Kenneth Armitage 1916-2002
Standing Figure, 1957
ink, chalk and wash on paper
30½ x 11½ ins
signed and dated lower right 'KA 57'

Provenance
The Artist
Private Collection, UK

Exhibited
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
XXIX Venice Biennale, 1958, cat no. 104
British Council, Paris, Armitage Exhibition, 1959
(touring to Cologne)



Best known as a sculptor, Kenneth Armitage, was, along with Reg Butler, Eduardo Paolozzi and Lynn Chadwick among others, one of the distinguished group of artists representing Britain at the celebrated 1952 Venice Biennale, whose work Sir Herbert Read famously claimed represented 'the geometry of fear'. It is, in retrospect, perhaps too strong a term to apply to Armitage’s work, either as a sculptor or a draughtsman, the subject matter and spirit of his art always conveying a warm and acute observation of people and situations that is largely free of the kind of angst often present in his contemporaries’ work at Venice, and in British sculpture in the 1950s generally. Armitage has always been notable too for the quality and quantity of the drawings he has produced throughout his life, 'an activity' he regards 'as natural as breathing'. Some are, as he puts it, mere doodles or sketches which might form useful references for future sculpture; others like Standing Figure are 'more considered but less frequent . . . complete in themselves with no further purpose in mind'. This study does, in fact though, seem to bear a close relation to one of the sculptures Armitage produced for the Venice Biennale of 1958. The massive torso, squarish head shape and spindly legs and arms being very characteristic of much of his sculpture of this period.