Conjunction VIII

In 1952, on the occasion of the XXVI Venice Biennale, Herbert Read wrote an essay titled 'New Aspects of British Sculpture', where the now infamous phrase 'geometry of fear' was first coined. Chadwick was one of those sculptors represented in the exhibition, along with Adams, Armitage, Butler, Clarke, Meadows, Moore, Paolozzi and Turnbull. Working during this period of post-war austerity in Britain, their work revived sculpture through new techniques and mediums, and introduced new tensions and a sense of disquiet to their subject matter. With references to T.S. Eliot's foreboding lines of poetry and the imagery that they evoke, Read's essay alludes to the beasts and figures of Chadwick's iron sculptures of the 1950s.

Read writes: 'These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, of ragged claws 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas', of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear. Gone for ever is the serenity, the monumental calm ... The consistent avoidance of massiveness, of monumentality, is what distinguished these epigoni even from their immediate predecessor, Moore. They have seized Eliot's image of the Hollow Men, and given it an isomorphic materiality. They have peopled the Waste Land with their iron waifs' (exhibition catalogue, XXVI Biennale, Venice, British Council, 1952).