Screen form

An internal energy animates the sculptures of postwar British artist Robert Adams, from his first carved wooden forms to the later abstract welded compositions for which he is best known. His career was at its highest point in 1961, when the artist was forty-three years old, the year he left his teaching job at London’s Central School of Art and Design to sculpt full-time. Screen form, 1961, which Adams made in that year, marks a departure for the artist towards sculptures that could be utilised in modern architectural spaces. A confetti of triangular metal fragments appears to cling, as if by magnetic attraction, to a cluster of curving, upwardly thrusting stalks, capturing dynamic movement within a flattened, static and nominally rectangular matrix. Defying gravity, a multitude of delicate shapes hovers in space, as insubstantial as paper clippings. From behind, light pierces the broken surface creating a twinkling effect of fragile impermanence, at odds with the immutable and weighty bronze and its darkened matte surface.¹Nehama Hillman, Robert Adams, A Critical Study and Complete Catalogue. M. A. dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1969 (copy in Tate Gallery Archive), p. 13, in Alistair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, Henry Moore Foundation in Association with Lund Humphries, London, 1992, p. 76.

When part of this series was exhibited at the 1962 Venice Biennale, the critic Josef Paul Hodin wrote admiringly of ‘the essence of vegetative life’, in his ‘plant-inspired growing forms’.²Josef Paul Hodin, Robert Adams, British Pavilion, XXXI Biennale, Venice, 1962.

The development of Adams’s screen projects was complex and organic, in which his ideas were typically worked out initially as sketches on paper and graphic works, and eventually as a welded prototype. The NGV’s Screen form is one of a bronze edition of six (‘1961/12 Opus 137’), cast from a graphite-finished steel original now in a private collection.³Alistair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, Henry Moore Foundation in Association with Lund Humphries, London, 1992, p. 198, cat. no. 362. The sculpture records an early stage in the artist’s explorations of the screen as idea and form, which preoccupied him for years to come. In the context of a forward-looking, postwar Britain, the modern screen offered infinite possibilities to a constructivist like Adams, whose milieu included architects such as Misha Black of the Design Research Group. Neither monumental like architecture nor integral to its structures, the screen defines and draws attention to the architectural environment, transmitting sound, light and air, while creating privacy and visual interest. Over the subsequent five years, Adams’s series of screens took on many forms and functions: static and wall-mounted, in the manner of paintings; suspended from ceilings for the ocean liner SS Canberra; enclosing stairs at the Sekers Fabrics showrooms in Sloane Street, London; freestanding as room dividers; and hinged to serve as garden gates. His screens formed a giant fixed facade for the New Customs House at Heathrow Airport; a church altar, complete with corpus, for a Benedictine Priory, Missouri; and even his brooch and jewellery designs looked like ideas writ small for future screens. Adams exhibited some of his early screen works soon after their creation in his one-man retrospective at the 1962 Venice Biennale and also an exhibition at the London-based gallery Gimpel Fils (Adams’s one and only dealer) in the same year.

In 1961 Adams was a ‘mid-career artist’. His reputation had already been established for a decade thanks in large part to the British art critic Herbert Read. In 1952 Read hauntingly described the art of Adams and his fellow sculptors, who had started working with the readily available wartime materials of metal sheet and rods in the 1940s, as united by a ‘geometry of fear’, claiming that their new metallic forms expressed a society-wide sense of anxiety in the aftermath of the Second World War. The angular, jagged, rough-textured or spiky objects on view at the ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’ section in the 26th Venice Biennale of 1952 caused a sensation and were an eye-opener to modern art aficionados outside the United Kingdom. Former Director of MoMA, New York, Alfred H. Barr Jr. wrote:

it was the group of young sculptors that provided the greatest surprise of the whole Biennale. [Robert] Adams, [Kenneth] Armitage, [Reg] Butler, [Lynn] Chadwick, [Eduardo] Paolozzi and others aroused not only international admiration but also – what is more conclusive – a widespread desire to buy.⁴Alfred H. Barr, ‘Letters to the editor: Britain at the Biennale’, The Manchester Guardian, 3 Sep. 1952, p. 4

Before long, their sculptures became the readily recognisable heralds of a modern, British postwar humanism, promoted by the British Council, and toured in packaged exhibitions throughout the Empire.

Instrumental in their success outside Britain was the support provided by the English curator Eric Westbrook,⁵Peter Perry, Obituary: ‘Dr Eric Westbrook, CB 1915–2005’, Art Bulletin of of Victoria, vol. 46, 2006, pp. 66–9. who in January 1956, took on the directorship of the National Gallery of Victoria following the retirement of Daryl Lindsay. At this moment British sculpture was high on the agenda, following the success of the new generation of British sculptors, represented by Adams and his fellow exhibitors at Venice, São Paulo and elsewhere.⁶Margaret Garlake, Britain and the São Paulo Biennale, 1951–1991, British Council, London 1991. As Australian-born curator Lynne Cooke noted, by the end of the 1950s British sculpture was being ‘widely vaunted, not least by native critics, as the most flourishing school in the world’.⁷Lynne Cooke, ‘New abstract sculpture and its sources’, in Sandy Nairne & Nicholas Serota (eds), British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1981, p. 167. The Felton Bequests’ Committee allocated an extra £1500 for the purchase of contemporary sculpture for the new building and Felton Adviser A. J. L. McDonnell was asked to investigate examples in London.⁸John Poynter, Mr Felton’s Bequests, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2003, p. 514. McDonnell identified several suitable examples with the Gimpel brothers and secured Screen form for £196.17, no doubt aware that other examples were on view at the Adams’s solo exhibition at the 1962 Venice Biennale.⁹For Gimpel Fils’s stalwart promotion of contemporary British sculpture and its particular support of Adams, see Alice Correia, ‘Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth and the promotion of British Sculpture in the 1950s’, The Sculpture Journal, vol. 24, issue 1, 2015, pp. 97–112.

In 1963, in an article for the Gallery’s Art Bulletin, Westbrook commented that Screen form seemed ‘almost aggressively man-made’, but drew attention to the formal qualities of its construction; the low-relief surface and narrow profile that linked it to painting, and the co-ordination of its many small parts into graceful sweeping curves. Westbrook concluded that ‘Adams is not an artist who seeks to ingratiate, but a frequent return to this austere work will yield more and more of his unique flavour each time’.¹⁰Eric Westbrook, ‘Some acquisitions of recent British sculpture’, Annual Art Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, vol. 5, 1963, p. 18.

Without doubt, Westbrook was genuinely alive to the many possibilities that Adams’s sculpture suggested. In particular, its orchestration of metallic fragments into graceful forms, its perforations and its light emit-transmitting qualities, had resonances with the new NGV building that he was planning in consultation with architect Sir Roy Grounds. The envisaged building was to include vertical screens to allow for a flexibility of space, ceiling screens of interlocking panels to create both intimacy and an airy sense of height, and finally a glass roof by Leonard French comprising thousands of geometric shards of glass within a welded metal matrix. Robert Adams’s bronze Screen form was integral to Melbourne’s coming of age as a modern city.

Sophie Matthiesson, former Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria