Lynn Chadwick

Charismatic sculptor who became an international star

Lynn Russell Chadwick, sculptor: born London 24 November 1914; CBE 1964; RA 2001; married 1942 Ann Secord (one son; marriage dissolved 1959), 1959 Frances Jamieson (died 1964; two daughters); 1965 Eva Reiner (one son); died Stroud, Gloucestershire 24 April 2003.

The career of Lynn Chadwick is a lesson in the ephemerality of artistic fashion. In the last 20 years, although his work continued to sell for high prices in Europe, Japan and America, Chadwick was under- appreciated in his native country. Yet, in the 1950s, his generation of sculptors younger than Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth had put British sculpture back on the world artistic map. Indeed, Chadwick himself was then better known in the international art world than Damien Hirst and the YBAs are today.

Chadwick had been a sculptor for only six years when, in 1956, he won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, triumphing over more established artists who included Germaine Richier, Giacometti and César. The sensation caused by this award eclipses the recent fuss over the YBAs, for Chadwick became a national hero and an international star. He had already showed at Venice in 1952 with the YBAs of the day, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. In 1953 he was included in the Salon de Mai in Paris and in 1955 in the "New Decade" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York; following 1956 public collections and private collectors vied with each other to buy his work.

His celebrity was only increased by his rackety private life, for Chadwick was a larger-than-life character, an artist with the charisma and personal magnetism of a Rodin or, closer to home, Augustus John.

Lynn Chadwick was born in Barnes, south-west London, shortly after the beginning of the First World War. His father was an engineer, whose profession greatly influenced technical aspects of his son's later career (as Chadwick's did that of one of his sons, the sculptor Daniel Chadwick). Following his time at Merchant Taylors' School, Chadwick spent the late 1930s working as an architectural draughtsman. (He continued to draw throughout his career, making working drawings, of course, but sometimes also producing delicate depictions of his massive late sculptures in surprisingly romantic positions, and occasionally carefully observed botanical specimens.)

His Second World War service was in the Fleet Air Arm, where he was on Atlantic convoy duties, which gave him a lifelong liking for speed, and for the sensations of flight and movement that were central to his early work. (For each birthday Daniel made and presented him with a model of the Swordfish he had flown during the war, and among the few paintings on display at his rambling Strawberry Hill Gothick house in the Cotswolds, Lypiatt Park were some of rockets in flight.)

Demobbed in 1944, Lynn Chadwick returned to work for the architect Rodney Thomas, whose close acquaintance with contemporary European architecture influenced Chadwick. Thomas had experimented with balanced beam mobiles. Chadwick had the idea of suspending pieces from the ceiling so that air currents moved them. At the time he did not know that the American Alexander Calder had made mobiles using the same principles.

When he did learn about Calder's work of the 1930s, he was encouraged to experiment even further, and in 1949 one of his smaller pieces occupied the window of Gimpel Fils. His first one-man show there the following year attracted so much attention that it resulted in three huge commissions. Two were for the 1951 Festival of Britain: the mobile for Jane Drew's Tower restaurant was seven and a half feet in diameter, that for Mischa Black's Regatta restaurant was 13 feet high. The piece for the Battersea Park Sculpture Exhibition the same year was eight feet tall.

Chadwick's inspiration was now outstripping his technical skills, so he went on a month-long training course at the British Oxygen Welding School. This permitted him to make the self-balancing stationary sculptures, such as the series of mysterious metal frames with limited-movement claws or cages enclosing crystals, and finally to invent a new technique of welded metal armatures filled in with a compound of iron powder and gypsum. Now he could achieve the creases, curves and angular lines, and the ribbed effects that made his early sculpture so eye-catching.

The technique lent itself to skeletal constructions, which later allowed him to build the human and animal forms, such as the haunting bird-like and lion or dog-like beasts – simultaneously friendly and frightening – that were among his very best work (along with, I think, the elaborate welded constructions of found objects). Chadwick must have been aware from the outset that it would be possible now to cast his work in bronze.

One of the early uses of the new technique was his entry for the 1953 Unknown Political Prisoner International Sculpture Competition, won by his friend Reg Butler. Chadwick received an Honourable Mention and a £250 prize for his maquette in which four vertical solid geometrical figures, from which spikes emanate, enclose a fifth. You can see exactly what the critic Herbert Read meant by coining the phrase "the geometry of fear" to refer to the emotional punch packed by the work of Chadwick and the younger British sculptors.

Chadwick married his first wife, Ann Secord, in 1942, and they had a son. Following their divorce he married Frances Jamieson in 1959, by whom he had two daughters. Together they bought the dilapidated Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, a mostly Victorian pile, in the older part of which the Gunpowder Plot was said to have been hatched.

They had already separated by the time that Frances killed herself in 1964, but a scandal was generated that affected the wedding plans of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and questions were asked in Parliament. Though it actually had nothing to do directly with Chadwick, such was his fame that the newspapers made a meal of it. The next year he married a young Hungarian woman, Eva Reiner, Daniel's mother, who brought up Frances's two young girls as well.

Restoring the house and its extensive gardens showed his creative powers at their fullest: the much-photographed big dining room with its heated terrazzo floors and cantilevered dining and serving tables, and his own bathroom with its sunken terrazzo bath were themselves sculptural objects. On his 10 acres he was a serious and knowledgeable gardener, a plantsman as well as a garden architect who thought nothing of shifting tons of earth to realise vistas and paths. (He is to be buried in the pinetum.) In the vast kitchen gardens he was a pioneer of organic cultivation, providing Eva with large quantities of vegetables, fruit, herbs and salads for the generous meals they served to the friends (and occasionally dealers and collectors) who filled the house and occupied tens of bedrooms at weekends throughout the late Sixties and Seventies.

Eva Chadwick also dealt with the business side, ensuring that, despite a slump in Chadwick's popularity in the Pop Art and Hard-Edged Abstract Sixties, his work continued to sell even after he had ceased to be a household name in Britain. Demand was so high that in 1971 he set up a small foundry in some of Lypiatt's ample outbuildings. In the Eighties he hired a technical workshop manager, and this allowed him to produce some massive welded sheet-steel pieces in 1988 for the airport at Palm Beach, Florida, and the Paris Citroën factory at Le Ponant.

He also bought a large tract of adjoining land in the Toadsmoor Valley, which he was developing as a sculpture park for his own work and a nature reserve. In recent years Chadwick handed over the foundry to Rungwe Kingdon, whose Pangolin Foundry now has the exclusive rights to cast the extant work. Though shows in Britain have been rare in recent years, Chadwick showed abroad regularly, often selling everything in the show; most of the galleries were in Europe, but almost all the work sold by them has made its way to America. By way of redress, a "display" of 35 pieces, some of them very large, is scheduled to open on 15 September in the Duveen wing of Tate Britain.

In the South of France, at La Garde-Freinet, the village in the mountains above St Tropez, Chadwick had several houses. I first met him there in 1969. It was the first of several summers spent having all-day lunches on the beach, followed by drinks at Le Gorille. We shared and laughed about our distant admiration for the beautiful blonde wife of a famous French cartoonist.

In his sixties and well into his seventies, Chadwick was vigorous and youthful, à la older Picasso, holding court at Lypiatt, where there was a succession of maîtresses en titre, most of whom fitted comfortably into the relaxed domestic arrangements that prevailed. Until the later Seventies life at Lypiatt and in France seemed to consist of one long, glamorous, happy party. All this was, of course, made possible not only by Chadwick's continuing productivity, but also by Eva's shrewd management and business acumen.

Chadwick had a twinkle in his eyes, a funny, frequently heard laugh, and a fund of funny tales. One of the best was the story of how, at the time of the 1972 Henry Moore exhibition at Michelangelo's Forte di Belvedere on the edge of Florence, he and Eva were lodged in a nearby castle. The price of this extravagant accommodation was that they were expected to play host to Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and their entourage, which meant enlisting the local peasantry to provide both food and (additional) furniture fit for royalty.

The first was a simple matter of dispatching most of the poultry population of the village; the second involved scouring the big houses of the locality. At last they found a suitably grand table and chairs from another castle. Lynn creased with laughter when he related that he had forgotten how small Princess Margaret was, and how cross and uncomfortable she appeared, seated in the regal, ornately carved chair, unable to touch the ground nearly two feet below her own two feet.

Paul Levy