#Elisabeth frink animals archive
Messums Wiltshire recently rescued the studio and reconstructed it at the great tithe barn in Tisbury, where it can be seen, with original plasters, tools, letters, objects, photographs and film, in ‘A Place Apart’ until October 18 ( Before he died in 2017, Frink’s son, Lin Jammet, requested that her collection of about 900 works, which Annette Ratuszniak has catalogued, as well as her archive of photographs and documents, be given to the nation. In 1976, Frink moved to Dorset - to Woolland, overlooking the Blackmore Vale - where she lived with her third husband, Alex Csáky, whose son, architect John Csáky, designed a studio for her. Shortly before her death, she was exploring, in her various media, the theme of the Green Man, with its promise of renewal and rebirth.
#Elisabeth frink animals series
Frink was interested in the heroism and psychological strength of survivors of persecution and works such as her ‘Running Man’ series (1976–80) can be seen as symbols of hope. It was not all existentialist angst, however. Her ‘Goggle Heads’, which she made after moving to France with her second husband in 1967 and are among her most arresting works, exude a Bacon-like malevolence and brutality.
Bacon, in particular, shared a friendship and artistic affinity with the strong, androgenous-looking sculptor, whose Small Head (1959), with jaws agape in a terrifying scream, recalls his biomorphic creatures. There is no doubting the significant contribution Frink made to European post-war art, yet, within a British context, she has been described as ‘falling between two stools’, not quite part of the older Geometry of Fear group (Armitage, Chadwick, Butler, Meadows), yet neither belonging to the new generation of Abstract sculptors such as Caro and King, although she absorbed elements of 1960s Pop culture.įrink mixed with the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and George Melly and was a vibrant, popular figure on the 1950s and 1960s London bohemian scene.
Other artists and writers with whom parallels can be drawn are Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Paolozzi, Günter Grass and F. She adopted their technique of modelling in plaster over a wire armature and later met Richier, who became a role model. Visiting Paris in 1951, she had been greatly taken by Rodin’s skill at representing the body in motion and influenced by seeing Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated forms and Germaine Richier’s metamorphosing figures. She was fascinated by flight, the exploration of Outer Space and the aeronautical romantic Léo Valentin, whose descent to death in 1956 partly inspired Birdman (1959). In an echo of Ted Hughes’s poem The Hawk in the Rain (1957), she produced a series of sculptures and drawings of falling, spinning men with mutilated bodies and pitted flesh, images of ‘human vulnerability on a celestial scale’. Her preoccupation with conflict, heroism and trauma was forged during her wartime childhood, when she witnessed returning planes and aviators falling in flames from the sky.
Just as du Maurier’s haunting novel The Birds (1952) is a metaphor for nuclear war, and other artists adopted avian imagery in response to the climate of fear, Frink’s menacing man-birds were, she wrote, ‘vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness’. Still more unsettling are her hybrid bird sculptures, from the early corvid-monsters that brought her to prominence after she graduated from Chelsea School of Art to the walking humanoid ‘Warrior Birds’ she made from 1953 - ‘Jagged as shrapnel, these forms are both wounds and weapons… if they sang they would spit out splinters of iron,’ wrote her friend Laurie Lee - and the more militarised ‘Harbinger’ and ‘Standard’ series of the 1960s. Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardeners.
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