Intellectuals Without Trauma

"Forty years ago, the idea of there being a great English sculptor was as remote as a Hottentot becoming prime minister of Scotland," says one British artist. Today Great Britain has become a hotbed of new sculptors, with three museum shows in London currently devoted to their renaissance. Miraculous as the new flowering appears, the sculpture bloom began in the 1930s, when British artists found the seeds for their ideas on the Continent from such sources as Brancusi, Archipenko and Picasso, repotted their findings in good English earth, and began producing a hardy native growth.

Off Their Pedestals. The oak towering above all is Henry Moore (TIME cover, Sept. 21, 1959). Around him have now sprung a turbulent group of younger sculptors. First to appear in the immediate postwar years were Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, whose vaguely figurative iron and bronze forms spoke to stress, anxiety and despair. Succeeding them is another generation that reacts against what one, Anthony Caro, calls their predecessors' "bandaged and wounded art." The wraps are off, the postures have come down from their pedestals and plinths, and the new British sculptors (see following color pages) are forging ahead in tough, cool and iconoclastic experimentation.

The youngest of the post-Moore sculptors reject a moody image of man just as they have abandoned casting in bronze. They use plastics and Fiberglas to create exuberant forms that often intrude into the provinces of painting. Cambridge-educated Phillip King, 30, a devoted student of Moore's, wants to "open up volume," and in works such as Twilight, he knifes apart space with hard, bright edges.

A counterpart is Oxford-taught William Tucker, also 30, who switched from painting to sculpture after seeing Moore. Tucker strips the image to its irreducible core, colors his work to give clues to its form, but abstracts it to the point where it would connote almost anything or nothing. He agrees with King that "five years ago, sculpture was still nihilist and negative. Today it's about life, not death, and we're not afraid of words like beauty, joy and pleasure."

The Stressful Present. Two leaders of the new generation are Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Caro, both 41. Paolozzi turned from golem grotesques of junkyard assemblages of gears and bolts to hand-tooled totems, such as Artificial Sun, which are unthreatening icons to a world that accepts machine culture willingly. Caro, a Cambridge engineering graduate, worked with Moore for two years until "I'd come to feel that bronze was using me." So he began welding elegant elongated girderwork in steel instead of making "people substitutes" in bronze.

There still are those who adhere to the permanence of cast metal. Michael Ayrton, 44, has painted for 29 years, but Moore got him to sculpt as well. Impassioned by Greek mythology, he wonders "what happens when you are partly animal and want to become wholly human." He makes his misshapen minotaurs, therefore, into symbols for man's stressful present. Bernard Meadows, 50, who assisted Moore from 1936 to 1939, also produces bronzes suggestive of figures withdrawn into abstraction. Tough, crablike carapaces cover highly polished softer forms like defenses for a vulnerable humanity.

Sublime Thoughtfulness. A new and cooler objectivity has replaced the earlier angst in angular bronze. But the look of the sculpture is less realistic, more a kind of sublime surrealism of daydreams rather than nightmares. One such obsessive humanist is Roland Piche, 26, a former student of Meadows' whose space frames--cubes of bar steel--are his trademark. In them, as in his Homage to a Summer Portrait, a distinct action is frozen like a blurred snatch of Technicolor film. "This is a transitory generation," Piche says, and these actions are imitated in transitory materials.

The post-Moore sculptors are in transition toward new forms utterly unrelated to history, anatomy, anecdote, or the nature of materials. They want to make new shapes that man has never conceived of. Moore himself, still relentlessly pursuing his own work at the age of 66, is not dismayed. "The thing about the English school now," he says, "is its variety. They don't care what material or technique they use. They understand rightly that it's the mind that counts."

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