gardens of the Natural History Museum, architects Carmody Groarke have inserted a single 115-ton block of granite that aims to be as fixed and permanent as the folly is transitory and light. This is the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Memorial.
The block is left with the rough marks of quarrying, with repeating semi-cylindrical channels where long drills made a row of tubes that, when filled with water and given an explosive charge, caused the stone to be separated from its original cliff. The block is then undercut diagonally at one corner, such that it seems to teeter. In the space formed by the cut, inscriptions remember the 225,000 or more who died in the tsunami, and the names of the 155 of them who were Britons.
Like Carmody Groarke's 7/7 memorial, it is tactful without being soft-headed, relying for its impact on material, light and siting. It is in the genre of mute tablets and sentinels, which is what statues of veiled weeping women and sad cherubs once were – the accepted way of communicating loss. But it is none the worse for that; it is a job well done.
What is pleasing about these three different things, the memorial, the folly and the fountain, is that they all work. Often public space has a way of attracting interventions that weren't asked for and answer no desire or need, except for some artist, architect or local politician to put their tag on a place. The result is the usually excruciating phenomenon known as public art. With these three, once they're there, you can see the point of them. I can even see the point of the Reagan, given that there's still a much larger FD Roosevelt in a better location in Grosvenor Square. It's only fair the Republicans can get their man in, too.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 8, 2011
Art and architecture cross paths as robots roam the streets of Brixton and a giant E-Type brings Goodwood to life
Across the UK this week, architecture meets art head on. Public spaces are becoming canvases designed to shock, impress or contradict their surroundings, whether by ruefully reflecting them back at themselves or boldly reimagining how they may look in the future.
First up is a mass of white steel tubes (half a kilometre and half a tonne of the stuff, to be exact). It was there at the beginning of the week. But just as quickly as an Jaguar E-Type can accelerate from 0-100mph, Gerry Judah's bombastic sculpture of the world famous sports car in front of Goodwood House, Sussex is on its way to being taken down.
If you missed this sculpture commissioned by Jaguar for this year's Festival of Speed, don't worry ... it will soon be re-erected permanently near Coventry, home to Jaguar.
Standing 28 metres high, Judah's E-Type was a sensational foil to the classical grace of Goodwood House during the three-day festival. Judah, who worked as an architectural draughtsman with Richard Seifert before training as an artist at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art, tells me: "I see myself as part showman, part shaman and a bit of an alchemist."
I first met Judah in 1993 when the Calcutta-born artist created a moving and monumental Human Rights sculpture for Amnesty International. This was designed to have stood on Potters Fields next to Tower Bridge, but was refused planning permission. Since then, he has made such sculptural marvels as the Auschwitz Model in London's Imperial War Museum, and 15 car sculptures for successive Festivals of Speed.
The E-Type sculpture makes us see afresh the relationship between historic design and contemporary art. The tensions and ambiguities between the two can be both strange and delightful.
Or serene. This week, Tadao Ando, the celebrated Japanese architect who has yet to complete a building in Britain, came that bit closer to doing so with the official opening of Silence, a monumental fountain outside the Connaught Hotel in London's West End. Silence is a rippling, pool-shaped disc that reflects its surroundings and entices passers-by to plunge in. It is an early part of a £10m transformation of streets on the Grosvenor estate in Westminster.
This week will also see new artworks by Anish Kapoor, Franz West, Julian Opie and the late Kenneth Armitage unveiled by the Lord Mayor in the City of London. Great St Helens is being transformed into an outdoor sculpture gallery that will complement the new wave of buildings that have shot up around Norman Foster's Gherkin over the past decade.
Armitage's Screen with Folded Arms, from 1967, was always intended for an urban setting, while Kapoor's Sky Mirror offers topsy-turvy views of the surroundings, celebrating the cityscape and drowning in the sky. Opie's 3 Men Walking depicts just that: three men, dressed in fluorescent pink, walking around and around as if forever caught in the City. Franz West's Garden Pouf is a zigzag sculpture you are encouraged to touch, and which contrasts wilfully with the more formal lines of surrounding buildings.
A Tsunami Memorial was also inaugurated this Wednesday in the grounds of the Natural History Museum in London's South Kensington, commemorating the 155 British people who died in the 2004 wave that swept across the Indian Ocean. Designed by young architects Carmody Groarke, who also created the 7 July memorial in Hyde Park, the new monument is like some great stone washed by ocean tides against the Victorian architecture of the museum.
And then there's Kibwe Tavares's astonishing animation, Robots of Brixton, made for his masters degree in architecture at UCL. Tavares has taken Southwyck House, the much-maligned brutalist housing block flanking Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, south London, and reimagined it as a home to misunderstood and castigated robots in 2050. The beauty of Tavares's architectural renderings combined with his highly imaginative way of making us see Brixton afresh is moving, poetic and funny. He should team up with Gerry Judah. Architecture would never seem quite the same again.
Green planet: Charles Jencks’s gardens – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 23, 2011
Landscape architect Charles Jencks merges an interest in cosmology with a love of landscape design to create swirling, spiralling land sculptures. Weave your way through some of his cosmic creations
Meet Ernö Goldfinger, the unsung hero of furniture design
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 7, 2011
The unconventional furniture designs of Ernö Goldfinger – a man better known for his architecture – are a revelation. Which is why Ryan Gander's new art exhibition aims to bring them to light
Hidden in the basement of a terraced house on the Kingsland Road in east London, behind a black metal door, is a gallery called The Russian Club. Currently showing there is an enigmatic little exhibition entitled Ernö Goldfinger v Groucho Marx. It consists chiefly of a few plastic stools strewn across the floor, some photocopied pages taped to the walls and a large piece of wooden furniture that's not easy to categorise: a shallow, open cabinet in the shape of a picture frame. Inside this glassless vitrine is a collection of monochrome objects – books with no titles, pictures depicting nothing and a few inscrutable spheres. You could be forgiven for scratching your head.
The show is a collaboration between the designer Michael Marriott and the artist Ryan Gander. Marriott supplied the stools and a document listing some of the design objects that are significant to him – by and large they are irreducible classics by the likes of Achille Castiglioni and Jasper Morrison, with a few humble household objects thrown in. Gander supplied the wooden vitrine and his own document, a transcript of one of his lectures in which he creates a series of free associations that take in everything from John Wayne to the Marx brothers to the modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger.
At first, I couldn't see the connection between the works on display, or between Marriott and Gander, even though there's a clue in the exhibition's title. It turns out to be Goldfinger, the architect of the once despised, now desirable Trellick Tower in Notting Hill – and the man whose name Ian Fleming borrowed for his most single-minded baddie. Marriott and Gander have both been inspired at various points in their careers by Goldfinger's house in Hampstead, 2 Willow Road. It's not the architecture that fascinates them so much as the furniture and fittings, most of which Goldfinger designed himself. In fact the only colour photograph in the exhibition depicts Goldfinger's dining table, a white lino top mounted on the base of a piece of industrial machinery. Intrigued, I decided to pay a visit to Willow Road.
Now managed by the National Trust, Goldfinger's house is the middle one in a row of three that he built on the edge of Hampstead Heath in 1939. He was 37. Born in Budapest, he'd spent the 20s immersed in the avant-garde world of Paris, where he'd studied with Auguste Perret and befriended Charlotte Perriand, Max Ernst and Lee Miller. He moved to London in 1934 with his new wife, Ursula Blackwell of the Crosse & Blackwell food empire. It was Ursula's money that paid for Willow Road – and gave Goldfinger the chance to show off his architectural skills. They spent it wisely, bookending their own house with one to sell off and one to rent out.
From the outside, the modern brick terrace does not appear hugely radical. This is somewhat deceptive, as the houses are supported on cylindrical concrete cores that allow for extremely open, flexible interiors. Goldfinger was an early proponent of open-plan living, deploying foldable partition walls to double the size of a room. But while there is much to write about the house architecturally, it is Goldfinger the designer I am curious about. His buildings, from Trellick Tower in the west to its twin, Balfron Tower, in the east, are exhaustively documented. By contrast, he is almost absent from the history of furniture design – chiefly because he never had any commercial success in that department. Yet the Willow Road house reveals a clever, pragmatic designer who was ahead of his time.
From the moment you enter the house, you can sense Goldfinger's obsessive attention to detail and his unconventional colliding of materials. At the end of the entrance hall is a spiral staircase with concrete steps and an elegant brass handrail. But what does Goldfinger use to thread through the balustrade? A stretch of old rope. It's an idiosyncratic, oddly rustic detail in this refined modernist setting, and one that sets the tone for what follows.
Upstairs, in the living room, I experience a jolt of recognition. There it is, the wooden vitrine that Gander recreated for the exhibition, except here the books and pictures are real rather than ciphers. This framed screen, a device often used by the surrealists for displaying objects, acts as a giant TV, and certainly befits the space better than the clapped-out 80s Sony skulking in the corner. It is the centrepiece in a world almost entirely of Goldfinger's design. There are bent plywood chairs, wood-and-leather safari chairs originally made for Lee Miller in Paris, tubular steel dining chairs, ribbed-glass uplighters and a desk with pivoting drawers. All of these were designed with production in mind, but his only commercial products were a series of storage units and the toys he designed for the Abbatt toy company.
So why talk about Goldfinger's design at all? Because in one aspect – and no doubt unconsciously – he was oddly prescient. Goldfinger had a talent for incorporating readymades into his furniture. The rectangular dining table is brilliantly juxtaposed with its cast-iron machine base. Right next to it is a sideboard that, instead of legs, uses two steel I-beam cut-offs for feet. In these pieces, Goldfinger lets the language of industry and construction into the home. Elsewhere, you suspect, he is simply being resourceful. When he wanted a side cabinet, he took a standard upright one and turned it on its side. He created an adjustable shelving system by drilling holes in gas piping and using steel rods as pegs – Ikea couldn't make it any simpler. Bedside lights? How about two Anglepoise desk lamps bolted to the wall.
This is a far cry from the perfectionist language of high modernist furniture, the squeaky chrome and leather of Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier, with their emphasis on original forms. Conventional design history normally introduces readymade furniture in the 1950s, when Castiglioni started turning tractor seats into chairs and car headlights into lamps. Perhaps Goldfinger, who was in the circle of the surrealists in the 1920s, was channelling Duchamp and Isidore Ducasse, or perhaps he was simply a witty, observant talent, like Castiglioni after him. Goldfinger may have been a commercial failure as a furniture designer, but I left Willow Road wondering whether he might not be the missing link connecting the early modernist masters and their post-modernist successors.
Republican art rules OK
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 28, 2011
The royal wedding will showcase Westminster Abbey, but it is under republics, not monarchies, that artists flourish the most
The cultural heritage of the British monarchy is about to go on display all over the world as screens glow with the architectural and sculptural grandeur of Westminster Abbey. Founded in the 10th century, loaded with new marvels down the ages of which the most sublime is surely the chapel of Henry VII with its filigree fan vaulting, this royal abbey church is the best example anyone could ever adduce to support the contention that British culture is profoundly beholden to and involved in the regal tradition.
But in the history of European art, monarchy cannot claim all the masterpieces. On the contrary, republics and republicans have created some of the most dynamic and brilliant works of art of all time.
There's a clue to this fact in Westminster Abbey itself, in the Chapel of Henry VII. The setting is medieval in flavour and very English. But the tomb has putti that visibly come from Italy: it was created by the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who came to London from Florence. In fact, Torrigiano was trained in sculpture alongside Michelangelo, and broke his famous rival's nose in a teenaged fight. In 16th-century Italy, he was notorious as the thug who disfigured Michelangelo. In Tudor Britain he was valued as someone who could give it a taste of the most modern, dynamic culture in Europe.
So the British royal family imported Italian Renaissance art to Westminster Abbey. But the civilisation of the Italian Renaissance that it coveted was, however, obsessed with republicanism. The Renaissance started in cities that freed themselves from outside rule in the middle ages. The ideal these cities believed in was republican self-rule. In practice, most of them fell prey to despots – but the most brilliant tried to be republics. Venice ruled itself as a republic until the age of Napoleon, and its art, from Tintoretto's Paradise in the Doge's Palace to Giovanni Bellini's portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan in the National Gallery, is profoundly coloured by the unique cultural politics of the Most Serene Republic.
Florence, where Torrigiano came from, had a much less stable history. Where Venetian republicanism endured the centuries, the politics of Florence were bloody. The Medici family established de facto rule over the Republic, but they were deposed in 1494, violently restored nearly two decades later, and overthrown again in 1527 only to crush their enemies with tens of thousands of deaths in the Siege of Florence in 1529-30.
It is the history of Florence that should give cultural conservatives pause for thought. In Florence, from Donatello's Judith right through to Michelangelo's David, the most influential masterpieces of the Renaissance expressed the ideal of republican citizenship. Not only that: after the Medici finally defeated this ideal and became quasi-monarchical dukes, art in the city went into decline. The later Medici let their city become an artistic backwater compared with its great days. The city's artistic fire died with the Republic.
Artistic revolution happens in republics, you could reasonably conclude. The greatest artists flourish in free states far from the corruption of kings.
Meanwhile in Britain, the monarchical tradition has survived longer and more floridly than most other places. It is also a fact that of all the grandest European cultures we have the weakest tradition of visual art. In France, the Revolution inspired David. In Spain, the republican cause in the Civil War moved Picasso. Art does not flourish in monarchies, or to put it another way, in Italy they had republican ideals and they produced Donatello, Titian, the Renaissance. In Britain we've had thousands of years of hereditary monarchy and (since the Abbey) what has that produced? The souvenir mug.
Peter Thursby obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 21, 2011
British sculptor of works ranging in scale from the monumental to the domestic
The sculptor Peter Thursby, who has died aged 80, produced his first work in the wake of the second world war, a time when new and brutal abstract art came into being, challenging the semi-abstract and the figurative. His early sculptures were hard and aggressive, with form sacrificed to surface qualities. In time a more human modernism took over. His work ranged in scale from the architectural and monumental to small pieces for domestic interiors. He worked with a range of materials, from cast concrete, stone and slate to bronze, stainless steel, aluminium and silver.
His father was an army officer, and Peter had a rather military bearing himself. His handshake was firm, and his manners and his attire (when not in the studio) were both impeccable. He was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and his childhood was spent in Jamaica. Back in England, he attended Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury. The author William Golding was his English teacher, and Peter remembered Golding provoking his pupils into "thinking" – something that was not normally on the curriculum.
After doing his national service, he began to study art at St Paul's College of Education in Cheltenham (now Gloucestershire University). He then studied with Paul Feiler and Ernest Pascoe at the West of England College of Art. Attending their life classes honed his natural drawing skills and laid down the ideas which informed his first sculptures.
At Exeter College of Art and Design (1954-60), the teacher Edward Atkinson stimulated Peter's interest in sculpture. Throughout the 1950s Peter's output was almost exclusively in the form of paintings. By 1957 his canvases had become not only richly textural, but also fully abstract. His small series of red, black and grey paintings entitled Metal Objects in Space was praised in La Revue Moderne. His switch to sculpture was marked with early success when, in 1962, he won first prize in an exhibition held in Gloucester entitled 19 Young Sculptors.
Referencing the human form, Peter's early totemic sculptures were dark, coruscating pieces. These evolved into winged creatures thrusting into space. Marjorie Parr bought one winged creature at his solo exhibition at Plymouth Art Gallery in 1964, and he showed regularly at the Parr gallery. Gradually his organic sculptures became subsumed by the mechanical. New bronze table-sculptures took on a resemblance to assemblages of engine parts. Not all of his audience was convinced, although Eduardo Chillada, Eduardo Paolozzi and César Baldaccini were also engaged in making sculpture from reclaimed materials.
Peter made a number of tensile, poised aluminium sculptures, their linear forms in tune with new modernist architecture. They foreshadowed Peter's large public sculptures of the 1980s. Cast in bronze by the Morris Singer Foundry, these monumental works, weighing up to three tonnes, were erected in the US, Germany and the UK. Water was brought in to flow over many of them, creating movement, light reflection and sound.
Peter was not averse to semi-figurative work if he felt the subject called for it. Such was the case for his 1970s Podmen sculptures and his later Sarum series and Flight series. Intrigued by satellites and space travel, he produced a number of ringed and domed sculptures in the 1970s and 1980s, works which both reflected and refracted light. He also made a successful Tower series in which sculpture becomes architecture.
A good communicator, he gave generously of his time to art education and arts organisations, including the Royal West of England Academy, of which he was president for five years (1995-2000). In 1995 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West of England, Bristol.
I first met Peter when working on his biography with Simon Olding. For me, his Optimism series from the 1990s (one of which is now in the Queen's collection) came to epitomise him. His optimism was a paramount energising force, along with his deep Christian faith, and both helped him to create a body of work that is recognised as a significant contribution to 20th-century sculpture.
He is survived by his wife, Maureen, whom he married in 1956.
• Peter Lionel Thursby, sculptor, 23 December 1930; died 6 January 2011