Elisabeth Frink 1930-1993

Elisabeth Jean Frink was born in 1930 and was thus only 9 when WW2 broke out. Her father was a professional soldier and represented, in her wartime childhood, a heroic figure. Frink was given her first pony aged 3 and was a competent rider by 4. Hers was an outdoor, countrified childhood. Horses and riding were her passion but devoid of sentimentality; she recalled from her childhood visiting the knackers yard and seeing horse carcasses hung up and flayed for dog meat. 

Frink was 15 when the first Pathe News images of Nazi concentration camps emerged. All witnessing such for the first time, Frink included, were obliged to reconsider what it meant to be a human being. To reassess what man was ultimately capable of. Questions that Frink was to explore for decades. During the war Frink witnessed war planes crashing into the fields near her grandparents’ home, The Grange in Great Thurlow, a village in Suffolk (where she was born and later spent much of the war) - their wreckages, appearing to the young Frink as broken-winged creatures of war; a vision echoed in the work of other artists such as Paul Nash and his haunting sea of crashed planes, Totes Meer.

Later in life and revealingly Frink told Edward Lucie-Smith “I’ve had a flight dream from the time I was very young. It’s to do with birds flying, planes crashing - big monstrous things flying, sometimes with a man in them”. 

Frink’s childhood experience of war obliged her to attempt, in the years and decades that followed, to come to terms with not only man’s brutality, but also his vulnerability. This was what her art had to be about; getting to grips with and expressing the nature of the human condition. Herbert Read called this phenomenon, not exclusive to Frink amongst post-war sculptors and painters, “the geometry of fear’. Frink, like others was a product of her time; in her case, a remarkably visceral product. 

The genesis of Frink’s career as an artist was a visit to Italy at the end of the war; her father was stationed in Trieste. The artist’s biographer, Stephen Gardiner, suggests the sight of prancing horses on the façade of San Marco in Venice above St Marks, nostrils flaring, and an abundance of magnificent paintings and alter pieces by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto and Bellini left the 16 year-old Frink determined to inhabit this world and upon her return, persuade her parents that she should go to art school; which although somewhat surprised, they obliged. 

So off she went with something of a foundation training at the Guildford School of Art and then, from 1948 to 1953, to the Chelsea School of Art, where Bernard Meadows and Willi Soukop were her tutors. She was taught to paint but found that colour didn’t excite her and that she was drawn more to creating in 3 dimensions. Prunella Clough recalls that Frink was remarkable in knowing exactly what she wanted to do, even from this early stage. 

 
Frink achieved early commercial success when in 1952, aged just 22 and still studying at Chelsea, Beaux Arts Gallery in London held her first major solo exhibition and the Tate Gallery purchased a work entitled 'Bird'.

Many of the subjects that were to dominate her career appeared early; standing men, men on horseback, horses, warriors, dogs and of course birds; flying birds, predatory birds, birds falling. Frink later admitted that birds were “really vehicles for strong feelings of pain, tension, aggression and predatoriness.” 

Her first love was Joe Creelman, a young officer in the London Irish rifles, sadly killed in a motorbike accident. Joe lived on in Frink’s work throughout her career with references from early drawings, to Green Man. “Her personal experiences, both joyful and painful, were a crucial lava bed for her art. On her own admission, a lot of Frink’s work was an expression of anxiety. There was always a moral dimension to her art. She wasn’t trying to improve mankind, just to show humans what they are.” (Elisabeth Frink, Catalogue Raisonne, Edited by Annette Ratuszniak).

 
Her studies completed at Chelsea School of Art, Frink went on to teach there (1953-60) and at St Martin's School of Art (1955-57).

Frink never used assistants (except in the last three months of her life) because for her, sculpture was about feeling and therefore only she could create a ‘Frink’ sculpture, because only she had the feeling that inspired and directed its creation. 

Frink employed the traditional Lost-Wax process of casting in bronze; a method that dates back thousands of years.

She modelled on an armature of metal rods and chicken wire in wet plaster of Paris, often applied through strips of cloth and given more substance with card and small pieces of wood.  She worked fast; a necessity of her process as the plaster dried quickly. When dry she chiselled and reshaped the form, sometimes adding more plaster. She often used a surfirm tool to give a fine grating to her surfaces (as we see on the stubby wings of Large Bird, 1966).

Frink used a number of foundries during her career including the Meridian Foundry and the Morris Singer Foundry. Once she was happy with the plaster model, it would be taken to the foundry and a hard clay or plaster mould made which was the exact negative of Frink’s original model. The moulds were made in a number of pieces with keys placed between the parts during construction so that they could be reconstructed accurately.

Once a mould was finished, molten wax was poured into it to cover the entire inner surface of the mould to a desired thickness. The resultant wax copy of the original model was then removed from the mould. The wax copy was then ‘chased’ with a heated metal tool to remove unwanted marks and fine ridges where the pieces of the mould came together. Frink would now incise the base of the wax copy with her signature and the edition number of the ultimate casting.

The wax copy was then ‘sprued’ with a branch-like structure of wax that would eventually provide paths for the molten bronze to flow, a wax cup at the top. The sprued wax copy was then dipped into a slurry, silica and grit combination to create a ‘ceramic’ shell mould. The ceramic shell-mould was placed cup-down in a kiln, whose heat hardened the silica into a strong shell, and the wax melted and ran out; hence ‘lost-wax’ process.

Bronze alloy in a crucible was placed into the foundry’s furnace until molten, then poured carefully into the ceramic silica shell. The shell also had to be hot to prevent the temperature difference shattering it.

Once cooled, the ceramic shell, which like the wax copy could only be used for one casting, was broken up, releasing the bronze casting. The sprues were cut off and at this stage Frink once again became heavily involved. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Frink was not happy to leave the final touches to the foundry. She would personally ‘chase’ each casting working at it until she was happy that the signs of the casting process were removed, and the cast was true to her original model. This would involve Frink carefully filing and polishing sections of each bronze. Finally, Frink worked with the foundry, assisted for many years by Ken Cook, with the patination of the final castings using various chemicals to achieve the desired patina. Her choice of medium and meticulous process was crucial to convey not only seductive flesh, but also the searing wounds, threat and vulnerability in her sculpture.

Frink preferred to sculpt the male rather than female firm which she found too soft. She liked the angularity, strength and firmness of the male nude and saw in it a vulnerability. Initially Frink’s sculpted men were more broken, vulnerable, warlike and predatory but over time we can see her sculpture heal and very gradually emerge from the horrors of war. 

In 1958 Frink joined the Waddington Galleries, London were she would go on to  exhibit regularity, usually a show each year. In the 1960s she was also represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

Following the dissolution of her marriage to architect, Michel Jammet, Frink moved to the south of France in 1967. She needed to escape the London artistic scene; which was increasingly falling under the spell of Pop Art from the US; the antithesis of Frink’s work, rooted as it was in the natural world and man’s relationship with it. In France, her psychological ‘war wounds’ continued to heal, and with the aid of clear bright southern French sunlight, Frink’s work softened becoming smoother and less textured. That said, war and aggression remained present themes. Evil in Frink’s work is almost always blinkered, whether by goggles, the carapace of a helmet or a virtual absence of eyes. As Julian Spalling suggests, in Frink’s mind it is “as if the greatest crime is not to see the implications of what you are doing and, even worse, to blind yourself to your own nature”. 

Goggle Heads of 1967-69 were attributed by Frink to photographs of General Mohamed Outkit who wore dark menacing glasses. It’s been often observed that these heads also recollect Frink’s own countenance; their strong chins, pained mouths and serious brows. In 1969 Frink married for a second time, this time to Edward Pool.

In her late human figures, her sensitivity to the horrors of WW2 receding, Frink said she was aiming for ‘a sense of containment under the skin”. In many later sculptures she was concerned about man’s relationship with animals; in particular, with dogs and horses. “The world would be terrible place without animals”. Dogs and horses, Frink observed, have “ been man’s best friend for thousands of years.” This enduring relationship is wonderfully captured in Horse and Rider (1974), described by Frink as a “an ageless symbol of man and horse" and now a listed ‘building’ on busy Bond Street in the centre of London’s Mayfair, and marking the entrance to the Royal Academy. The same year that she created Horse and Rider, Frink’s marriage to Edward Pool was dissolved.

In the last two decades of Frink’s life and career, her subject matter and voice as a sculptor, clearly softened again. Her representation of dogs and even baboons and hogs, but especially horses, is an expression of the tenderness she felt for those animals and a desire to capture their quiet nobility. As such it represents a sea-change from the terror evoked by the predatorial stance of the anthropomorphic birds and winged men of the 1950s and 60s. Now horses frolic and roll, well fed dogs sit attentively, awaiting their master’s instruction. Had the long shadow of war finally passed?

It wasn't until 1971 that Frink first exhibited at the Royal Academy, in the Summer Exhibition and that same year was elected an Associate of the Academy. In 1974 Frink began exhibiting regularly with Beaux Arts and in 1979 was elected a full Academician at the Royal Academy, but resisted attempts to make her the first female president.

From the early 1980s, and with the guidance of Kenneth Clark who had cast her bronzes for 3 decades, Frink began to experiment with more colour. With beautiful green and red patinas achieved by heating the bronze to a very high temperature before generously applying the patinating chemicals. Frink was always intensely involved in the finishing of each cast because as she said “This enabled me to have the last word, which was very important to me”. And of course, that makes each cast unique and its uniqueness, a product of the artist’s direction and hand.

The 1980s contained important milestones in Frink's career. In 1982, a publishing firm proposed to produce the first Catalogue Raisonné of her work; and the Royal Academy planned a retrospective of her life's work which was held in 1985. The retrospective proved a huge success and spurred the art establishment to hold more exhibitions of Frink's work, with four solo exhibitions held in just the following year.

Frink was made a CBE in 1969 and a Dame in 1982. Her final marriage, in 1974, to Hungarian-born Alexander Csaky continued up until his death, just a few months before her own passing. In June 1992, Queen Elisabeth II made Frink a Companion of Honour, an award conferred for conspicuous national service.

Frink maintained a intense pace of work and exhibiting until early 1991, when an operation for cancer of the oesophagus forced a break. In September, she underwent further surgery but returned to work shortly after with exhibitions in the USA and work on a colossal sculpture for Liverpool Cathedral; but her health was clearly deteraiting. Risen Christ for Liverpool Cathedral was to be her last sculpture. One week after its installation, Elisabeth Frink died on 18 April 1993 at the age of just 62. Her cancer had been brought on in part from a lifetime's inhalation of plaster dust.  

Throughout her life Frink ploughed her own path as a sculptor; “Nearly all people have a private world. I escape into my studio and put my fantasies into solid form. I have one ambition, to be a good sculptor. I think one has to be ambitious. I want to be able to give the idea, the crystallisation, the satisfactory sculptural form without it being mere forms which look nice. I want to have impact on people who look at it without being dramatic or melodramatic.”