From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
It might seem tiresome to begin a discussion of Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003) with the four-word term that bedevilled him for much of his career and remains associated with his spiky, often insectoid sculptures, but it’s worth noting just how persistent that epithet has proven. When the critic Herbert Read described the work of Chadwick and the other British sculptors who presented at the Venice Biennale in 1952 as limning ‘the geometry of fear’, he could not have anticipated the sheer number of curators who would, over the decades, position Chadwick’s work in relation (or in opposition) to this idea.
Any admirer of Chadwick who bristles at Read’s interpretation – or indeed, any admirer of great anthropomorphic sculpture – would find a tonic in Lypiatt Park, the neo-Gothic manor house in the Cotswolds that Chadwick bought and saved from ruin in 1958. The building and the 100 hectares of rolling greenery that surrounds it are populated by Chadwick’s work – he personally oversaw the distribution of the sculptures throughout the parkland – and dispel once and for all the idea that ‘fear’ is the salient attribute of his art. In fact, spend enough time there and your own aesthetics get warped: Chadwick’s spindly bronze creatures, which often resemble, say, the murderous arachnids of Paul Verhoeven’s film Starship Troopers (1997), come to feel comfortingly familiar, even friendly. Human faces start to seem oddly round and fleshy by comparison.
A view of Maquette for Stranger III (1959) by Lynn Chadwick in the grounds of Lypiatt Park, Gloucestershire. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley; courtesy Lynn Chadwick Estate/Perrotin
The estate has a lively history. The real Dick Whittington obtained it in 1395 as part payment of a debt; it went on to be owned by John Throckmorton – associated with the Gunpowder Plotters, who used to meet with ringleader Robert Catesby and co-conspirator Thomas Winter in the building’s former ‘Oak Room’ – before undergoing significant redevelopment in the early 19th century. Having expended much effort in restoring it to habitable condition, Chadwick lived there with his family until his death. It now belongs to his youngest child, the artist Daniel Chadwick (b. 1965), who has installed some of his own art around the house to complement the existing design – for example, an Alexander Calder-esque mobile whose floating red and purple discs match the colours of the corners of the stained-glass clerestory-style windows.
Other people’s art is present too – for instance, a spot painting by Damien Hirst, a friend of the family, occupies a dining room wall – but the overriding presence is that of Chadwick père, whose work is dotted around the house in surprising and often very funny places. To wit: the thick-thighed creature stretched out in front of the fireplace like a very Chadwickian family dog (though it looks more like a frog); or the blocky character with two squares for a face and a drawer handle for a mouth that stands shyly next to a storage unit, wondering why he was even invited to the party. The house feels both like a Lynn Chadwick museum – Camilla Brown’s bust of the artist sits near the front entrance – and also like a home that bears the hallmarks of his own hard-ass sensibilities: the sofa in the dining room is made of concrete.
Chadwick was not known for his approachable manner, and had a complicated relationship with the public. ‘A sculptor has no public in the ordinary sense of the word,’ he said in 1954, two years before he won the top prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. ‘When I produce something, I hope that someone, some individual, will buy it.’ He did accept public commissions: he presented work at the Festival of Britain in 1951 alongside Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore; today, his King and Queen (1990) sits atop the canopy of the department store Fortnum & Mason and is seen by millions of people every year. The hauteur with which the pair survey the scuttling masses of Piccadilly seems to chime with Chadwick’s own disposition.
A view of Jubilee IV (1985–87) by Lynn Chadwick in the grounds of Lypiatt Park, Gloucestershire. Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley; courtesy Lynn Chadwick Estate/Perrotin
Lypiatt Park feels like the sculptor’s aloofness writ large. Understandably, since it’s still a private residence, any visits are by invitation only – a shame, as the grounds offer a unique insight into the scale and variety of Chadwick’s work. The sculptures in the park span most of his career, from the 1950s to 1996 and his very last sculpture, Ace of Diamonds, a two-metre-high, nearly seven-metre-long cuboid. It’s typical of the large-scale minimalist steelwork of his late period, but less compelling – and less fun – than some of his more fantastical work: High Wind IV (1995), a bronze sculpture of a woman walking in two directions at once that recalls Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913); Walking Woman (1984), a constructivist bronze of a woman whose dress fans out behind her like petals, fins or feathers; or Crouching Beast III (1990), a steel sculpture made up entirely of contiguous triangular forms that resembles an armoured wolf howling at the moon. One sculpture, on the bank of a large pond, has become almost entirely consumed by vegetation; for others, Chadwick had small hillocks landscaped into the garden to act as natural plinths. The works take on new life in this setting: a few of Chadwick’s bronze ‘couples’ really do seem to be sharing an intimate moment, while metallic canines pad about and sentinels gaze into the distance.
Though this unexpectedly animated world remains out of bounds to the general public, an ambitious three-part exhibition organised by Perrotin aims to bring Chadwick to the people. The first part of ‘Hypercycle’, which opens this month at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris, presents the artist’s early mobiles and sculptures; the second exhibition, which is scheduled to open next year in New York, will revolve around his ‘mature’ work, completed between 1963 and ’79; and the final show, slated to take place in 2026 in an as-yet-unconfirmed city in Asia, will focus on his late style. All three will include photos and videos of Lypiatt Park.
That Chadwick came to prominence amid a group of like-minded compatriots has long given his reputation a curiously national dimension, but it’s not hard to imagine his work breaking free of this context. The creatures he welded into being constitute a genus that expresses itself not through physiognomy but through proud posture and stoic demeanour, unmistakeable whatever the setting. It’s only natural that his work be shown around the world: it might finally reposition him not just as a great British sculptor but as a great sculptor.
The first exhibition in ‘Lynn Chadwick: Hypercycle’ is at Perrotin and the Hôtel de Sully, Paris, from 12 October–16 November.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.