Lynn Chadwick

Guy Pieters, Knokke-Heist
Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Exh. Cat., London, Marlborough Fine Art, A Selection of Important Sculpture, June - August 1988, illustrated (ed. no. unknown)
Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Oxford 1990, p. 330, no, C58 S, illustrated (ed. no. unknown)
Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Stroud 1997, p. 364, no. C58 S, illustrated (ed. no. unknown)
Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Aldershot 2006, p. 372, no. C58 S, illustrated (ed. no. unknown)
Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Farnham 2014, p. 372, no. C58 S, illustrated (ed. no. unknown)

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few short, superficial rub marks and shallow scratches in places, as well as some spots of burnishing to some of the protruding elements, which is in keeping with the artist's choice of medium. There are some dust fibres which have deposited in the recesses of the work, as well as some small spots of oxidation in places.
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Beating Alberto Giacometti to the prestigious International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956, Lynn Chadwick was one of the most distinguished of the young sculptors that emerged in Britain in the years following the Second World War. Executed in 1987, Maquette IV Jubilee III is a lyrical testament to his talent as well as a stunning example from his most iconic series –the Jubilee figures.  In the same vein as Francis Bacon’s distorted forms or Alberto Giacometti’s existentially elongated figures,  Maquette IV Jubilee III  deals with the horrific legacies of the Second World War. Art critic Herbert Dean famously interpreted, “these new images belong to the iconography of despair, 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” (Herbert Read cited in: ‘Geometry of Fear’, Tate, no date, online). While Dean’s famous observation speaks directly to Chadwick's work from the 1950’s, it from this background that the present work must be seen. Created nearly 40 years after, Maquette IV Jubilee III presents an all-together more optimistic celebration of human form – testament to time’s power to heal.

The regal Maquette IV Jubilee III exudes an aura of eminence - the armless monolithic figures stride forward, their bronze cloaks interpreting the nature of the wind, or the majesty of a bird taking flight, rendered static with all tensions suspended in space.  As his wife, Eva Chadwick, explains: “Chadwick has always been intrigued by movement, either actual or implied, in his sculpture… his cloaked walking women with windswept hair of the 1980s explored figures in motion. Sometimes their cloaks and draperies flow out in the wind from behind them, or are caught by a gust and wrap themselves around the figures" (Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, Farnham 2014, p. 15). At once primitive and futuristic, Maquette IV Jubilee III possesses an attitude of rebirth – a new figurative form for a new post-war age. Pierre Cabanne, writing for a Paris exhibition, described Chadwick’s figures as plaster filled skeletors “tearing themselves free from the primordial slime, taking form and flexing their new muscles, walking [forward] for the first time”(Pierre Cabanne cited in: Edward Lucie-Smith, Lynn Chadwick Out of The Shadows: Unseen Sculpture of the 1960s, London 2009, p.43).