Kenneth Armitage, R.A.

Private Collection, U.K.

Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage; Life and Work, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, KA10, p.143.

There are white casting deposits which have gathered in some of the crevices, otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. The sculpture is loosely held on a wooden plinth. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Kenneth Armitage's People in the Wind is, along with his Family Going for a Walk, one of his two best-known and most popular early sculptures. In its largest form it was included in the landmark exhibition of eight young sculptors (Robert Adams, Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) at the 1952 Venice Biennale which not only provided an immediately prominent platform for Armitage's work, but was also the occasion for the coining of Herbert Read's famous phrase, 'the geometry of fear'. Whilst Read's attempt to see a Jungian collective unconscious tendency within the work of the artists shown has been much questioned by art historians and critics, what is undeniable is that during the 1950s, a new generation of British sculptors had emerged onto the international stage.

Armitage was not particularly well known at the time of this exhibition, although since 1946 he had been teaching sculpture at Bath Academy of Art, the far-sighted academy run by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis at Corsham Court. The Ellises recruited some remarkably talented young artists onto the staff and Armitage's contemporaries included William Scott, the potter James Tower (whose work shares a close affinity with Armitage's sculpture) and later, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost. As a relatively new teacher, Armitage himself admitted that he was very much learning on the job and it is with Two Linked Figures of 1949 that his first mature and distinctive style appears. Armitage had become interested in the way in which groups of figures massed together such that a spectator registered the single mass before the individuals; 'Joining figures together I found in time I wanted to merge them so completely they formed a new organic unit – a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary' (The Artist, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London 1962 (unpaginated)). 

Like Family Going for a Walk, this sculpture exists in a number of variants and sizes and thus attests to the ways in which Armitage was exploring the theme of interlinked figure groups. As with Family Going for a Walk, People in the Wind combines both movement and humour, but achieved this by different means. People in the Wind merges them into a clear single unit, the thin central slab which would be a feature of Armitage's group sculpture for the next five years at its core. The stylised figures push forward together against the elements, clothes and limbs melding into one mass, and whilst there is deliberately nothing to give any sense of individual identity, Armitage gives the piece huge movement and humour.

'Here Armitage is in the tradition of Degas and the unposed gesture, except that, whereas Degas often found his subjects among professional experts in movement (ballet dancers, racing horses), Armitage works within his everyday experience of everyday people' (Norbert Lynton, ibid., unpaginated)