'The bravery of Armitage's position is that he has little interest in formal issues, expressing instead an intuitive understanding of posture that is not to do with action but with reaction, or the way the body accommodates its environment - in this case, leaning into the wind. There is no mass in this sculpture; it is as if the bodies are given their weight by the invisible wind. And this transference is the realisation of the impalpable in the material, or the transient in the permanent.'

ANTHONY GORMLEY



Kenneth Armitage's People in the Wind is, along with his Family Going for a Walk, one of his two best-known and most popular sculptures. An earlier version of the present work was included in the landmark exhibition of eight young sculptors (which included Robert Adams, Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull) at the 1952 Venice Biennale, which not only provided an immediately prominent platform for Armitage's work, but was also the occasion for the coining of Herbert Read's famous phrase, 'the geometry of fear'. Armitage wrote of showing People in the Wind at the Biennale that:'Before showing this piece at the 1952 Biennale I was unknown. After it, I had an international name.'



Prior to this exhibition Armitage had been teaching sculpture at Bath Academy of Art, the far-sighted academy run by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis at Corsham Court. The Ellises recruited some remarkably talented young artists onto the staff and Armitage's contemporaries included William Scott, the potter James Tower (whose work shares a close affinity with Armitage's sculpture) and later, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost. As a relatively new teacher, Armitage himself admitted that he was very much learning on the job and it is with Two Linked Figures of 1949 that his first mature and distinctive style appears. Armitage had become interested in the way in which groups of figures massed together such that a spectator registered the single mass before the individuals:

'Joining figures together I found in time I wanted to merge them so completely they formed a new organic unit – a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary' THE ARTIST, QUOTED IN NORBERT LYNTON, KENNETH ARMITAGE, METHUEN, LONDON 1962.



The present work exists in a number of variants and sizes and thus attests to the ways in which Armitage was exploring the theme of interlinked figure groups. People in the Wind combines both movement and humour, the work merges them into a clear single unit, the thin central slab which would be a feature of Armitage's group sculpture for the next five years at its core. The inspiration for People in the Wind lay in a very specific memory whilst the distinctive angularity and etiolation lay in sources close to home:

‘[People in the Wind] had a pronounced front and side elevation with two membranes meeting at right angles giving the idea of bulk without solid convex forms. The elongated and slightly divergent necks derived from the plants which grew at my studio door and which I watched and drew because of their structural buoyancy. Each had half a dozen stalks coming up and a small stem absolutely upright and straight and opening out of the top. This gave an intended lightness and economy, away from the heavy masses which I associate with my previous stone carving. The subject of people struggling against the wind came from seeing, from the window in my London flat, a mother and her two children struggling against a strong wind. If you look at a crowd, you do not count the arms and legs, you just see odd arms swinging and the odd leg moving.' JAMES SCOTT, THE SCULPTURE OF KENNETH ARMITAGE, LUND HUMPHRIES, LONDON, 2016, P. 29



The mother and children come together as a literal family unit, pushing forward together against the elements, clothes and limbs melding into one mass. Armitage, with gentle playfulness and great humanity, creates a work of unity and togetherness. Perhaps there is a hint of fragility in the elongated, thin necks but there is also strength, with arms firmly stretched out, elbows behind, the group leaning into, embracing, the wind. The sentiment is far removed from the so called ‘Geometry of Fear’: ‘There was no “geometry of fear”, I was in a state of happiness after the war. I felt I was singing a song when I was demobbed. I felt “I am alive; now I am going to work”, and I did…joyfully.’ KENNETH ARMITAGE, QUOTED IN JAMES SCOTT, THE SCULPTURE OF KENNETH ARMITAGE, LUND HUMPHRIES, LONDON, 2016, P. 34