Neither was Frink's intention to find the right approach, sculpturally, to project on an equally large scale her image of The Green Man, an ancient symbol of regeneration and the fertility of spring, with branches sprouting from the head of a male figure.Īfter Frink's early, quiet but very real success in the Fifties, her most testing time came in the Sixties and Seventies. A recent project to sculpt on a large scale a seated man looking up at a crouching baboon which stares into space was not fulfilled. As Frink said, 'They carried men into battle.' Also recently, a sequence of sculptures of baboons, in isolation, have great poignancy through their closeness to man. A recent, larger than life-sized bronze sculpture of a War Horse, huge, powerful and muscular as it is, still presents us with our culpability. Frink's great bronze horses became famous, ranging from standing or prancing horses to the memorable Rolling Horse of 1982 her sculptures of dogs, quizzical and alert, all seem equally forceful, convincing and unsentimental.īut, on certain occasions, Frink did not see animals only on their own terms. The early wounded birds, which preceded the images of men attempting to fly and helmeted and goggled airmen, soon gave place to idealised winged figures. Growing up in the country, close to animals and birds, Frink's sculptures of living creatures are by no means gloomy or painful. Patricia Strauss, the wife of George Russell Strauss MP - who tried to persuade the Government to use half of 1 per cent of the cost of all new buildings for works of art - pioneered the first international sculpture exhibition in Battersea Park.Ī good measure of all this hope and idealism is reflected in Elisabeth Frink's sculpture as an extension of her own stoic and idealistic nature. At CEMA, there was the startling discovery in the early years of the war that in many parts of the country quite large numbers of people had never seen an original work of art of any kind in their lives, a discovery which gave a real driving edge to the task of travelling exhibitions. Those who worked in the art world were encouraged by the greatly expanded public for art created through the wartime efforts of CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, formed by Maynard Keynes, Kenneth Clark and others, the embryo of our post-war Arts Council. The Royal Festival Hall appeared on the South Bank. There seemed to be a real opportunity for good young architects to repair cities devastated by bombing with new architecture. In the world of art, architecture and design there was even an expansive feeling of optimism which culminated in the celebratory 1951 Festival of Britain. But the sombre mood of the times, still bleak in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was all the same fortified by the hopes aroused through the formation of the United Nations Organisation and sheer relief at the cessation of hostilities. Life in England was still harsh for at least a decade after the war, with the continuance of wartime rationing and the day-to-day reality, often lowering to the spirit, of an impoverished austerity. Her earliest drawings, even before she went to Chelsea School of Art in 1949, were powerful but grim in tone: wounded birds, apocalyptic horses and riders, falling men. As a 15-year-old schoolgirl, she watched on her local cinema screen the first appalling news pictures of Belsen. As a very young schoolgirl, Frink had to hide in the hedges from the machine-gun attack of a German fighter plane.
Barbara frink obituary professional#
Her father was at Dunkirk as a professional soldier, and saw much action elsewhere the family at home lived near an airfield in Suffolk where bombers often returned to base in flames.
If Frink's professional context with its fresh opportunities came from Moore's wartime example and success, her imaginative world was also quite radically affected, if not fully formed, by the war.
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