Flight from fear

Published 29 September 2003

Art - Richard Cork on a sculptor whose best work was also his gloomiest

To his annoyance, Lynn Chadwick found that a critic's words came to dominate public understanding of his work. In 1952 he contributed to a show of younger sculptors at the Venice Biennale's British pavilion. Herbert Read, who wrote the catalogue introduction, argued that a Jungian unconscious united their work, obsessed with "excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear." Those final four words swiftly branded a new generation with an identity they would struggle to shake off.

In one sense, Read was right to stress the strain of anxiety running through their work. Several of them, including Kenneth Armitage, Geoffrey Clarke and Chadwick, had emerged from prolonged active service in the Second World War. A decade later, as the current Tate retrospective discloses, Chadwick would allow his war memories to dictate the form of an unnerving sculpture. But the earliest exhibits are the opposite of anguished.

Chadwick, who had earned a living as a textile, furniture and architectural designer since 1946, caught the attention of the radical architects Misha Black and Jane Drew. Drew asked him to make one of his mobiles for the Riverside Restaurant she was designing for the 1951 Festival of Britain. But the commission that made his reputation was for Black's Regatta Restaurant: a tall "stabile", rising with lean and aspirant energy from the garden. Its copper sheets, held on a crisp armature of brass rods, were redolent of growth. Chadwick likened the sculpture to a cypress, and its spirit of renewal chimed perfectly with a festival dedicated above all to postwar regeneration. No hint of what Read described as "the iconography of despair" can be found in this serene work.

Although Chadwick had caught the national mood of optimism, that year he set out to explore more uneasy emotions. He began, surprisingly, with a mobile called Dragonfly. Suspended from the ceiling, and balanced from a single point at the side of the insect's body, it appears at first like an elegant plaything. But then we realise that its attenuated body swoops down in a predatory curve. This is a dragonfly bent on destruction, and its airborne menace surely originated in Chadwick's awareness of his own lethal potential as a wartime pilot.

As his confidence grew, so Chadwick's sculpture became more ambiguous. In the maquette for an imposing work called The Inner Eye, an unidentifiable pres-ence supported on thin legs holds a glass fragment in a pincer-like grip at the centre. Chadwick hints at the creature's prehistoric origins, even as he suggests that it belongs to a science-fiction world as well.

Even in a proposal for a piece in welded iron submitted to the Unknown Political Prisoner competition in 1953, Chadwick made references to the past. For the first time, he filled in his bodies, and four of them interlink as they hold a smaller, thinner form in their tenacious grip. They lift it off the ground, so that the prisoner inhabits a world as suspended as Dragonfly had been. But now all sense of mobility and power has given way to rigidity and helplessness.

No wonder Chadwick declared, a year later, that "art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark". He equated his source of inspiration with a dream, warning that "the intellect alone is still too clumsy to grasp it". That is why his work of this period has mysterious titles such as Idiomorphic Beast or Conjunction. His finest early work thrives on its unclassifiability. Fascinated by the interplay between animal and human, the real and the mythological, he refuses to separate them in his own mind.

Sometimes, these forms recall the snarling, long-beaked creatures in Graham Sutherland's immense painting The Origins of the Land, commissioned by the Festival of Britain for the "Land" pavilion and now, fortuitously, displayed on the Tate's new extension staircase. But Sutherland did not intend his primordial animals to have any contemporary references, whereas Chadwick relished his ability to leap freely around different eras.

Even in a work entitled Dancing Figures he evaded literal interpretations. Although identifiably male and female in their bodies, and locked together in a sexual act, the figures' heads are reduced to genderless prongs. Lacking any human individuality, they are not so far removed from the world inhabited by The Stranger, a pterodactyl-like beast bearing a polished slab of silver plate on his chest.

This creature has a tragic dimension, and Chadwick's preoccupation with the dark side of his imaginative life led to intensely frustrating rejection. Commissioned in 1957 to produce a memorial to the airship that crossed the Atlantic twice in 1919, he proposed a winged figure with two heads looking in different directions. Uncannily prophetic of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, it was intended as a powerful monument for the new long-haul terminal at London Airport. But the pioneer airman Lord Brabazon of Tara led opposition to it from the Guild of Air Pilots, dismissing the maquette as "a diseased haddock". It was rejected, depriving us of an impressive public sculpture by an artist at the zenith of his abilities.

Just how well Chadwick would have coped with a large-scale work is demonstrated at the show's halfway point, where The Watchers stand isolated in the Duveen rotunda. The first of his multi-figure groups, it shows three brutish creatures lined up in a row. With their block-like, featureless heads, thick necks and bulky torsos, they resemble prehistoric thugs. All looking outwards, and not joined to each other in any way, they are supported by oddly slender legs, reminding us of Chadwick's preoccupation with vulnerability. But the overall mood is menacing, and their sinister blankness indicates that he viewed the cold war period with deep-seated pessimism.

Then the whole tenor of the exhibition changes. The mercifully concise second half, tracing his development from 1969 to the end of his work- ing career in the mid-1990s, reveals a terrible decline. Chadwick immerses himself in a more predictable figurative idiom, mainly casting in bronze and indulging a partiality for young women with hair as wind-blown as their dresses. Whether striding or mounting flights of stairs, they entirely lack the sinister, animal potency of his 1950s sculpture. He becomes skittish, even titillating, and polishes the faces and breasts of the well-endowed Three Elektras until they gleam shamelessly in the light. At once repetitive and overblown, the later work amounts to a sad betrayal of his earlier achievements. For them alone the Tate survey is well worth visiting, with its timely reappraisal of Chadwick's tense, resourceful and unsettling contribution to modern British sculpture.

"Lynn Chadwick" is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (020 7887 8000) until March 2004

Post this article to