Public sculpture is having a hard time these days as the focus of a self-righteous attack. It tended to be largely overlooked, unless it fit into the standard narrative of the rise of Modernism, like Jacob Epstein’s battered figures in the British Medical Association building in the Strand, which caused Edwardian London to gasp in obscene bewilderment at its opening in 1908. Eric Gill’s 1932 figures outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House were attacked in 2022 and 2023 as the work of a pedophile; and in Cardiff, the statue of the controversial Waterloo hero, General Thomas Picton, was removed from the splendid Town Hall (1900-04) by Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards.
Transmit ideology
John Stewart’s study of the rise and fall of architectural sculpture between the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain is therefore timely and of great interest. Gill had been brought in to enhance the austere flanks of Broadcasting House as a way of furthering the Reitian mission of bringing high culture to the masses: sculpture embodied the great tradition of classicism and could embody historical, literary and allegorical messages. Gill had his doubts: the sculptors, he declared, were “called by the architect to liven up a building that was supposed to be too boring or plain” by creating art that “proclaims who the building belongs to and what game”. they think they are playing”. Architectural sculpture is an obvious transmitter of ideology. Stewart explains well how the rickety Port of London Authority building on Tower Hill (1912-22) expresses London’s relationship with the Thames as the gateway to the Empire beyond, and it is a shame that the Kelvingrove Art Gallery group from Glasgow, The Empire salutes Glasgow, not illustrated. But it’s not all imperial pomp or civic swagger: the reliefs of drunken monks inside the Black Friar pub are crucial to the success of London’s most attractive Art Nouveau interior.
Stewart (a Scottish architect) takes us chronologically through the changing relationship of architects to sculptors, explaining how their status rose from humble craftsman to respected co-creator, a process embodied in the formation of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1884. Richard Norman Shaw urged to his fellow architects to ‘knock on the door of art’, and the period up to the outbreak of war in 1914 saw a flourishing of partnerships between the arts: John Dando Sedding and Henry Wilson working closely at Holy Trinity Church in London in Sloane Street; Aston Webb and Harry Bates at Birmingham Courts; and William Young and Alfred Drury at the Old War Office in Whitehall, London. The latter work dates from 1898 to 1906, the zenith of British global reach: but his sculptural groups include The horror of war filled with a menacing skeleton. There was more to this camp than thoughtless gentrification.
“Units of the Arts”
Some schemes get more attention than others. John Belcher’s Chartered Accountants’ Hall (1889-1893), in Moorgate Place, London, is rightly in the spotlight for its Hamo Thornycroft friezes, but London’s Deptford Town Hall (1903-05) by Lanchester, Stewart and Rickards , important for its opulent naval ornament of Henry Poole, is omitted; it was recently the subject of a consultation to decide whether naval statues should be cancelled. These buildings were conceived as units of the arts in which the carved elements were intrinsic to the overall effect. Similarly, Stewart deflects the question of Henry Pegram’s statue of Cecil Rhodes on Basil Champneys facade to Oriel College, Oxford. It is unfair to bemoan omissions in a book that covers so much ground, but it is a shame to ignore the triumphal arch at Waterloo Station, the finest war memorial in a building, or the Gilbert Bayes relief. The drama through the centuries at the Saville Theater in London, although one of his superb friezes for the Commercial Bank of Scotland in Glasgow (1935) depicts industry illustrates the cover. Not much about churches either.
Stewart is at his best in chronicling the architectural developments of the time; buildings without sculptures are sometimes mentioned, suggesting a dragged-out mission. One of the book’s major themes is the challenge of modernism, and its hostility to three-dimensional distraction, illustrated by three London schemes: Gray Wornum’s RIBA headquarters (1932-34) is cited as a late example of the fusion of building and construction. sculpture; Walthamstow Town Hall (1937-42) is rightly mentioned for the powerful figures of John Kavanagh. Henry Moore’s early 1950s work on the Time-Life building on Bond Street closes the narrative. The epilogue ends on a dubious note, considering that the integration of architecture and sculpture only survives in classical revivalism, where Sandy Stoddart’s work with Craig Hamilton stands out. Overall, this is a welcome book on a fascinating subject. As Gill joked, what game did they think they were playing?
• John Stewart, British Architectural Sculpture 1851-1951Lund Humphries, 208 pp, 151 color illustrations, £45/$89.99 (hb), published 3 May/22 August
• Roger Bowdler is a partner at Montagu Evans, advising property owners on historic buildings. He was Director of Listing at Historic England and writes on funerary art
