Elisabeth Frink 1930-1993
Assassins II, 1963
bronze
height 20˝ inches
signed on base, edition no. 2/8

Provenance
Private Collection, UK

Literature
Jill Wilder, Elizabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Harpvale Books, 1984, cat no.105 illus b/w
Edwin Mullins, The Art of Elizabeth Frink, Lund Humphries, 1972, cat no. 50 illus b/w



From the late 1940s, Giacometti had concentrated on the frail vulnerability of the individual, while a post war concern for the victims of military and political oppression was commonplace, as exemplified by the 1953 competiton for a 'Monument to an Unknown Political Prisoner'. But the other side of that same coin - the face of cruelty and oppression itself - had scarcely been looked at. During the sixties, Elizabeth Frink made a series of heads and standing figures which develop the image of the soldier, to portray the more evil aspects of ambition and the will to power.

In 1963 Frink made a number of armoured men, whose heads and stiff bodies seem fused with their armour. The Assassins (of which there are two versions) come in pairs, their identities hidden behind masks, helmets or hoods. Their appearance implies a ruthless dehumanisation, but they are not robots - there is none of Chadwick's science-fiction romance or Paolozzi's whimsical ridicule in these figures. They are hired killers who carry out their tasks efficiently, anonymously and without mercy, but they are also sensate human beings responsible for their actions and aware of their moral implications. Nor can these men be dismissed as dicatator's henchmen - the long arm of tyranny and therefore beyond the moral pale. The references to armour suggest they could be a couple of soldiers sent on a special mission. Frink makes no distinction between one form of murder and another. These sculptures assert that there can be no excuses for cruelty - no 'just' wars.

Frink's sculptures from this time use the fusion of heads and bodies with military gear to suggest complete role identification - these men have been thoroughly indoctrinated. She depicts soldiers as marked and malformed by their violent experiences, and in so doing, underlines the permanent damage inflicted by war and the difficulty for men in returning to a normal life and civilian morality.