ROBERT ADAMS (BRITISH 1917-1984) CRYPTIC FORM No. 1, 1980 (OPUS 394) stamped, dated and numbered ADAMS 1980 1/6 (on the underside), cast in an edition of six, bronze 31cm high, 17cm wide (12 ¼in high, 6 ¾in wide) Literature: Alastair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1992, no.662, illustrated p.239 (another cast)The three works by Robert Adams presented from Hugo Burge’s collection in this sale are a perfect snapshot of three decades of the artist’s output. They encapsulate his interest in screen-like forms that play with the notion of ‘flatness’ within the overall three-dimensional context of sculpture.Adams was part of a ‘golden generation’ of British sculptors who came to prominence in the early 1950s, achieving almost immediate international acclaim and recognition, not least for their ability to capture the uncanny and uneasy mix of optimism and despair that followed World War Two, the liberation of the concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Adams was part of the group selected by Herbert Read to exhibit in the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale – when he coined the phrase ‘the geometry of fear’ to capture a particular quality of these young sculptors’ work, with their spiky and attenuated forms that spoke to the existential crisis of the post-war period. However, as Alastair Grieve noted in the Preface to his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, Adams’ sculpture ‘differs markedly from that of…his contemporaries…as it is purely visual, totally unliterary, constructed from abstract forms and spaces…Abstract art opened the way for a truly expressive use of materials, unhindered by the restraints of representation.’ (Alastair Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1992, p.9) A work such as Screen Form has in fact more in common with an even younger generation of British sculptors such as Anthony Caro (who had begun to make his first cut and welded works in 1960), as well as the American minimalists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Richard Serra – although in Adams’ rough handling of the material, the worn and jagged edges of the plates, he holds something of the memory of the post-war world of twisted metal and bombsites. Also amongst his peers – Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull amongst others – Adams remains relatively undervalued and unheralded – something that no doubt drew Hugo Burge, always a champion of the good but overlooked, to Adams’ work. This could be due simply to the fact that all of Adams’ early works were unique, made of forged and welded steel (he didn’t start making editions until the late 1960s) and so his work couldn’t proliferate on the back of this early critical success. And partly because – like his contemporary Kenneth Armitage, to similar result – Adams refused to be pinned down in the visual language of his 1950s success, but innovated restlessly, not least in becoming ever more abstract. Slim Form, for example, brims with 1960s optimism, of Harold Wilson’s pledge to harness the ‘white heat of technology’, its smooth, polished surface making it the perfect embodiment of both the atomic age and the age of Concorde. In contrast to his sculpture of the previous decade, there are no jagged edges to arrest the eye, to turn you back on yourself. Instead, Adams’ sculpture flows with the space surrounding it and so returns somewhat to the conceptual world occupied by Henry Moore – the artist against whom Read presented the ‘geometry of fear’ artists as a counterpoint. Yet for Moore, this fluidity always stands aligned to the shapes of the landscape, whereas Adams’ art is committed to the urban – although in Cryptic Form we can perhaps see a later career shift back to something more allusive and metaphorical. In this, he shares something in common with his contemporary Turnbull, another artist much admired by Hugo Burge. As the forces of post-Modernism swirled around in the 1980s, these two veteran sculptors embarked on making, to use Turnbull’s expression, universal totems ‘beyond time’.
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