As part of my crash course in teaching myself more about the artists represented by BlainSouthern, I went to see the exhibition about the work of Giacometti and Lynn Chadwick in the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle before it closes this Sunday.

The exhibition is based on the fact that Dirk Hannema, the politically dubious, but deeply knowledgeable former Director of the Boijmans Museum (he had collaborated with the Nazis), whose collection forms the basis of the Museum’s, bought a maquette by Lynn Chadwick, Dance IV in 1955 and a further major work, Teddy Boy and Girl in 1956. 1956 was the year that Chadwick, to everyone’s surprise, won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale when Giacometti was expected to.

It was a competition between, on the one hand, a highly sophisticated, intense Swiss artist based in Paris since the 1920s, internationally well known, working in a long-established tradition of observational drawing and modelling, and, on the other, a much younger, inventive, self-taught, post-war sculptor (Chadwick was only 42 in 1956 and had served in the Fleet Air Arm) making novel, spiky, energetic, non-figurative constructions. Chadwick won.

This is The Stranger (1954):-

This is Dance III (1955):-

This is Dance IV, also 1955:-

In September 1958, he bought Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire, his own form of elysium, and thereafter pursued his own route – increasingly monumental, free-standing, more figurative and also many small works.

This is Maquette II Stranger (1968):-

This is Walking Cloaked Figure (1976):-

He died only in 2003, the year of his retrospective at the Tate.