Seated Woman with Square Head (version B)

Stamped with Susse Fondeur Paris foundry stamp Bronze with a rich dark brown patina with green highlights Height: 23″ (59 cm) Conceived in 1955 and cast in an edition of 6 by Susse Fondeur Paris in 1957. ABOUT THE ARTWORK Born in Leeds in 1916, Armitage studied at Leeds College of Art from 1934 to 1937, where artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore had preceded him, before continuing his training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1937 to 1939. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served in the army until 1945. In 1946, he became Head of Sculpture at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, a post he held for ten years. It was during this period that he developed the mature sculptural language for which he became best known: figurative works often composed of thin, flat planes, intended to be read frontally and marked by a sense of tension, suspension, and weightlessness. Kenneth Armitage, People in the Wind, 1950, Tate, London, UK Although he came to prominence relatively late, at the age of thirty-six, his first one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils, London, in 1952 marked the beginning of his public recognition. That same year, his inclusion in New Aspects of British Sculpture at the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale brought him to wider international attention, alongside Robert Adams, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull, and helped usher in a new wave of British sculpture. These early successes established Armitage as a major figure in post-war British sculpture, a position reinforced by his winning first prize in the International War Memorial Competition in Krefeld, Germany, in 1956, and by his receipt of the David E. Bright Foundation Award for the best British sculptor under the age of forty-five at the 29th Venice Biennale in 1958. Kenneth Armitage, Two Seated Figures, 1957, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium Armitage exhibited widely in Britain, Europe, the United States, Japan, and South America, and his international reputation continued to grow. In 1964 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Caracas, Venezuela, and in 1970 at Boston University, Massachusetts. From 1974 to 1979 he served as visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. He was awarded a CBE in 1969 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1994. Major retrospectives of his works were held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1959, at Artcurial, Paris, in 1985, and at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1996–97. His work was also shown at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and at the Millennium Sculpture Exhibition in Holland Park, London, in 2000. He died in London on 22 January 2002. His work is held in major public collections worldwide, including Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Arts Council Collection; the British Council Collection; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Seated Woman with Square Head (Version B) was modelled in clay in London, shortly after Armitage’s return from Leeds, where he had held the Gregory Fellowship in Sculpture from 1953 to 1955. This figure was the last in a series of four small sculptures of seated women that the artist created between 1954 and 1955. The different versions vary in the position of the hands resting on the knees, the angle of the bent elbows, the extension of the legs, and the placement and tilt of the head. In this version, the vertical incision running down the torso emphasises the work’s more geometric, block-like structure in contrast to the less formal earlier versions. Seated Woman with Square Head (Version B) was cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris, in 1957 in an edition of six. A cast of this sculpture is held in the collection of Tate, London, and an unspecified cast of this sculpture was also included in the above-mentioned retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959. This sculpture, therefore, occupies an important place within Armitage’s oeuvre, belonging to the pivotal 1950s, a period when Armitage was developing the distinctive sculptural language that would establish him as one of the leading figures in modern British sculpture.