British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

For Kenneth Armitage, the 1952 Venice 'New Aspects of British Sculpture' exhibition 'was really the beginning of my professional life. I was totally unknown before that, and in those few weeks I became a known name internationally.' That year he was the last artist selected, but, six years later, he returned as the sole representative of British sculpture.

In 1997, Armitage closed an essay called 'My Life and Work' with the idea that the brain has separate 'real' and 'play' sides. Even at the Slade in the late thirties, where, like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, he'd gone after Leeds School of Art, his tutors had encouraged him to keep the 'humorous' side of his work. He did, and later, Peter Selz would call this 'his commitment […] to life and the joyful play of making which is the necessary counterpart of labour.' This approach to creativity – which only lapsed, temporarily, in the 1960s – sits strangely with the critic Herbert Read's now famous summing up of the 1952 show:

here are images of flight, of ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear. [italics mine]

By the 'scuttling' quotation, Read meant that, for him, the sculpture showed the late-WWI nerves of T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' growing into a full expectation that the world was about to be incinerated by atomic bombs.

But, as Read admitted, the sculptors didn't necessarily agree, and neither did a lot of other visitors to the Pavilion. In terms of 'geometry', Norbert Lynton saw him as 'less 'organic' and more geometrical than [Henry] Moore', but in terms of 'fear', there seemed to be something more optimistic being said about human companionship. Pieces like People in a Wind (1951) (shown in 1952) and Friends Walking (1951) (shown when he returned in 1958) had Alan Bowness writing 'there is always a basic humanity, a concern for people on a very direct and forthright level that distinguishes Armitage's work from that of most sculptors today.'

Armitage was an expert in military geometry; after the disaster of Allied gunners shooting down Allied planes at Dunkirk, he ran training courses in identifying the silhouettes of enemy planes and tanks. He'd joined up as soon as he left the Slade in 1939, and, although – to his glee – an early report read 'eccentric, untidy, and should be curbed', he eventually made a good soldier, and was promoted to captain by 1944. Immediately afterwards, 'longing to get on with art', he 'pulled a blind down in my mind over the whole of the six-and-a-half years in the Army', and walked into a job at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. As Head of Sculpture, his opposite number in painting was William Scott, one of his future co-exhibitors at the 1958 Biennale.

In 1953, he left Corsham to take up a Gregory Fellowship in Sculpture at Leeds University, his birthplace. He apparently had more of an emotional connection to his mother's roots in Ireland, but was suddenly reminded he'd been born within a few miles of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Herbert Read. Before going to Leeds, he met Charles and Peter Gimpel, who were setting up a gallery – Gimpel Fils – in London. Despite initial scepticism, they showed some of Armitage's work to Lilian Somerville, the British Council's Director of Fine Arts, and, as part of the 1952 selection committee, she voted him in.

For Armitage, abstract sculpture was 'too polite, like people who are too shy ever to take off their clothes'. Instead, figurative inspiration came from crowds, studio furniture and military memories; he soon realised he hadn't actually shaken the 'constant awareness of shape' developed during gunnery classes. 'Shapes of aircraft came into my work when I started making sculpture at Corsham', he remembered, and 1958 Biennale pieces like Roly-Poly (1955) – 'which was lumpy with legs in the air' – 'really came from the tanks'. As a sanctuary from students, he rented part of an old primary school as a studio, and had screens made to hide the old furniture.

Various things had influenced me unconsciously: the screens did. Although they were there I never thought about them, but I actually started making real screens. As a result of having looked at aircraft with their wings, the screens appeared as if they were almost flying.

Although he needed peace and quiet to work, large groups of people were his other main source of inspiration:

if you look at a crowd, you do not count the arms and legs, you just see odd arms swinging and the odd leg moving [… so] two or three figures would be unified into one mass, and then I could arrange the arms and legs as I wanted.

At the 1958 Venice show, elements of crowd, screen and plane combined in Family Going for a Walk (1951) and Seated Group listening to Music (1952). The David E. Bright prize for a sculptor under forty-five was especially invented for him, and the show was a huge commercial and critical success. Rather than capitalise on his sudden fame, Armitage entered the 1960s with darker concerns.

'The delightful mood of innocence and easy relaxation has disappeared from Armitage's work', Bowness wrote, 'and with it that feeling of warm humanity and intense interest in the activities of others.' The Legend of Skadar (1965) is basically a series of ten bronze walls. Their only feature – bizarrely protruding breasts – come from a Yugoslavian legend of a new mother walled up in a building to appease an evil spirit; her last wish was to be able to feed her newborn son from her living grave. According to the sculptor's research, the milk continued to run long after her death, and 'so it turned into a sacrifice that was a miracle, and was of help to women with fertility problems': perhaps a warmer vision of humanity than Bowness credited him with.

In 1967, an academic exchange scheme afforded him three year's work in Berlin around the time of the student riots, and began the Arm/Both Arms series. Effectively variations on the Skadar walls with more hopeful, outstretched arms attached, the series culminated in the choice of Both Arms (2000) for Leeds' Millennium Square.

Despite leaving behind an estate worth £2,213,663 when he died in 2002,  Armitage was, like his Venice co-exhibitor  S. W. Hayter, publicly unmotivated by money. In 1973, he spoke out against 'self-destructive over-commercialism within the normally conscientious gallery system', having himself worked and sold independently since he left the Marlborough Gallery in 1972. If artists and dealers were less precious, he argued, there would be a considerable public for affordable multiples and prints of works.

That everyone might see the same object at the same time is irrelevant, for with many people a susceptibility to the new or available is in no way contemptible but indicates rather a collective and innocent involvement in contemporary life – an affirmation of and confidence in being alive in this moment and in no other.

But his own favourite sculptural memory was of a unique piece of reindeer antler he'd seen in the British Museum – 'a museum of life', he called it – with a simple, ancient carving of a reindeer paw and antlers. From it, he took his opinion of 'the role of art': 'a form of direct communication quite independent of other human activities.'

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

Kenneth Armitage, ed. Tamsyn Woollcombe, Life and Work (London: Lund Humphries, 1997).

Alan Bowness, 'The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage', (British Council press release, c. 1958).

Alan Bowness, 'Kenneth Armitage: His Recent Sculpture', (exh. cat., c. 1973).

Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York: MOMA, 1959).

Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage (London: Methuen, 1962).

Bryan Robertson, John Russell & Lord Snowdon, Private View (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965)

Charles Spencer, Alecto Monographs 1: Kenneth Armitage (Bath: Academy Editions, 1973).

Tamsyn Woollcombe, 'Armitage, (William) Kenneth (1916–2002)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn., (Oxford: OUP, 2006); online edn, Oct 2008, accessed 9th January 2009.