Stephen Gilbert, 96; painter, sculptor and architectural designer
Hyfler/Rosner
January 19, 2007
Stephen Gilbert
January 15, 1910 - January 12, 2007
Artist who was celebrated on the Continent for his postwar
metaphors for human conflict
The painter, sculptor and architectural designer Stephen
Gilbert was perhaps the only British artist to be fully
embraced by the Parisian avant-garde. As one of the very few
British artists to find fame and fortune abroad, his long
and innovative career has been somewhat overlooked in
Britain.
He was born in 1910 in Fife, the grandson of Sir Alfred
Gilbert, the celebrated Victorian Art Nouveau sculptor of
"Eros" (more accurately, the Angel of Christian Charity) in
Piccadilly. He gained a scholarship in architecture to the
Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1929 where he met the
painter Roger Hilton who would become a lifelong friend.
Encouraged by Sir Henry Tonks, the Slade's principal,
Gilbert turned to painting and won the Slade Scholarship at
the end of his first year in 1930. He exhibited with the
London Group in 1933, in the Royal Academy show of 1936 and
had his first one-man show at the Wertheim Gallery in 1938.
Gilbert and his wife, the sculptor Jocelyn Chewett, whom he
had married in 1935, moved in 1937 to Paris where Chewett
had recently completed her sculptural apprenticeship to the
sculptor Ossip Zadkine. Obliged by the outbreak of war to
flee, they moved to Ireland. Invalided out of active
service, Gilbert spent the war in relative isolation in the
countryside just outside Dublin, and developed a personal,
expressionistic idiom that responded directly to the
anxieties of that time.
The White Stag group of refugee artists in Dublin, including
two pupils of the French Cubist painter Albert Gleizes,
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, offered a cosmopolitan point
of contact and facilitated early exhibitions of Gilbert's
new painting. Influenced by Jung and Nietzsche, his work of
this period is characterised by fantastical creatures,
vegetation and devouring insects painted in vivid oils.
While on one level the paintings are obviously a response to
the emotional turbulence of the war, they are also powerful
metaphors for the ever-present, internal human conflict.
In 1946 Gilbert returned to Paris. He exhibited at the Salon
des Surindépendents in 1948, where his work was noticed by
Asger Jorn, who had just form the CoBrA group with Appel,
Constant, Corneille, Altan and Alechinsky. The group's
painting paralleled the US Action Painters and Abstract
Expressionists in their pursuance of unconscious gesture and
image and bore a striking affinity to the work executed by
Gilbert five years before.
Jorn invited Gilbert to join the group and they travelled
with their families through a devastated Germany, to
Copenhagen, where Gilbert spent a month with Jorn and the
critic Christian Dotremont, completing a mural in a house
which the CoBrA artists were decorating.
After exhibiting at the second CoBrA exhibition in 1949 at
the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he became friends
with the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, Gilbert moved
away from the CoBrA group, being the first of these artists
to cast aside vigorous figuration in favour of abstraction.
From 1952 he simplified his means, painting colourful and
reductive designs of elemental shapes in impasto textures.
Exhibiting regularly with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles,
Gilbert found a place in the vanguard of continental artists
who, in the spirit of postwar optimism, looked to the
idealist Modernism of the 1920s.
Gilbert also began to explore the possibilities of
three-dimensional form. His metal constructions from the
1950s are an articulation of his ambition to, in his own
words, "put colour into space". As well as exhibiting
regularly at the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture, Gilbert became
a member of the Groupe Espace from 1954 and was a co-founder
of the Néovision group.
Increasingly interested in modernist architecture, he was
introduced by Hilton to the experimental architect Peter
Stead. In 1955-56 Gilbert spent time in Huddersfield where
he worked with Stead on a series of remarkable but
unrealised architectural proposals.
From 1957 Gilbert developed a series of curvilinear
structures which, by using polished metal surfaces, reflect
light back on to themselves so the sculpture is constantly
changing and dematerialising its perceived form. These works
were exhibited at the Drian Galleries in London in 1961 and
in exhibitions of the British Constructionist Group.
Gilbert's work remained distinct in its intuitive
consciousness of the manmade world of constructed
environments, of machines and of shapes determined by speed
and movement. "Art must have a parallel with the tenor of
your particular epoch," he said. "If you don't succeed in
reflecting this, a vital element is missing."
In addition to two public commissions in London,
international recognition came with a Gulbenkian award in
1962 and the Biennale de Tokyo in 1965.
After the death of his wife in 1979 Gilbert's sculpture
became increasingly self-contained and gestured towards an
act of affiliation to his wife's restrained and subtle
unified forms.
Gilbert's work is housed in private and public collections,
including the Tate in England, the Musée d'Art Moderne in
Paris and the CoBrA museum in Amsterdam. Belated recognition
came with the exhibition Paris-Paris at the Centre Georges
Pompidou in Paris in 1981, which revived knowledge of the
cultural life in Paris and France during the period from
1937 to 1957, and the subsequent exhibition at the Barbican
Centre in London in 1982, Aftermath: France 1945-54.
Gilbert's creative partnership with Chewett was celebrated
by the recent exhibition The Sculpture of Stephen Gilbert
and Jocelyn Chewett in Post-War Paris at the Henry Moore
Institute in 2006.
Gilbert is survived by his son and daughter.
Stephen Gilbert, painter and sculptor, was born on January
15, 1910. He died on January 12, 2007, aged 96
Hyfler/Rosner
>
>
> Stephen Gilbert
> January 15, 1910 - January 12, 2007
>
> Artist who was celebrated on the Continent for his postwar
> metaphors for human conflict
>
http://www.heedemoestrup.dk/artists/gilbert.htm
http://www.cobraart.dk/gilbert.html
http://www.galerie-cobra.dk/kunst/cobra2.jpg