Minotaur Alarmed

Numbered 8/9 Bronze with rich brown patina Height: 7.3″ (27 cm) Conceived and cast in 1970 ABOUT THE ARTWORK Michael Ayrton was a true renaissance man; he was a sculptor, painter, printmaker of figures and landscapes, illustrator, draughtsman, theatrical designer, filmmaker, writer, and art critic. He conducted his studies from 1935 to 1939 at the Heatherly School of Fine Art and the St John’s Wood Art School, transferring to Vienna and Paris between 1936-37. In Paris he shared a studio with John Minton while both studied under Eugene Berman. It was only in the 1950s that he turned toward bronze sculpture, having visited Greece in 1957 with the British Modernist sculptor Henry Moore. He greatly admired and took advice from Henry Moore, who helped with the technical development of the medium. Ayrton was fascinated by Greek Mythology, especially the Daedalus myth. In this story, King Minos employed Daedalus to build a labyrinth to imprison his Minotaur son. Having constructed the maze, the King realised that Daedalus was the only one who knew its secrets, so imprisoned him and his son Icarus in a tower. To escape, the ever-brilliant Daedalus created a pair of wings from wax and feathers for himself and his son. The young man leapt from the tower and flew like a bird away. However, he refused to heed his father’s words, and came too close to the sun and the wax in his wings melted, sending him to his death. Artists and writers alike have long been fascinated by the minotaur, most notably Picasso who created a plethora of work inspired by the mythical creature. Like Ayrton, Picasso saw himself as the minotaur. The bull has strong roots in Spanish history and Picasso related to the half man half bull and its formidable masculine strength. Despite the mythology customarily focussing on the slaying of the minotaur by the triumphant Theseus, Ayrton’s work, akin to Picasso’s, centres on the minotaur itself. For Ayrton, it is a representation of himself and man, at the same time brutish and powerful but also impotent and helpless. The futility of the minotaur’s efforts to free himself from the maze reflects man’s limitations and inadequacies in life itself. The Minotaur came sharply into my foreground in 1962 and began the agonized evolution toward the human condition that to me is his nature and his ambition. Him l drew and cast in bronze, but I never painted him. I do not know why. It has been said that Theseus slew the Minotaur, but Theseus was a braggart, and the Minotaur is killed every Sunday in Spain or Mexico, and, as Picasso knows, he does not die. (Michael Ayrton, 1971, p. 296). Minotaur Alarmed, cast in bronze in 1970, shows the minotaur crouched with one arm forward and the other behind his back, his gaze directed upwards to the left. Ayrton sculpted the minotaur in various positions, namely enraged, drunken, erect or alarmed, but never, as Mary Aswell Doll states, defeated. This may be the artist’s deliberate intention to place Theseus very much in the background if not eliminated altogether, seeking rather to extend and enrich the mythic message of the monster as a living embodiment of the preconscious psyche. (Mary Aswell Doll, 2011, p.29). The minotaur, as represented by Ayrton, remains a powerful symbol of the human condition, and particularly the masculine condition, as both powerful and helpless simultaneously.