Mayor Opens Exhibition Of British Sculpture

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29985, 21 November 1962, Page 12

Mayor Opens Exhibition Of British Sculpture

"When I saw the size of some of these exhibits, I thought of the days when I worked in a steelworks,” said the Mayor (Mr G. Manning), opening the exhibition of recent British scuilptare in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. The exhibition, organised by the British Council of Arts, includes 72 works of nine British sculptor*.

The council had made it passible for persons here to see something of the development of modem art from the country from which many New Zealanders sprang, said Mr Manning. It gave them the opportunity of studying what was taking place in other countries, and, along with other art exhibitions, it brought' them into contact with the thought of others.

Quoting from, the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition, by David Thompson, Mr Manning said that

for the first time since Constable and Turner Britain now had a remarkable number of highly gifted sculptors quite capable of establishing a corporate, international ascendancy. The sculpture in this exhibition was no longer the work of newcomers. It was by artists widely known and firmly established, and it represented, in a collective sense, their achievement during a period in which it would be reasonable to look for symptoms of consolidation and success. More significant was an almost general tendency for an open, linear quality of the sculpture of the early 1950’s to have given place to closed forms and a sense of mass. Mass was an expression of sculpture in its most enduring and monumental character. lane was rather the expression of its more urgent or fleetingly emotive qualities, he read. This change of em> phasis might well in some in-

stinctive, unconscious way reflect how a decade of peace compared with the uneasy atmosphere of the immediate post-war years.