§ Lynn Chadwick C.B.E. R.A. (British 1914-2003) Maquette for Stranger, 1961 6/6, model 340, signed and numbered, bronze with green / brown patina(31.5cm high, 26.3cm wide (12.3in high, 10.3in wide))Provenance: Sotheby's, New York, 1 July 1991, Lot 125; Private Collection, London.Footnote: Literature: Bowness, A., Lynn Chadwick, Methuen, London, 1962, unpaginated (another cast illustrated); Farr, D. and É. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor: With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p.192, no.340 (another cast illustrated). The subject of the ‘Stranger’ occupied Chadwick over the period from 1954 until 1969, in a formal theme which also informed the contemporary ‘Winged Figure’ works. As Alan Bowness explained in his 1962 monograph about the artist, the stimulus was Chadwick’s controversial commission from the Air League of the British Empire in 1957, to create a memorial to the 1919 double crossing of the Atlantic by the airship R34. Having served as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy during World War Two, Chadwick had a deeply personal experience of flight and link to the concept of a winged figure, itself embedded in the myth of Icarus. In Maquette for Stranger, the power of the anonymous figure’s torso and spread-out winged arms is contradicted by its tapering, spindly legs. It has a monumentality and stillness which yet suggests strength in movement. As Bowness continued ‘the Strangers and Watchers seem to be tensed: waiting, aware that something is going to happen…the tensions arise directly from the sculptor’s treatment of surface. His technique leads him to build an armature, constructed from straight rods, and this becomes the skin as well as the bone of the figure. Everything is thus brought on to the surface, and the network of rigid lines and absence of curves is somehow expressive of a high pitch of nervous intensity, possessed by these strange immobile creatures.’ (Bowness, op.cit., unpaginated). Such was the significance of Maquette for Stranger that a cast of it was selected by the British Council for inclusion in the VI Bienal de São Paulo of 1961, shortly after its creation. Herbert Read wrote about the sculptor’s contribution to the British presentation: ‘Lynn Chadwick’s vision has penetrated a psychic region where man is a tensed geometrical aeronaut, watching the skies, wings folded or outspread for flight. Such is the new image of man, the archetype of a space age.’ (Herbert Read, ‘Lynn Chadwick’, VI Bienal de São Paulo, exh.cat., 1961 quoted in Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p. 115). Chadwick was declared hors concours, or ‘beyond competition’ at the biennial, the first time a British artist had been thus honoured.
