Selected works from the exhibition

The following works are a selection of the pieces on display in the
Grayson Perry: Unpopular Culture exhibition now showing at the
De La Warr Pavilion.

Kenneth Armitage
Figure Lying on its side (No 5), 1957

Kenneth Armitage's work expresses a concern for people and their basic emotions and
idiosyncrasies. In the 1950s his sculptures of women, emphasising the flat rectangular
form of the female torso, are close in conception to the work of the painter William Scott,
with whom he had worked in Corsham Academy of Art.

It has been suggested that in Armitage's case these distinctive forms might partly derive
from his war-time experiences, when he was involved with training in aircraft and tank
identification. In this work, the body suggests the shape of a tank and the thin horizontal
lines of the guns. There is also an emphasis on the front view rather than
three-dimensionality.

It has often been said that Kenneth Armitage had an instinctive concern for the human
condition and, indeed, much of his sculpture is dominated by an interest in individual
emotions and idiosyncrasies. Unlike many of his contemporaries Armitage had a feeling 
of warmth for humanity that opposed the sense of anxiety characteristic of his time.
‘Figure Lying on its Side (No.5)‘ expresses the affection and humorous attitude Armitage
felt for his fellow man, the figure rolling and stretching “as though awakening from a delicious
dream.” Unusually, Armitage‘s sculptures are constructed from flat shapes which defy the
conventional roundedness of sculptural figuration. His distinct flat forms are thought to have
been influenced by his experience of war, when he was involved with aircraft and tank
identification. Armitage‘s time in the army had a huge impact on the way he viewed the
human form, prompting him to express the analogies between the great feats of engineering
and the architectural construction of the human body. The influence of war is particularly
evident in ‘Figure Lying on its Side (No.5)‘, the body alluding to the shape of a tank and the
limbs referring to the thin horizontal lines of guns. After the war, Armitage abandoned
stone and wood preferring to use bronze as a material which gave him more freedom to
create the delicate, linear shapes of his earthbound bodies.

Frank Auerbach
Euston Steps - Study, 1980 - 1981

The word `study' in the title could imply that the artist painted this as a preliminary experiment
for another picture, but it is in fact a finished painting and does not stand subordinate to any
other work. Frank Auerbach paints and repaints the same subject, either portraits or places
around Camden where he lives. This is one of many recent paintings and drawings of Euston
Station Steps. He wishes to convey a deeper sense of what is seen than can be achieved
through a more superficial record. "There is", Auerbach has said "a real barrier between the
sort of painter who is arranging things on a surface for their own sake and the sort of painter
who has a permanent sense of the tangible world ... to make a true record, the experience has
in some way to be digested and turned into the artist's gesture. Simply to mirror it seems to
me to make a feeble echo."

‘Euston Steps - Study‘ is one of a number of paintings made by Frank Auerbach in the train stations,
building sites and streets around his studio in London‘s Camden Town. This is one of a series of
paintings depicting the steps at Euston Station. While the word ‘study‘ suggests that this is a
preliminary experiment for a larger or more polished work, in fact this is a finished painting.
The expressionist, thick impasto brushwork and the palette of browns, greens and oranges are
typical of Auerbach‘s painting of this period In both his portraits and landscapes, Auerbach
has attempted to capture something deeper than what is immediately seen. He once described
the difference between ‘the sort of painter who is arranging things on a surface for their own 
sake and the sort of painter who has a permanent sense of the tangible world … to make
a true record, the experience has in some way to be digested and turned into the artist‘s gesture‘.

Clive Barker
Head of Francis Bacon, 1978

In the Sixties, Clive Barker was very interested in testing the iconic status of certain images in art.
The form this curiosity took was to create in gleaming metal and three-dimensional form images
which had previously existed in paintings. He re-created familiar images such as Magritte's shoes
and van Gogh's chair.
In 1978 he exhibited the series of twelve sculptures of his friend Francis Bacon at the Felicity
Samuel Gallery in London. Bacon in turn painted three portraits of Barker. Barker often welded
real objects into his work creating a type of sculptural collage. In the Bacon series, one of the
heads includes a length of thick ribbed piping to resemble the windpipe.

Elinor Bellingham Smith
The Island, 1951

Elinor Bellingham-Smith comes from a long line of East Anglian landscape painters. She spent
much of her later years painting the Suffolk countryside and, after her separation from Rodrigo
Moynihan in 1957, she settled there permanently. Like her contemporary Mary Potter, her work
has a delicate touch and tonal sensitivity. David Sylvester wrote that 'she was one of those English
landscape painters who paint the weather' and that she was able to 'find an equivalent on canvas
 for her experience of being alone in a flat country under a great canopy of sky.'
The Island was exhibited in the Festival of Britain exhibition Sixty Paintings for '51, where it won
second prize.
Elinor Bellingham Smith comes from a long line of East Anglian landscape painters. She spent
much of her later years painting the Suffolk countryside and, after her separation from Rodrigo
Moynihan in 1957, she settled there permanently. Like her contemporary Mary Potter, her work has
a delicate touch and tonal sensitivity. David Sylvester wrote that 'she was one of those English
landscape painters who paint the weather' and that she was able to 'find an equivalent on canvas
for her experience of being alone in a flat country under a great canopy of sky.'
'The Island' was exhibited in the Festival of Britain exhibition 'Sixty Paintings for '51', where it won
second prize.

Ian Berry
Untitled

Ian Berry worked in the troubled areas of Africa, taking photographs of traumatic
and extraordinary scenes for the Magnum agency and big picture magazines
of America and Europe (including Paris Match, Stern, Life and Observer Magazine),
before turning his attention to British life. In these photographs he records, wtih a
certain sympathy, the weakness and oddities, humour and callousness of everyday
life in Britain. At the time of working on 'The English' series of photographs he
commented that 'the English are undoubtedly changing in their personal attitudes
and way of life. Never before have people encompassed such an incredibly
broad spectrum of life and disposition from those of a fast-disappearing Victorian
age through the anonymous war-time middle classes to the new-Atlantic culture.
' Berry usually works in black and white, explaining that 'if you're concerned with
form and content, colour can be an intrusion and distraction'.

Edward Burra
Winter, 1964

‘Winter‘ brings together Edward Burra‘s lifelong interest in genre scenes
with a newfound fascination for landscape painting, which he had begun
in earnest in the late 1950s. The subdued, melancholic atmosphere
and the sense of narrative mystery are typical of Burra‘s work. Heavily cloaked
figures huddle together in groups, sweeping snow from a country road.
While most of the faces are highly generalised or abstracted, a handful
of quirky profiles and piercing eyes appear at the centre and bottom right,
showing the continued influence of both Surrealism and caricature on Burra‘s work.
In ‘Winter‘, as in almost all of his paintings, Burra used watercolour in preference
to oil paint to produce his distinctive stippled effects, and rather than making
preliminary studies from life, Burra relied on memory and imagination to
create this enigmatic scene.

Anthony Caro
Woman Waking Up, 1956

Text from `Moving into View' (1997) extended labels: `In the early 1950's
Anthony Caro served his apprenticeship working under Henry Moore.
`Woman waking up' shows the younger artist striving to assert his independence.
The subject, a reclining female figure, is one that Moore might have chosen, but the
handling of it is very much Caro's own. There is nothing elegant, smooth, or classical
about Caro's waking woman. She is weighty, even cumbersome. The modelling
is rough and her pose is awkward. Large pebbles have been incorporated into
the solid forms of the breasts and buttocks. Caro's intentions are clearly more
expressive than realistic. The crude energy contained within this works seems to
link the woman's waking moments with the sculptor's act of creation. Both
activities are about the striving to breathe fresh life into dormant matter.'

Elisabeth Frink
Assassins No.1, 1963

The Greek myth of Icarus was important to Elisabeth Frink. Icarus and his
father, Daedalus, were imprisoned in the Labryinth with the Minotaur,
and in an attempt to escape Daedalus, fashioned two pairs of wings out of
feathers and wax. Daedalus warned his son to fly neither too close to the sun,
as the wax would melt, nor too close to the sea, as the feathers would become
sodden. But Icarus, overcome by the sublime feeling that flying gave him, soared
too close to the sun, melting his wings and thus falling through the sky to perish
in the sea.
Many of Frink‘s heroes are bird men: whether flying or falling, their thick torsos strive
to sprout wings but the bronze in which they are cast prohibits their growth.  In ‘Assassins
No. 1‘ Frink has combined these bird-like qualities with another key theme in
her work: war. The elongated, spindly legs of the two figures appear birdlike but the
title alludes to conflict.
Frink uses the subject of flight for two very different reasons: as a metaphor for spiritual
regeneration and the healthy pursuit of goals and ideas, and also to illustrate the
notion of selfish ambition. By 1966, as the war receded and flight became relatively
commonplace, the notion of flight as inspirational became a hollow cliché for Frink
and so she gradually turned away from the subject.
Frink‘s created this work by applying layers of plaster onto a wire armature prior to
casting in bronze. The craggy and gestural surface of this sculpture suggests that,
for Frink, the process of transforming an idea into material reality was one of speed
and urgency.

Head, 1959

Central to the work by Elisabeth Frink is the subject of the male human figure.
She once said: “I have focused on the male, because to me he is a subtle
combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability. Heads have always
been very important to me as vehicles for sculpture. A head is infinitely variable.
It‘s complicated and it‘s not surprising that there are sculptures of massive
heads going way back, or that lots of other artists beside myself have found the
subject fascinating.”
Earlier in her career, Frink lived in Ireland where she became interested in early
Celtic iconography and specifically with the ancient Celtic cult of the head. The
pagan Celts often considered the severed head to be blessed with divine
powers; this point fascinated and appealed to Frink as she endeavoured to
imbue her cold bronzes with a sense of vitality and life reminiscence of this
Celtic tradition. The craggy, harsh and misshapen form of ‘Head‘ is also
reminiscent of the primitive Celtic stone sculptures which Frink would have seen
in museums in Ireland.

Bert Hardy
A fight springs up between dockers waiting for work in the Pool of London, 1949

Bert Hardy, a prolific photographer for the Picture Post, was one of the great
photo-journalists of the 1940s and 50s. He was self-taught and began his
career contributing to the Illustrated London News and Tatler.
His photographs of deprived areas such as the Gorbals in Glasgow and
Elephant and Castle in south London portray his subjects in a sympathetic
and compassionate light. 'I was completely self-taught, chiefly by trial and
error on an old plate camera. It was when I got my first 35mm camera -
a Leica - that my phtographic talent emerged, but from the beginning I did
photographic sequences, now known as photo-journalism'.

Barbara Hepworth
Spring, 1966

Barbara Hepworth, like Gabo, used taut string in many of her sculptures.
Inspired by the Cornish landscape, she wrote of her work: ‘The colour in
the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves or shadows
deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension
I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.‘

Bryan Kneale
Iron Pig, 1962

During the late 1960s, Bryan Kneale mainly made large-scale
commissioned sculptures. His abstract works have been compared
to the functional machines which were used to make them. They
seem to be at the same time practical, streamlined and efficient and
somehow also mysterious. Kneale explains: 'The most fascinating
thing to try to do is to discover whether one has, within oneself, the
ability to realise a form that one has never seen, and hence not known
about: to try to realise the non-existent.'

L.S. Lowry
July, the Seaside, 1943

Essentially a private man, Lowry worked full-time as a rent collector
and clerk from the age of fifteen until his retirement at sixty-five. Born
in Old Trafford, he lived and worked in Manchester and Salford throughout
his life and it was the industrial scenes of these towns which provided him
with the main subject matter for his art. He is probably best known for mill
scenes against which crowds of stylised 'matchstick' figures trudge to and
from work, isolated in their own world. Lowry said, 'I've a one track mind... I
only deal with poverty, always with gloom. You never see the sun in my work.
That's because I can't paint shadows.'

'July, the Seaside' shows the workers on their annual holiday at the seaside.

Henry Moore
Seated Figure Against a Curved Wall, 1957

During the 1950s, Henry Moore received a number of commissions to
make sculptures for architectural settings. ‘Seated Figure Against a Curved Wall‘
is a working-model made as an exploration for a sculptural project that would
stand in front of the UNESCO building in Paris. The work consists of an a
bstracted female figure who is seated against a horizontal arced wall, the wall
acting to protect the figure from the architecture behind it.
Despite the solidity of the bronze piece, the work seems to convey a sense of
movement and energy. The seated woman is leaning forward suggesting
anticipation or expectation and the curved wall is tilted, as if in motion.
Arguably one of the leading sculptors of the twentieth century, Moore‘s work
is marked by a concern for “truth to materials” and a commitment to the strength
of form over and above a naturalistic representation of his subjects.
Gillian Howard March 2008

Moore has sometimes been derisively known as the man who makes 'those
sculptures with holes', as though no other sculptor had ever done it before or
since. His father was a coal miner and comparisons have been made between
coal mining and sculpting, tunnelling and hewing. Maybe this background
created in Moore a lifelong fascination with holes, caverns, tunnels and other
natural orifices. Moore also loved the holes in ruined buildings which let light
through, and the spaces between the branches of trees. He loved the unity between
the solid form and the space.
In his own words:
"The liking for holes came about from wanting to make space and three-dimensional
forms. For me a hole is not just a round hole, it is the penetration through from the front
of the block to the back. The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.
The hole connects one side to the other making it immediately more three-dimentional.
A hole can itself have as much shape and meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is
possible where the stone contains only the hole which is the intended and considered
form."

Eduardo Paolozzi
The Frog, 1958

Paolozzi is one of the most creative and innovative figures of our time. He was one of
the first sculptors to realise that our visual life is made up largely of images and
impressions which are manufactured: we live in a world of artefacts. Popular images
from advertsising and the media and machines are for the urban denizens of the 20th
Century a more significant part of the environment than animals or plants or even
other people. His use of material, not least in a remarkable series of prints, rightly
earned him his position as one of the pioneers of 'Pop Art' - although it would be a
mistake to regard him primarily as a pop artist.
For although he continued to use popular imagery, the deeper originality which he
deploys is to incorporate the man-made world of artefacts into the subject matter of art.

In making ‘The Frog‘, Paolozzi used part of a piano keyboard for the gaping mouth and
bottle tops for its eyes. At this time Paolozzi was developing a new method of working by
pressing a multitude of found objects into clay from which a plaster cast was then made.
The objects he used were as diverse as a toy frog and camera, a rubber dragon, a broken
comb, radio and clock parts, model cars and pieces of bark. Paolozzi talked about them
surviving as ‘ghosts of forms that still haunt the bronze, details of its surface or actual structure.‘
By using discarded objects and casting them in a precious metal such as bronze,
Paolozzi subverted the traditional use of this material. As he famously said, he was
‘interested, above all, in investigating the golden ability of the artist to achieve a metamorphosis
of quite ordinary things into something wonderful and extraordinary that is neither nonsensical
nor morally edifying.‘
Ann Jones, Curator of Projects, Arts Council Collection

The Old King, c. 1963

In the mid-1950s, Paolozzi developed a completely new method of working,
pressing a multitude of found objects into clay from which a plaster cast was
made. Some works such as The Old King are not so obviously collaged, but
still retain a roughly textured surface, showing the influence of the French artist
Jean Dubuffet and the rawness of art brut. Paolozzi has talked about ‘an
obsession with the metamorphosis of the figure‘, and the head was a constant
strand in his work.

Martin Parr
Hebden Bridge, Holywell Green, 1977

Hebden Bridge Steep Lane Buffet Lunch

Hebden Bridge, Steep Lane Chapel

Street Party, Elland

We hopeThere is no more perceptive commentator on the idiosyncrasies
of the British at leisure than Martin Parr. He has focused on bizarre and
humorous elements in contemporary British culture with an amused, if
ironical eye. After his move to Bristol in 1987, he concentrated on suburban
England - the tupperware party, the safari park, the supermarket and
holidaymakers at British seaside resorts. These are subjects often
overlooked by social documentary photographers keen to tackle more 'worthy'
subjects of conflict, homelessness and the suffering of the working class.
Martin Parr's first important series of photographs looked at the way we
behave in the presence of important monuments, for example Land's End,
Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor. More recently, he has been working on
a project about global tourism. you enjoy the exhibition.

John Piper
Palace of the Bishop of Winchester, 1942-1943

In 1934 John Piper made a quite dramatic move from landscape painting to
abstract reliefs. He began to make abstract paintings the following year after
moving to Henley-on-Thames. Although Piper continued to make landscape
collages, he was fully commited to abstraction for this short period in the 1930s
and he commented: 'I never had any interest in remaining an abstract artist
but I took the abstract practice very seriously and became interested and later
personally involved through friendships, with other abstract works here and
abroad.'

Alan Reynolds
The Village - Winter, 1952

Alan Reynolds' early work, of which this is an example, is inspired by natural
forms, in particular the landscapes of Suffolk where he was born. He fuses
natural observation with an awareness of geometrical construction and a
sensitivity to colour. As he explains: 'Formally I am obsessed with the horizontal
and verticl as a structural device, and I try as a painter to give poetic expression
through this formal scaffolding, one which is disciplined and at the same time
intuitive.

William Roberts
The Seaside, c.1966

The Seaside is a celebration of people enjoying a day at the seaside. Despite
being regarded as somewhat of a recluse, Roberts spent most of his career
painting and drawing ordinary people going about their life at home, work and
play. He was particularly drawn to individuals at leisure, and painted people
sunbathing, playing musical instruments, skipping, on see-saws and playing
snooker. In works like The Seaside the angular forms of his early works have
given way to more rounded almost sculptural figures. The composition is tightly
packed with people, and their limbs create a rhythm and sense of movement across
the painting.

Jack Smith
After the Meal, 1952

'I think of my paintings as diagrams of an experience or sensation. The subject is
very important. The sound of the subject, its noise or its silence, its intervals and its
activity. When I talk about the sound or the music of the subject, I'm not always
thinking in terms of a symphony, but groups of single notes. The closer the painting
is to a diagram or graph, the nearer it is to my intention, I like every mark to establish a
fact in the most precise, economical way.'
Jack Smith 1965

Ruskin Spear
Hammersmith Broadway, 1950

Ruskin Spear's work has a strong sense of place and identity. He was very
much a town painter and often turned to his birth place in Hammersmith
for inspiration. His paintings of the streets, pubs, bridges and river convey
the essence of this part of west London. These works show the influence of
Sickert and the Camden Town Group. Steer was also much in demand as a
portrait painter and his many commissioned portraits, include Lord Olivier,
Sir Harold Wilson, Lord Ramsey, Lord Butler, Lord Goodman and The Duke
of Westminister.
Ruskin Spear was born in Hammersmith, London in 1911. His full name was
Augustus John Ruskin and, living up to his name, he won a scholarhsip to the
Hammersmith School of Art at the age of 15, followed by another scholarship
to the Royal College of Art in 1931. He was elected RA in 1954 and CBE in 1979.
He died in 1990. There was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Royal
Academy, London in 1980 and he was included in the Looking at People
exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1957.

William Turnbull
Head, 1955

William Turnbull has tended to work in series, and during the 1950s the head
became a persistent motif in his sculptures and paintings. Unlike Brancusi's
smooth heads, the surfaces of Turnbull's ovoids are rough and worn and the
features are merged into the general surface texture. Turnbull explains the
attraction of the subject 'Head': 'The word meant fo rme what I imagined the
world 'landscape' had meant for some painters - a format that could carry different
loadings. Almost anything could be a head - and a head almost anything - given
the slightest clue to the decoding. The sort of thing that interested me was how
little will suggest a head; how much load will the shape take and still read head;
head as a colony; head as landscape; head as mask; head as ideology.'
William Turnbull's paintings and sculptures are characterised by a great economy
of form. White his paintings are completely abstract, a recurrent theme in the
sculpture is the head or figure, which he has constantly refined and simplified.
The inspiration for these works has ranged from ancient objects and idols to
modern industrial products.
During the 1960s and 70s Turnbull was one of several sculptors who made
abstract painted steel sculptures. He writes: 'Working in steel tends to be
closest I suppose to my sculpture being conceptual and being abstract,
because if you are making a big thing out of stainless steel, to a very large extent
it has to be conceptual: you have to know where you are having to cut the thing
with the torch and where you are going to weld it together. So it's a much more
planned way of working than my normal way in bronze.'

Carel Weight
The World We Live In, 1970-1973

Carel Weight is renowned for being the artist who exposes the sinister, strange
side of London suburbia. He mainly depicts the area of South London around
Clapham, Battersea and Wandsworth combining the strange and dramatic events
of his narratives with the absolute ordinariness of the surroundings in which they
happen. The dark nature of Weight's paintings has led many commentators to liken
him with the Surrealist painters, but this is an association that Weight is keen to
dispel. He does not like to be bracketed into cosy art historical niches and says that
the imagination for his images comes from his rather unusual childhood. Born to
a middle-class family in Paddington, Weight was sent each week to live with a poor
family in Chelsea (which was then considered a slum) in order that his mother
could continue to run the family business. It was during his stay in that tough
neighbourhood in Chelsea that Carel experienced the crime and violence that
permeates through his paintings today. The comparison of living between the two
different worlds has given him a very strong sense of the dark things which lurk
beneath the suface of normality.

Bryan Wynter
Landscape, Zennor, 1963

In choosing to live on a remote, wind-swept moor near Zennor, Bryan Wynter had the
subject of this painting close to hand. He lived there in an isolated cottage for nearly
twenty years, and the surrounding farms and wildlife, particularly birds, fascinated him
and formed the main subjects of his early paintings. Although he was born in London,
Bryan Wynter spent most of his working life in Cornwall, where he played an important
part in the artistic community. In both his early figurative works and later abstract
paintings, he aimed to express his own personal view of the landscape of West Penwith.
'Landscape, Zennor' is a typcial early small-scale gouache which evokes the rocks and
moors around Wynter's new home. His wife later commented that 'it seems to me that
his paintings record what it felt like to be moving in the landscape.'

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