“What I have tried to make clear in my sculpture is the way in which feeling, expression, even force and energy, should be below the surface. The outer skin may define more or less conventional features, but with a second look should indicate the complex strains of nerve-endings and the anticipatory reflexes of something that is about to happen. A recent life-size sculpture in bronze of a seated man may convey some of this latent and interior energy in which feeling is implicated.”
—Elisabeth Frink
Seated Man II is an iconic example of Elisabeth Frink’s conceptually multifaceted and formally complex sculptural practice, a striking manifestation of her career-long interest in the human condition. Conceived in 1986, during one of the most important and productive periods within Frink’s career and the year after her major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art in London, Seated Man II emblematises her idiosyncratic approach to sculpture, particularly in her engagement with the male figure as a series of archetypes. As she herself noted, ‘My sculptures of the male figure are both men and mankind. In these two categories are all the sources of all my ideas for the human figure … I like to watch a man walking and swimming and running and being ... I can sense in a man’s body a combination of strength and vulnerability – not as weakness but as the capacity to survive through stoicism or passive resistance, or to suffer or feel’.i In this way, Frink set herself apart from her contemporaries, both in focussing on the male figure and in pursuing a firmly figurative practice. In Seated Man II, Frink has captured the complexities and anxieties of the postwar period, the figure becoming a vessel for the contradictions inherent to lived human experience.
Earlier depictions of falling or wounded male figures represented a more literal reaction to Frink’s experiences during the Second World War, associating her with other sculptors such as Henry Moore, Lynn Chadwick and those who belonged to the so-called Geometry of Fear school. However, in contrast to her contemporaries’ tortured sculptures which drew power from an iconography of despair, Frink’s sculptures tended towards optimism and hope: ‘I am basically an optimist, and I like to look at the male figure and enjoy it without it’s being caught up in extraneous situations of aggression or flight’.ii An explanation for this can perhaps be found in her use of those closest to her as inspiration for her sculptures: the physiognomy of the present work is likely influenced by her third husband Alex Csáky. Here, the figure rests seated on a bench, turned slightly towards the left and gazing into the distance with eyes wide open. The seated male nude was developed as an archetype in the early 1980s; Seated Man, the earlier version of the present work, was conceived in 1983. Significantly, Frink originally intended to develop the seated figure into a large sequence of sculptures but only completed Seated Man and Seated Man II, a testament to the rarity and importance of the present work within her oeuvre.
“We wanted to move out of the city and into the country again. We eventually found the house in Dorset. This particular place influences my work directly because it is in a landscape I enjoy and feel uncluttered in, and because landscape has become essential to my work. Living in the country means being nearer to the elements, the climate and the changes of the seasons – it is a constant source of ideas.”
—Elisabeth Frink
In both form and mood, the present work is shot through with a relaxed naturalism, defined by the figure’s broad build and rounded musculature – gone are the lithe, athletic physiques of her earlier male figures. The figure is solid and imposing, a depiction of an adult man rather than a maturing teenager. As she remarked, ‘As I have grown older and the war years have receded, I have become far more interested in how the human figure really is, or how I can use it to embody or convey what I feel about mankind and what I feel about men’.iii The idealising nudity of Seated Man II, which traditionally afforded connotations of heroism and warrior-like prowess, is offset by the highly textured surface. In this way, Seated Man II evinces Frink’s technical skill on a grand scale. In 1974, Frink moved into a new, larger studio in Dorset. This allowed her to produce increasingly sizeable and complex sculptures, exemplified by Seated Man II. In these works, Frink focussed on achieving rich, textured surfaces through her technique of applying wet plaster to an underlying armature, adding layers of mixed, gritty plaster and then carving directly into the dried surface, reworking the material with chisels, sandpaper and axes. In Seated Man II, the surface is moulded, putty-like, and reworked with overlapping layers of material that are accentuated by deep ridges and folds. Describing her choice of medium, she remarked, ‘The process is totally flexible – that’s one of the marvellous things about working in plaster … It’s not like clay, which is always falling apart and dripping. I hate using clay’.iv The result is a dynamic, eye-catching and irregular texture, enhancing the torsion of the figure’s pose and emphasising its three-dimensionality. Most significantly, however, the figure appears paradoxically vulnerable and fragile: nudity becomes nakedness, stoicism displaces solitude and humanity rather than heroism is brought to the fore.
“I remember reading about the Riace warriors—how they were found in the sea off Calabria and brought to the surface. Then I remember them being on show in Florence. The original figures are very beautiful, but also sinister, and that is what they are supposed to be…”
—Elisabeth Frink
Her focus on the male figure, and notably the nude bronze format, places Frink within an artistic lineage stretching back to the Classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman periods. In pose and form, Seated Man II is highly reminiscent of the Terme Boxer or Boxer at Rest, currently in the collection of the National Museum of Rome; similarly, it was conceived in the same year as Frink’s Riace Warriors, which pay more explicit homage to the 5th century BC Greek bronze statues of the same name. On a formal level, Frink rejected Rodin’s handling of material, modelling in plaster rather than clay; in this, she found greater kinship with the practices of Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier and Henry Moore. On a conceptual level, she sought to depict a universal humanity rather than a series of distinct, individual personalities. It is this dedication to a humanistic ideal and approach to artmaking that made Frink extremely popular in her own lifetime and has ensured her legacy as one of the most important and influential British artists of the 20th century.
