Impressionist and Modern Art

We wish to thank Professor Ben Whitworth for his kind assistance in cataloguing the present lot.

Provenance:

Collection of Mrs. Webster Plass, 1962.

A gift from the above.

Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (now Philadelphia Art Museum), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (accession number 1962-159-1a,b).

Literature:

Christopher Neve, Leon Underwood, Thames & Hudson, London, 1974, no. 106, p. 151 (this cast illustrated).

Ben Whitworth, The Sculpture of Leon Underwood, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Much Hadham & Aldershot, 2000, no. 90, pp. 12-13; 38-39; 63; 130 (another cast illustrated).

Simon Martin et al., Figure and Rhythm: Leon Underwood, an exhibition catalogue, The Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2015, no. 33, p. 29 (another cast illustrated).

Note:

Born in Shepherd’s Bush, London in 1890, Leon Underwood was a sculptor, painter, and teacher whose artistic impact has been appreciated more posthumously than during his lifetime. Underwood was a curious traveler, scholar and collector of non-Western art, deeply interested in African, Mexican, and Native American traditions, which he studied first-hand during his extensive travels. His 1934 publication Art for Heaven’s Sake was among the earliest English-language studies to champion African art as part of a sophisticated and spiritual tradition, rather than purely ethnographic artifact.

In African art in particular, Underwood understood a visual language which he could incorporate into his own work, to convey the dynamism and fluidity he desired in his forms. While teaching at the school he founded - Brook Green School of Art in London - Underwood would ask life models to change position frequently so that he and his students could learn to represent the balance, rhythm and vitality of the human body in motion. 

Of the present sculpture Negro Rhythm: Harlem, NY, in particular, artist and writer Christopher Neve mused: the work is "altogether more of an inspired scribble in the air, the patinated bronze as compulsive as a 12-bar chorus from New Orleans with its insistent syncopated beat, and even, round the base, its title in a rhythmic 1930s script- the whole object, twenty-two inches high, an inspired exercise as vividly period as Edith Sitwell’s 'allegro negro cocktail shaker.'" The lyrical nature of the dancer, throwing his head back and swirling around a central axis, brings the dynamic figure to life and encapsulates Underwood’s lifelong project.