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Lot Essay
‘In 1976 he evolves striding figures clad in cloaks which, as the idea takes hold of his imagination, become ever more voluminous and billow out in the wind behind them ... Chadwick has delighted in contrasting the extravagant curves of the drapery with the gaunt angularity of the bodies they help to define’
-Dennis Farr
Conceived in 1984, Maquette II Jubilee III is a highly dynamic and striking work, produced during one of Chadwick’s most seminal periods. The Jubilee sculptures are among Chadwick’s most celebrated and desirable works, with the large-scale Jubilee sculptures holding the top two highest prices for the artist at auction. Michael Bird explains the history behind these iconic works, which take their title from 'the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession in 1952 but also acknowledges the work’s stagey, ceremonial nature: a man and female figure, striding side by side’ (M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 150).
From the 1950s Chadwick began to work with coupled figures, a subject that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career. Chadwick bestowed his figures with a distinct abstract idiom and a unique striking visual code, adopting the triangle and square head as a shorthand device for the symbolisation of the male and female. This identification of gender, is furthered in the treatment of his forms – the woman is more lightly built, her shoulders sloping at a gentler angle and her body appearing softer and rounder than that of her male partner. He, in turn, occupies a weightier stance, his mass and angularity more forcefully expressed, while the addition of a deep fissure to his body, which runs the length of his torso, reveals a sharper sense of form.
Chadwick explained: ‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98).
This balance of mass was fundamental to Chadwick. Indeed, within his works there lies a series of balancing idioms, with the artist playing with the parameters of mass and space; angular and organic forms; and the naturalistic and abstract. Chadwick explained the importance of such practice, ‘In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales – you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in ibid., p. 98).
During the 1970s Chadwick introduced garments to his works, adorning his figures with billowing cloaks and wing-like vestments, as seen in Maquette II Jubilee III. One can see this as a nod to the marble sculptures of ancient Greece, which commonly used the wet-drapery effect to delineate the female form, however, Chadwick gives life and autonomy to his flowing capes that form new abstracted shapes. This inclusion of robes not only further defined the distinction between male and female, here with the vestiges of a dress in the female figure and the allusion of a shirt in her male counterpart, but also incorporated an innate sense of movement and dynamism in his work.
This idea of motion can be seen to dramatic effect in the present work: the figures are propelled forward, their robes billow out behind them, as if caught in an invisible wind, thus setting his figures in a tangible space and fleeting moment in time. Chadwick relished in the manipulation of forms and line that these cloaks afforded him. The wonderful angular shapes of the robes in the present work are reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Italian Futurists and Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity of Space (1913), which famously explores the portrayal of movement through space.
Edward Lucie-Smith states, ‘The restless stirring of their vast cloaks enables them to make their own weather – where they are it is always windy, however still the weather. One notices how Chadwick’s characteristically crisp, sharp outlines seem to cut into the surrounding atmosphere. Far from mimicking nature, and, so to speak, becoming part of it, as some of Henry Moore’s large sculptures seem to do when placed outdoors, Chadwick’s work sets itself almost aggressively in opposition to its surroundings’ (E. Lucie-Smith, op.cit., pp. 111-112). While Chadwick stated, ‘Later I made this flowing coat evolve into ripples and later into a blown effect … like academic gowns blowing out behind’. Chadwick explained the effect of this stating that it gave him the opportunity to ‘get curves into my work … I made the outline of the cloak into a curved or multi-carved surface, or line rather, and joined them up so that I got interior volumes, sort of hollows which had a shaped outline’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in op.cit., p. 150).
We are very grateful to Sarah Chadwick for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
-Dennis Farr
Conceived in 1984, Maquette II Jubilee III is a highly dynamic and striking work, produced during one of Chadwick’s most seminal periods. The Jubilee sculptures are among Chadwick’s most celebrated and desirable works, with the large-scale Jubilee sculptures holding the top two highest prices for the artist at auction. Michael Bird explains the history behind these iconic works, which take their title from 'the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession in 1952 but also acknowledges the work’s stagey, ceremonial nature: a man and female figure, striding side by side’ (M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 150).
From the 1950s Chadwick began to work with coupled figures, a subject that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career. Chadwick bestowed his figures with a distinct abstract idiom and a unique striking visual code, adopting the triangle and square head as a shorthand device for the symbolisation of the male and female. This identification of gender, is furthered in the treatment of his forms – the woman is more lightly built, her shoulders sloping at a gentler angle and her body appearing softer and rounder than that of her male partner. He, in turn, occupies a weightier stance, his mass and angularity more forcefully expressed, while the addition of a deep fissure to his body, which runs the length of his torso, reveals a sharper sense of form.
Chadwick explained: ‘At first I gave the rectangular heads to both genders. Then I thought, that’s not quite fair – I ought to give the female one a different head. I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98).
This balance of mass was fundamental to Chadwick. Indeed, within his works there lies a series of balancing idioms, with the artist playing with the parameters of mass and space; angular and organic forms; and the naturalistic and abstract. Chadwick explained the importance of such practice, ‘In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales – you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in ibid., p. 98).
During the 1970s Chadwick introduced garments to his works, adorning his figures with billowing cloaks and wing-like vestments, as seen in Maquette II Jubilee III. One can see this as a nod to the marble sculptures of ancient Greece, which commonly used the wet-drapery effect to delineate the female form, however, Chadwick gives life and autonomy to his flowing capes that form new abstracted shapes. This inclusion of robes not only further defined the distinction between male and female, here with the vestiges of a dress in the female figure and the allusion of a shirt in her male counterpart, but also incorporated an innate sense of movement and dynamism in his work.
This idea of motion can be seen to dramatic effect in the present work: the figures are propelled forward, their robes billow out behind them, as if caught in an invisible wind, thus setting his figures in a tangible space and fleeting moment in time. Chadwick relished in the manipulation of forms and line that these cloaks afforded him. The wonderful angular shapes of the robes in the present work are reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Italian Futurists and Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity of Space (1913), which famously explores the portrayal of movement through space.
Edward Lucie-Smith states, ‘The restless stirring of their vast cloaks enables them to make their own weather – where they are it is always windy, however still the weather. One notices how Chadwick’s characteristically crisp, sharp outlines seem to cut into the surrounding atmosphere. Far from mimicking nature, and, so to speak, becoming part of it, as some of Henry Moore’s large sculptures seem to do when placed outdoors, Chadwick’s work sets itself almost aggressively in opposition to its surroundings’ (E. Lucie-Smith, op.cit., pp. 111-112). While Chadwick stated, ‘Later I made this flowing coat evolve into ripples and later into a blown effect … like academic gowns blowing out behind’. Chadwick explained the effect of this stating that it gave him the opportunity to ‘get curves into my work … I made the outline of the cloak into a curved or multi-carved surface, or line rather, and joined them up so that I got interior volumes, sort of hollows which had a shaped outline’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in op.cit., p. 150).
We are very grateful to Sarah Chadwick for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.