Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002) Seated Woman with Square Head (Version B) 60 cm. (23 1/2 in.) high ...

Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002) Seated Woman with Square Head (Version B) signed with initials 'KA', numbered '6/6' and stamped with foundry mark (on the base) bronze with a black patina 60 cm. (23 1/2 in.) high Conceived in 1955 and cast by Susse Fondeur, Paris in 1957 Footnotes: Provenance With Galeira Conkrit, Caracas, 24 October 1974, where acquired by Private Collection Sale; Sotheby's, London, 22 November 2023, lot 173 With Alan Wheatley Fine Art, London, where purchased by the present owners Exhibited London, Gimpel Fils Gallery, Recent Sculpture by Kenneth Armitage, October–November 1957, cat.no.12 (another cast) Venice, British Pavilion, Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, June–October 1958, cat.no.71 (another cast) Antwerp, Middelheimpark, 5e Biennale voor Beeldhouwkunst, May–September 1959, cat.no.4 (another cast) Kassel, II. Documenta ' 59, Kunst nach 1945, Internationale Ausstellung, 11 July–11 October 1959, cat.no.2 (another cast) London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, A Retrospective Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings Based on the XXIX Venice Biennale of 1958, July–August 1959, cat.no.24 (another cast) Ottowa, National Gallery of Canada, Recent British Sculpture, 14 April-14 May 1961 (another cast); this exhibition travelled to Christchurch, 20 November-9 December 1962 Literature Roland Penrose, Kenneth Armitage, Bodensee-Verlag, Amriswil, 1960, pl.12 and 16 (ill., another cast) Norbert Lynton (ed.), Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London, 1962 Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage Life and Work, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, p.46, cat.no.KA54 (ill., another cast) Kenneth Armitage Sculptor: A Centenary Celebration, Sansom & Company, 2016, p.82, pl.55 (ill., Tate cast) James Scott and Claudia Milburn (ed.), The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, Lund Humphries, London, 2016, cat.no.58C The present work is an excellent example of what Armitage looked to convey in his art, and what was received so well by the public. On a broader, more ideological level, Seated Woman with a Square Head (Version B) is quintessentially Modernist, in that it is a fundamentally human response to the modern world. In a more specific sense, it communicates this in a visual language built upon ideas of contemporary architecture, of light-weight, skeletal structures, steel and iron girders and the opening up of space from the inside, as Armitage himself described during a 1954 symposium on the arts in Leeds: 'the result was visually light, buoyant and crisp and the inner structure apparent from the outside...no longer [was it] a trapped volume of air...the use of metal gave the additional qualities of delicacy, contrast, tension and economy'. The distorted human figure in his work looks beyond the principal influences up to the modern age of Classical Greece and Rome, towards a more subjective response to reality seen in the art of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Meso-America. In this instance, his distortions are radical; matchstick limbs, a flattened, block-like torso and head and a geometrised overall shape recall 'the mysterious dehumanisations of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore' (James Scott, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, Lund Humphries, London, 2016, p.40). Yet despite this 'dehumanisation', Armitage remains essentially humanist –  it is the human presence that lends his work its arresting quality, where in other sculptors this inherent, subconscious sense can be secondary to the manipulation of the chosen material.  Such a focus on Humanism was not a given at this time. The present work was created in 1955 amidst a dynamic period of British art, in which Figuration and Abstraction were starting to polarise. Anthony Caro would return from America at the start of the 1960s along with a wave of commercial success for Abstract sculpture, despite seeing his latest work as a continuation of his earlier figurative phase. This illustrates what had perhaps become a false-dichotomy in critical circles, an illustration seen in Barbara Hepworth's emphasis on the figurative, human nature of her sculpture despite its abstract qualities, and mirrored also by Patrick Heron's self-analysis of his own stylistic shift in painting. With Armitage, though, where he stood in this supposed spectrum was never in doubt. His distorted figuration and the post-war Humanist ideas he sought to express captured the fertile imagination of his viewers with a tension and complexity quite distinctive of the era. We are grateful to James Scott for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: AR AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing