Model for Krefeld Monument, 1956
Bronze
Bronze with a dark green patina, conceived in 1956 and cast at a later date. There are only two known cast of this sculpture, this cast and one in the Pier Gallery, Stromness, Scotland bought by Margaret Gardiner.

This indivisible bronze trio embodied post-war defiance against the forces of war, destruction and repression. Not only in terms of a symbolic figurative theme but also of style the Krefeld Model epitomised the formal tension between horizontal and vertical axes, the thin stick-like arms and legs extruding from the central slab-like torso area. These vividly textured central areas were further ‘embossed’ positing pronounced rectilinear patterns. These functioned as iconographic residues using the emotive theme of bombed ruins and architectural shells with their jagged, shattered, honeycombed edifices.

While characteristic of the slightly earlier sculpted groups (such as ‘Children Playing’ 1953 and ‘Friends Walking’ 1952) that had established Armitage’s reputation , during the first half of the 1950s, the Krefeld model bears specific historical reference to saturated allied bombing of the German city. In 1956 the Yorkshire-born and Slade-trained sculptor was approached by Krefeld’s Kaiser Wilhelm Museum to submit a maquette, or working model, for a war memorial in the German city. Although Armitage, auspiciously, won the competition the final piece was never completed as there were objections to an artist from England, the former enemy, providing the monument. Instead, one cast of the model entered the notable collection of Margaret Gardiner, the founder of the Pier Gallery, Orkney.
By the time the Krefeld model was made Armitage had presided for a decade as Head of sculpture at Bath Academy, Corsham Court and had been a Gregory Fellow in sculpture at Leeds, his home town. More successes would soon follow; in 1959 he won a David Bright Foundation Award at the Venice Biennale and during the second half of the 1970s was a visiting tutor in Bernard Meadows’s sculpture department at the Royal College of Art,London.
33.0 cm (13 inches) High

Literature:
Kenneth Armitage - Life and Work, text by the artist edited by Tamsyn Woollcombe with a foreword by Alan Bowness, published by The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries Publishers, London. Cat No KA62 (illus pages 55,56,57)
POA