What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

In 1953, the Tate acquired Bird, a bronze sculpture created by Elisabeth Frink just one year earlier, following her studies at the Chelsea School of Art, when the young artist was merely 22 years old. That same year, Frink, along with fellow British artists Bernard Meadows, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, and Kenneth Armitage gained special notoriety thanks to their respective works being shown at “New Aspects of British Sculpture” in the British pavilion at the 26th Venice Biennale. Birds were an important, career-long source of subject matter for Frink. Said the artist: “In their emphasis on beak, claws and wings... they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness.” The present example is both alert and at the ready; the bird’s head is slightly lowered, and its wings are drawn back.Frink’s interest in birds is traceable to at least two factors: firstly, the onset of World War II, as Frink related birds to plane crashes, and her father was an officer in the British Army; and secondly, she had a great fondness for animals, including birds, as well as horses and dogs. Standing on its legs in a somewhat menacing and atypical pose, the present bronze conveys some of the inherent fear and tension prevalent in Frink’s earlier treatment of the subject and seems to expound upon it. Related Frink bronze models include Birdman II (1958), Bird (1959), Harbinger Bird I (1961), Little Bird (1961), Birdman (1962), New Bird I (1965), and Large Bird (1966).Critic Herbert Read coined the now well-known phrase “Geometry of Fear” as a reaction to the works of the British sculptors on view at the 1952 Biennale, citing what he called...”the iconography of despair, or of defiance...images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas....” Frink became associated with other, older British "Geometry of Fear" sculptors who rose to prominence following the Second World War, and whose works represent a departure from the bronzes of an earlier generation of British sculptors that included Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. While the latter emphasized volume, solidity, and smoothness of finish in their execution, the “Geometry of Fear” sculptors (such as Mod Brit heavyweights, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler, William Turnbull, Robert Adams, and Eduardo Paolozzi) took a rougher, edgier, almost existential approach to their work. In the present example, Frink’s interest in stressing “beaks, claws, and wings,” coupled with her affinity for presenting her subjects with a rough-hewn surface are clearly on display.