About this lot

Description

Bernard Meadows (British, 1915-2005) Cockerel signed and numbered to the underside, 'Meadows 2/6' bronze maquette 29 x 21cm (11 x 8in)
Provenance: Whitechapel Gallery, London, 'Pictures For Schools', 1954, where purchased by Hertfordshire County Council for Bowmansgreen Primary School, London. Other Notes: Bernard Meadows began his artistic career at the Norwich School of Art, later going on to study at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute. He became Henry Moore's assistant in 1936 and had a close relationship with the artist throughout his life. The present lot was most probably created in the years following Meadows' increased international recognition, gained in the wake of exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale alongside a new generation of British sculptors, including Anthony Caro and Lynn Chadwick. Herbert Read coined this group of artists as the 'Geometry of Fear' School, and it was Meadows' work which perhaps most closely reflected this description. The expressive sculptural qualities of the present lot, executed in pitted bronze, embodied the artist's own mindset on humanity in the post-war era. The cockerel was a subject Meadows returned to consistently throughout the 1950s. Some works were heavily abstracted, their beaks open as though screaming in pain. This iconography was something Meadows elaborated on in some detail, noting 'I look upon birds and crabs as human substitutes, they are vehicles, expressing my feelings about human beings. To use non-human figures is for me at the present time less inhibiting; one is less conscious of what has gone before and is more free to take liberties with the form and to make direct statements than with the human figure'. Another much larger version of 'The Cockerel' remains on display at Bowmansgreen Primary School, London, and a similar maquette forms part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Scotland.

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