Dame Elisabeth Frink

Bird

1952

In Tate St Ives

Modern Art and St Ives: Meaning and Material in the 1950s

Artist: Dame Elisabeth Frink 1930–1993
Medium: Bronze
Dimensions: Object: 210 x 250 x 362 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1953
Reference: N06140

Display caption

The prodigious Frink began to show her work in public in 1951 and among her first sculptures was this strong and alert bird, rather like a crow or a raven. The bird theme was to occupy Frink over the next two decades. Of these early sculptures she said that they ‘were really expressionist in feeling - in their emphasis on beak, claws and wings - and they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness. They were not, however, symbolic of anything else; they certainly were not surrogates for human beings or ‘states of being.’

Gallery label, September 2016

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Catalogue entry

N06140 BIRD 1952

Not inscribed.
Bronze, 8×9 1/2×14 1/2 (20×24×36).
Purchased from the Beaux Arts Gallery (Knapping Fund) 1953.
Exh: Three Sculptors, Beaux Arts Gallery, November 1952 (4).

Three casts were made; one was bought by a private collector, the second by the Arts Council, and this is the third.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I