Lynn Chadwick valuation
Won Venice at thirty-nine with welded beasts and cloaked figures with geometry for heads.
Lynn Chadwick was born in London in 1914, trained as an architectural draughtsman, and flew as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during the war.
What a work by Lynn Chadwick is worth
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Bio
Lynn Chadwick was born in London in 1914, trained as an architectural draughtsman, and flew as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during the war. He came to sculpture through mobiles in the early 1950s and then to the welded and cast work that made his name: standing figures in cloaks, beasts, and pairs, built as an armature of welded iron rods filled with a compound he called Stolit and later cast in bronze. Heads are reduced to a pyramid for the male and a rectangle for the female. He took the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956, ahead of Giacometti, and worked at Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire until his death in 2003.
Nearly everything of consequence is a bronze in a numbered edition, usually of six or nine plus artist's proofs, and the edition number and cast date are the first things to establish along with whether the cast was made in his lifetime. He used distinctive patinas, including a polished linished finish on some later works, and repatination is an intervention that a photograph will not always reveal. Works are normally stamped with a number and often dated. The estate maintains the records.
At a glance
- Born
- 24 November 1914, London
- Died
- 25 April 2003, Stroud
- Movement
- Abstract art
More on Wikipedia.
Gimpel Fils, the Festival of Britain and Lypiatt
Chadwick had been a conscientious objector before he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm in 1941, flying as a pilot on Atlantic convoy escort. After the war he designed trade-fair stands for the architect Rodney Thomas and made his first mobile around 1947; one placed in the window of Gimpel Fils in 1949 led to his first one-man show there the next year.
For the 1951 Festival of Britain he made Tower Mobile for Jane Drew's Riverside Restaurant and The Fisheater for the Arts Council, and in 1952 he was one of eight young British sculptors shown at the Venice Biennale. He bought Lypiatt Park, a Gothic Revival house in Gloucestershire, in 1958. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate and the Centre Pompidou.
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