Elisabeth Frink: Human Damage and Metamorphosis

 

It is through art that civilisation arrives – Elisabeth Frink.

 Elisabeth Frink was born in rural Suffolk in 1930. Her soldier father saw action at Dunkirk during the Second World War, which broke out when Frink was not quite 9-years old. Her home was close to an airfield and the young girl often used to hear English bombers returning to base, sometimes crippled or in flames. Plane crashes were also a fairly frequent occurrence and Frink would venture out a day or two after the event to scavenge over the wrecks, gleaning bullet-cases, pieces of shrapnel and other detritus, as souvenirs. As wartime rationing was in place, Frink like a legion of others, trapped rabbits for the family table.

Because of the airfield, German planes were a constant threat and on one occasion, the young schoolgirl had to dive under a hedge to avoid the strafing machine-gun fire of a German fighter plane. Aged 15, she was amongst the shocked audience in a cinema, watching in horror the first footage of the liberation of Nazi deathcamps. These wartime experiences inevitably filtered into her work as one of England’s preeminent figurative sculptors of the C20th. Her later images of machine-like birds and splintering, winged men are clear references to the wartime events she witnessed, and to the relationships she subsequently had with war-damaged men. 

As a child, Frink was given books on Rodin and Michelangelo, which ignited her interest in art. In 1949, she was accepted into Chelsea Art School and, as a superb draughtsman, she flourished in their strongly drawing-based program. In 1952, she was included in a group exhibition at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery, run by modernist painter, Helen Lessore, who had been a great champion of young, unknown artists, such as Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. Frink’s work for the exhibition included mainly plaster sculptures of men, birds and horses’ heads – subject matter that recurred throughout her life. The following year, the Tate bought her sculpture, ‘Bird’, for their collection. The work depicts a menacing, predatory crow or raven - all beak and aggression - stalking an unseen prey.  

On her first trip to Paris, Frink was finally able to see Rodin’s work in the flesh. She also discovered Giacometti’s work, and became inspired by his pioneering technique of building up quick-drying plaster over a metal armature. This revelation provided her work the gift of speed and spontaneity.

At some point around this time, Frink embarked on a relationship with an emotionally-troubled ex-RAF rear-gunner, who had been given a pre-frontal lobotomy in an attempt to cure his depression – a somewhat commonplace operation at the time, regrettably. A subsequent partner had lost a leg in the war. The tide of war-injured humanity inevitably influenced a good deal of her subject-matter. Images of broken, battle-scarred men abound – heroic in their imperfections. 

 

Borrowing Giacometti’s method, Frink began constructing her work using an armature of chicken wire, over which she applied plaster. Later in her career, she began with solid blocks of plaster, which she chopped back into a representational form with a hatchet – these works were then usually cast in bronze. In 1963, her sculptures were used in a number of scenes in Joseph Losey’s 1963 film, The Damned (not to be confused with Luchino Visconti’s film of the same title, from 1969), for which she also served as technical adviser to the actress Viveca Lindfors. Losey also featured her work in several scenes of his gripping psychological conundrum, The Servant (also from 1963), starring Dirk Bogarde.

                                          Elisabeth Frink, Animal Form, 1962.
 

Frink married her first of three husbands, Michel Jammet, in 1955, and she relocated to the South of France, where she remained during the period of the Algerian war. She has stated that during this time, she was very conscious of “the Algerian refugees, and the police, and the army”. Her so-called ‘Goggle Heads’ – a series of sinister, thuggish heads, which she made during this period - were based on her response to newspaper photographs of Moroccan General, Mohamed Oufkir, who always appeared in public with sunglasses on, and whom Frink regarded as a dark, menacing force.

+

 Following these implacable, sinister heads, Frink presented a group of calm, ‘softer’, male heads, which represented innocent, anonymous martyrs throughout the world, who had died for their beliefs. These works sprang from Frink’s deeply-held humanitarian principles regarding oppressed peoples under dictatorships. As the artist stated about her concentration on heads throughout her career: “All human emotions go through the head – their life, their suffering, their joy.”

Throughout the late- ‘50s and early ‘60s, Frink was arguably making some of her most important work, referencing figures and animal in ways that reference a whole history of British art. But from the mid-1960s, Frink’s figurative work began to be relegated to a back seat, in the onslaught of abstraction, which was then becoming the de rigeur method in art schools on both sides of the Atlantic. The new generation of sculptors abandoned traditional modelling and carving techniques in favour of ‘assemblage’. This was spearheaded in the UK by Anthony Caro, whose arrangements of steel sheets and bars – often painted bright colours – became the fashion. New materials such as plastic also came into vogue. Frink now found herself out of favour.

As she has stated, suddenly “all the art schools said no to figurative, no to the model, no to life drawing – which was intolerant, and such a ghastly mistake. Whole generations of art students have come out not knowing how to draw. They were crazy.  I stopped teaching at that point.”  We may decry the same antipathy towards the importance of drawing within many art schools today.

Frink, who was often quoted as saying that she didn’t find the female form the slightest bit interesting to sculpt, instead made enduring images of the human male, in all his tragedy, bravery, and sometimes brutality, which stand as timeless images of human frailty, vulnerability and metamorphosis.

                               Elisabeth Frink, Horse and Rider lll.