Clement Meadmore; The Australian obit (Sculptor)
Hyfler/Rosner
May 10, 2005 Tuesday All-round Country Edition
Designer and sculptor. Born Melbourne, February 9, 1929.
Died New York, April 19, aged 76.
CLEMENT Meadmore's career, in New York since 1963, produced
an extraordinarily large number of commissions for
monumental abstract sculptures, not only in the US but also
in Mexico City (for the 1968 Olympic Games), Japan and
Australia. Besides the civic, corporate and museum
commissions, private collections included Nelson
Rockefeller's at Pocantico Hills.
A citation for an American award in 1973 characterised
Meadmore as "a forceful sculptor of simple twisting forms in
black or earth colours. Direct, masculine, moving." That
meant both rhythmic visual movement and emotional elation.
Meadmore said he usually tried to place the centre of big
outdoor works at human eye height. They therefore looked
back and invited identification with the spectator's body.
Surprisingly, black-painted or brown-rusted industrial steel
radiated a kind of muscular, athletic warmth.
The square is the ultimate abstract form and from the late
1960s his sculptures were always assembled from
square-section hollow tubes, an assertive statement of
alliance with then new minimalism. But because the modules
were twisted and bent into endless variations we also saw
the improvisational freedom of abstract expressionism.
Austere geometry is transcended by experimental play and the
paradox engenders delight: play is a matter of high
seriousness.
In a 1962 article, "Sculpture in the Man Made Environment",
Meadmore wrote that any work of art is always an occasional
"foreign body in its environment and just as life is mostly
honest work with an occasional burst of sexual or spiritual
passion, sculpture has a slightly supernatural quality in
relation to a functional environment".
There were many gallery-sized pieces in bronze as well as
steel, but they were all scaled up from small hand-held
polyester-sheet models for fabrication at an art foundry.
They are available in editions. Eric Gibson's monograph The
Sculpture of Clement Meadmore (Hudson Hills Press, New York,
1994) illustrates two monumental Flippant Flurrys, one in
Sydney with its architectural backdrop outside the Art
Gallery of NSW, the other on a grassy slope in Collegeville,
Pennsylvania.
Meadmore was the eldest of three children. His father, a
one-time vaudeville performer, sold mechanical trains and
hobby toys at Meadmore Models in Exhibition Street; his
mother loved ballet, a seed for his later sculptures of
stress and bodily motion and elevation. An aunt, Phyllis
Meadmore, had married J.J. Hilder, a watercolourist in
Sydney. After Scotch College and Geelong College he enrolled
in aeronautical engineering but shifted to industrial
design.
On graduation from RMIT in 1949 he designed very smart
contemporary furniture. His Cord chair, 1952, and Calyx
lamp, 1953, are Australian design classics. In 1953 he
visited Europe and thenceforth the catalogue of his dozen
"Meadmore Originals", sold at 86 Collins St, noted that
Kenneth W. McDonald was now sole proprietor of the designs.
Roger Meadmore says his brother had expected a pound stg. 1
royalty on each Cord chair, never received it and sued
unsuccessfully for breach of contract; he recalls a judgment
that the chair was not original but had been copied from an
American magazine and that the defendant later bragged he'd
made a fortune from the Meadmore chair.
Terence Lane, a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria,
has seen an American chair of the period that is similar but
much less sophisticated than Meadmore's.
The sculptor was what old Melbourne friends call a "jazz
dag". To the end in New York he played his drums in jam
sessions with friends. From 1954 for nine years he designed
all the covers for Melbourne jazz publisher Swaggie Records.
A book on Mondrian's paintings, presumably including
Broadway Boogie-Woogie, was a very early inspiration.
Meadmore sculptures bear titles directly signifying bodily
experience, as in Clench, Push Up, Fling or Terpsichore
(classical goddess of dance) or else indirectly, taken from
titles of danceable music (Flippant Flurry is a Duke
Ellington number). On a visit to Japan in 1959 he first saw
new American abstract painting and was bowled over by
Barnett Newman. That year he also persuaded fellow jazz dag
Max Hutchinson, a shopfittings manufacturer, to give some of
his Adroit showrooms in Flinders Lane to Gallery A, which
Meadmore managed for two years before shifting to Sydney.
Meadmore continued to mentor Hutchinson, who opened a branch
Gallery A in Sydney in 1964, and another gallery in 1970 in
downtown New York.
In Sydney, from 1960-63, Meadmore was highly visible as the
only sculptor in a group of exciting new abstract artists,
among them the painters John Olsen and Peter Upward,
supported by the young critics Robert Hughes and Virginia
Spate. Though his one-off welded sculptures began to enter
museum collections he still needed design jobs.
Sheila Scotter hired him as her first art editor at Vogue
Australia; within a year he got a trip to New York where
American Vogue was run by Alexander Liberman, who was also
an abstract sculptor in steel. Introduced to Newman,
Meadmore did not return, was soon granted American residence
as a "cultural asset" and in 1976 became an American
citizen. Meadmore wrote well: concise magazine reviews of
jazz and new art; books on furniture. He hoped to publish a
book of his photographs, Dolmens: Monumental Abstract
Sculpture 4000-3000 BC.
He liked the look of austere living. After a long spell on
the upper Upper West Side of Manhattan he tried a few years
in the mid-'80s at ex-urban Briarcliff Manor, Westchester
County.
In 1988 he returned to lower Fifth Avenue, the former studio
of Picasso's mistress Francoise Gilot, knocked down walls to
make it more loft-like and give more views of the Empire
State Building. He said he never wanted to be an
"Australian" artist, he preferred to compete with the
world's best and had probably become an "American" artist.
He was really a micro-regional Manhattanite, with an
Australian accent.
He was gruff, laconic and quietly ironic in a very
Australian way. He was attractive and loved many women. He
married twice, in Melbourne in the '50s and New York in the
'80s, and divorced twice.
He cohabited with Virginia Cuppaidge from 1969 to 1974 and
assisted her career as a painter.
He is survived in Australia by his son Quentin and
grand-daughter Jade, brother Roger and sister Rosalind
Moffat. Ellen Goldberg, a close confidante and friend since
1969, cared for him during his final years with Parkinson's
disease.
His galleries, Marlborough Chelsea in New York, Salis &
Vertes in Salzburg, Anna Schwartz in Melbourne and Robin
Gibson in Sydney, will continue to handle his work. A
Meadmore Foundation will control the estate. Robin Gibson is
holding a memorial tribute shortly, and the AGNSW will mount
a small memorial display. The NGV will hold a memorial event
that Anna Schwartz is planning, hopefully, to coincide with
the relocation of Meadmore's Dervish to a more highly
visible site at the Victorian Arts Centre.