Reg Butler, Reg Butler Bronze Sculpture Musee Imaginaire Abstract Brutalist Female Figure

Details

Description

Reg Cotterell Butler (1913 - 1981)
Bronze
Musée Imaginaire
Conceived 1961-62, cast 1963
Stamp signed and impressed with monogram Initials … Read more Reg Cotterell Butler (1913 - 1981)
Bronze
Musée Imaginaire
Conceived 1961-62, cast 1963
Stamp signed and impressed with monogram Initials © RB
Numbered 9/9,
Cast by Valsuani Foundry, Paris, France.

Literature (for the full Musee Imaginaire):
Exhibition catalogue, "Reg Butler" (London: Tate Gallery, 1983), pp. 15, 68, no. 63, another cast illustrated
Exhibition catalogue, "Reg Butler: Musee Imaginaire: Bronzes Middle & Late Period" (London: Gimpel Fils, 1986), another cast illustrated on the cover
"The Tate Gallery Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1984-86" (London: Tate Gallery, 1988), pp. 117-118, 500, no. T03703, another cast illustrated
Margaret Garlake, "The Sculpture of Reg Butler" (Much Hadham: The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2006), pp. 18-19, 162, no. 224, pl. 4, another cast illustrated


Reginald Cotterell Butler (1913 – 1981) was an English sculptor. He was born at Bridgefoot House, Buntingford, Hertfordshire to Frederick William Butler (1880–1937) and Edith (1880–1969), daughter of blacksmith William Barltrop, of The Forge, Takeley, Essex. His parents were the Master and Matron of the Buntingford Union Workhouse. Frederick Butler, formerly a police constable, was a relative of the poet William Butler Yeats; Edith was of Anglo-French descent.

Butler studied and lectured at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from 1937 to 1939. He was a conscientious objector during the Second World War, being exempted from military service conditional upon setting up a small blacksmith business repairing farm implements. After winning the 'Unknown Political Prisoner' competition in 1953 he became one of the best known sculptors during the 1950s and 1960s, and also taught at the Slade School of Art.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949. The following year he preceded Kenneth Armitage in receiving The Gregory Fellowship awarded by Leeds University. It was during his three years in Leeds that he fully developed his sculptural style. He abandoned his past methods of welding iron and turned instead to expressionist modelling in clay or plaster and casting the models in thin, lightweight bronze. In 1952 Butler was among eight sculptors chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, where his work was highly acclaimed. A retrospective of his work was held at Louisville, Kentucky in October 1963. Apart from occasional group shows, Butler did not exhibit again until 1973 when he held an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The ten years of silence were the result of his disillusionment with sculpture's value as public art and the rise of a new generation of abstract sculptors in the 1960s.
Butler's later work consists of lifelike models of female figures, such as Girl on a Round Base, that have something in common with Hans Bellmer and the sculpture of Allen Jones and prefigure the work of Ron Mueck.
Butler was featured in the 1964 documentary film, "5 British Sculptors (Work and Talk)", by American filmmaker Warren Forma, A study of sculptors Reg Butler, Barbara Hepworth, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick and Henry Moore.
Many of his works are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Tate Gallery in London.


Select Exhibitions
2026: 100 Years of British Art, Messums London, Mayfair. Artists include, Brian Taylor, Elisabeth Frink,
Lynn Chadwick, Patrick Hughes, Reg Butler, Terry Frost.
2023: Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain. Marlborough, London, Mayfair. Artists include Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Germaine Richier, Graham Sutherland, Prunella Clough
2021: Modern British Art, Osborne Samuel Gallery
Artists included Alan Munro‏ Reynolds, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Patrick Heron, Peter Kinley, Reg Butler.
2016: Modernism and Memory: Rhoda Pritzker and the Art of Collecting. Yale Center for British Art New Haven, Connecticut, USA Artists included L. S. Lowry, Alan Lowndes, Helen Bradley, Alan Davie,
Alan Lowndes, Anthony Caro, Ivon Hitchens, Reg Butler. See less