Ian Walters; figurative sculptor of leftist heroes

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Ian Walters
Figurative sculptor whose portraits celebrate the heroes of
the left
The Independent
15 August 2006
Peter Cannon-Brookes

Nice work:
http://sylviapankhurst.gn.apc.org/maquette.htm
http://www.alanbushtrust.org.uk/articles/article_pjacobs.asp?room=Articles
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/28/nmand28.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/09/28/ixhome.html
Sculpture and socialism were the twin driving forces of Ian
Walters. After 30 years of teaching, mostly at Guildford
School of Art, he devoted his energy and talents to the
promotion of socialist politics and the celebration of the
heroes of the left. His work includes portrait sculptures of
Nelson Mandela, Harold Wilson, Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and
James Callaghan.

Born in Solihull and educated at Yardley Grammar School,
Walters studied at the Birmingham College of Art from 1946,
where he came under the influence of the much-underrated
sculptor William Bloye (1890-1975). From an early enthusiasm
for woodcarving, Walters turned to modelling and was
influenced by Jacob Epstein, Charles Sargeant Jagger, to
whom Bloye owed much, and the figurative works of Ossip
Zadkine.

Birmingham provided him with a solid grounding in the
figurative tradition and, returning to the West Midlands
after National Service (1952-54), he took up a lecturer post
at the then Stourbridge College of Art, in the sculpture
department. From there he moved in 1957 to the Guildford
School of Art as a lecturer in sculpture.

Walters's political activity extended back to the 1945
general election when, as a 15 year old, he participated in
the school mock election and became a convinced socialist.
Intellectual substance was provided by, inter alia, the copy
of Herbert Read's Art and Society (1937) that he received as
a school art prize.

In the early 1960s he travelled to Yugoslavia to participate
in one of Tito's public sculpture programmes, but it was the
1968 outbreak of student protests which brought together
Walters's political and artistic activities. He, while
siding with the students, rejected the fashionable abstract
art espoused by intellectuals, and instead set about
developing a powerful style of figurative sculpture intended
to speak to a much broader public. Epstein, Jagger and Bloye
provided important points of departure, but his personal
synthesis owes considerably more to Baroque sculpture than
has been generally recognised.

For the creative artist it is virtually impossible to teach
well and pursue an independent artistic career concurrently,
but the attractions of a secure if modest income are
difficult to resist when a young family is to be supported.
Walters parted company with Guildford in 1981, and he
attributed this to his political activism.

He offered his services to the London office of the African
National Congress and produced for them a giant bust of
Nelson Mandela which, cast in thin resin, was taken to ANC
rallies around the time of the 70th anniversary of its
foundation in 1912. Subsequently cast in bronze (1985) this
has come to rest on the South Bank, London, close to the
Royal Festival Hall.

The publicity that this sculpture engendered led to a
commission for a life-size, full-length figure of the
firebrand socialist politician Fenner Brockway (1888-1988),
of which the resin bronze cast was exhibited at the Society
of Portrait Sculptors annual exhibition in 1982. Boasting a
wonderfully grandiloquent rhetorical gesture, this Baroque
portrait was cast in bronze and set up in Red Lion Square,
Holborn, in 1985. Walters was briefly a Member of the
Society of Portrait Sculptors - 1983-84 - but, never
comfortable within organised bodies, he allowed this to
lapse.

For the last 20 years of his life, Walters was rarely short
of left-wing subjects. His impressive International Brigade
Monument in Jubilee Gardens, on the South Bank, was unveiled
in October 1985. He rapidly became the preferred sculptor of
the socialist elite and his perceptive half-length bust of
Tony Benn (1987) was exhibited by the revitalised Society of
Portrait Sculptors in its "FACE2000" annual exhibition, the
year before Walters rejoined.

It was Tony Benn who encouraged Walter to enter the
competition for an over-life-size, full-length figure of
Harold Wilson for his home town of Huddersfield. Again
exploiting a decidedly Baroque composition inspired by press
photographs taken at the time of the 1964 general election,
the former Prime Minister is depicted hurrying away from the
main railway station. The sculpture was unveiled by Tony
Blair in July 1999.

In the meantime, Walters had executed a number of
distinguished portrait busts, of Lord Soper - which won the
Tussaud's Studios Millennium Prize at "FACE 2000" - Sylvia
Pankhurst, and Bishop Trevor Huddleston (casts in Bedford
and at South Africa House in London). When Nelson Mandela
unveiled the Huddleston bust in Bedford in April 2000,
Walters noted the way in which the former South African
president addressed the crowds with his arms outstretched to
embrace them and the world.

This provided the immediate inspiration for his full-length
portrait of Mandela, the plaster maquette for which he
exhibited at "FACE2001". That year Walters travelled to
South Africa and modelled from life a half-length bust
portrait of Mandela at his home. The whole project for the
9ft standing figure of Mandela wearing his distinctive
printed "madiba" shirt has been fraught with controversy,
and, orginally intended for Trafalgar Square, the
sculpture's final location has still not been decided.

The posthumous half-length portraits of Sir Hugh Casson
(2002) and the fiery Baroness Castle of Blackburn (2003)
reveal in the vigorous painterly modelling and twisted poses
the Baroque qualities noted earlier, while those of Lord
Callaghan of Cardiff (2003), Arthur Scargill and Michael
McGahey are much more sober. This treatment is appropriate
for Scargill and McGahey, executed to commemorate the 20th
anniversary of the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. No longer
swashbuckling warriors of the left, the fire has gone out of
them.

There is an unfamiliar tenderness in the more generalised
modelling of the matronly bust of Fay Weldon, sent by
Walters to "FACE2005", which suggests that he was becoming
increasingly concerned with his own mortality. Apart from
putting the finishing touches to his figure of Nelson
Mandela, at the time of his death Walters was working on a
portrait of Stephen Hawking and planning one of his old
political friend Tony Banks.

In May 2006 the Society of Portrait Sculptors presented Ian
Walters with its highest award, the Jean Masson-Davidson
Silver Medal, in recognition of his lifetime achievements.

Ian Walters, sculptor: born Solihull, Warwickshire 9 April
1930; three times married (one son, one daughter); died
London 3 August 2006.