Ceysson & Bénétière

Philip King was born in 1934 in Khair ad-Din, not far from Carthage, in Tunisia. After the war, in 1946, his family came back to England and settled in London, a city that was deeply marked by the German strategic blitzkrieg. At the end of his education at the Mill Hill School, Philip King did his military service with the Royal Signal Corps in England and Marly-Le- Roy, in the vicinity of Paris -because he spoke French. In Paris, he often visited the Louvre Museum, where he copied classical sculptures, and met Vantongerloo. Relieved from his military duties, he went on to study Modern Languages, French and Russian, at the Christ’s College, where Anthony Caro also studied. While drawing in Cambridge, he also tried his hands at sculpture. Well decided to study and practice sculpture despite his disappointing experiments, King went to St Martin-in-the-Fields, on the advice of a librarian. The first person he met there was Anthony Caro, which classes he started following, before becoming a teacher himself, and one of Henry Moore’s assistants, like Anthony Caro. Thanks to a scholarship, King traveled to Greece, while Anthony Caro went to the United States where he became friends with Clement Greenberg and David Smith, who King met a bit later, at the Bennington College. Back in England, Anthony Caro invited Philip King to see his latest production, which incited him to speed up the mutation of his own work, drop clay modeling, use new materials, and work on bigger scales, a direction he was already starting to take after discovering the new American painting. As he told Samuel Gross: “The entire new generation of English artists of that time was influenced by this new painting.” For him, it was urgent to operate a deep revolution in sculpture. And it seemed necessary and indispensable for many students of Anthony Caro’s workshop, wishing to keep alive the incredible effervescence of sculpture throughout the 20th century in England, which had probably been far more innovative than English painting, marked by the arrival of Jacob Epstein in London- who encouraged and supported Henry Moore - as well as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Naum Gabo. 

While recognizing the legacy of a tradition inherited, according to him, from classical Greece, Reims’s sculpture, Rodin, Moore, and Hepworth, King quickly parted from it. And he did so very differently than Anthony Caro, William Tucker, and Tim Scott. A work like Untitled I, 1961, which seems to draw from Moore’s abstract and sensual biomorphic forms, is laid on the floor on an open-angle base made in ordinary wood. It is also the case of Drift, 1962, which curvy plaster element is slightly elevated and enhanced by a similar set-up. Made entirely of plaster, Window, 1962, is an even more overt, even ironical, allusion to Barbara Hepworth’s hollowed-out circles and ovals, as well as to Henry Moore’s holes, but the void created by the oblong, radically geometrical opening King inserted in his piece recalls some of Moore’s sculptures and their clearly cut and defined plans. The mutation happened with Declaration, 1961, made in marble chips aggregated into simple geometrical forms: two circular, two square, and two X-shaped cobblestones “skewered” on a steel rod. Resolutely abstract, this work claims an autonomous existence nearing the “existential” loneliness fully expressed by Giacometti’s Woman with Chariot, 1945. A fervent reader of Camus, Phillip King, in the realm of sculpture, developed a sort of phenomenological vision in the wake of Merleau-Ponty -himself walking in Cezanne’s foot, and influencing Robert Morris’s unexpected minimalism. Phillip King was very explicit in that regard: “These sculptures don’t impose themselves [...] they simply invite us to be in their presence.” Adding: “they are in the same space as us, while also being elsewhere. This separation is both physical and mental.” This explains King’s interest in volume, gravity, and floor placement, even more crucial for the four conical works: Rosebud, 1962 and Ghengis Khan, 1963, presented at Ceysson & Bénétière in 2016, Through, 1965, shown during the exhibition Primary Structures held at the Jewish Museum in 1966, as well as And the Birds Began to Sing, 1963, which beautiful title reveals the simple “complication” – in the horology meaning of the term- presented in this exhibition. For King, also a reader of Heidegger, the importance of the position of the sculpture on the floor went hand in hand with the notion of elevation -without necessarily piling up forms like Brancusi-, and the need for lightness, a floating impression, as Caro commented. Hence King’s choice of light, flexible and unconventional materials, like thin steel slates and fiberglass sheets. As he reminded Samuel Gross: “English sculpture, maybe in comparison to American sculpture, looked to lift weight (without ignoring gravity), to elevate matter, make everything lighter, and viewers forget about gravity”. The prominence given to the surface falls in line with Matisse’s approach rather than obeying Greenberg’s directives: it gives the work a new skin and a make-over, dematerializing it by escaping the load of material and textural constraints. However, while Phillip King remained attentive to Paolozzi’s gaudy practice of sculpture, and especially to Frank Stella’s colorism - the latter’s addiction to baroque illusionism being however contrary to King’s intentions-, he radically parted from them, the same way he did with Anthony Caro’s monochromatism. Yet, both evolved in the same expanding field of sculpture, one favoring the inside, the structuring frame, and horizontality, while the other turned to elevation and surface, and developed a fondness for color and light. Both felt the need to place their sculpture in a lived and experienced environment and in nature, which joined forces with the artist. Placed in a surrounding environment, their works rejected Mondrian’s industrialist orthogonality, and the limitations of a strictly frontal view, a confrontational view. King’s clearly stated refusal of pasting, to the benefit of mounting and assembling, while revealing his interest for Tatline, disqualified any affinities with productivist constructivism. Far removed from any conceptualist temptations, King’s work has always included a “crafty”, “made in the studio” dimension, as shown in his late production, in keeping with the English tradition- still visible in the car industry today -, and going all the way back to William Morris... 

Kynaston McShine was well inspired when he told American artists not to put Anthony Caro and other young British artists who mostly came from his studio -like Phillip King, William Tucker, Tim Scott, David Annesley, and Michael Bolus, among others- under the same Minimal Art umbrella, on the occasion of Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, the founding exhibition held at the Jewish Museum of New York in 1966, which shook the international art scene. In fact, McShine might have gotten the idea for this exhibition from the discovery of these British sculptors, as their works had already been shown in the second round of The New Generation: 1965, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Like the Beatles, this “new generation” of sculptors -Anthony Caro’s school- expressed a deep evolution in behaviors and aspirations, which, in the middle of the cold war, marked the end of the post-war period and revealed that the productions of the new French realists had not really transformed the paradigms of European and international sculpture... 

We can imagine visitors’ surprise upon discovering a sculpture like Tra-la-la and its Brancusi-like slenderness, resorting neither to pile-ups nor blocks. Phillip King’s and Anthony Caro’s works from the 60s set the new rules of sculpture. We could talk about many of them in length. Slant, Slit, and Nile... which repetition of assembled folded steel panels alter the plan of their horizontal succession while underlining their elevation and floor base. Sometimes, their alternating colors, for example white/red, guides the viewer’s pace. The latter is invited to “walk along”, stroll, and colorfully walk, to stop and go. Here, sculpture and nature collide. The same goes for Green Streamer, 1974, and its play on folding and unfolding, anticipating a possible horizontal extension of the assemblage... 

At the threshold of the 1970s, the main determining features of Phillip King’s art seemed well established, even if he continued to call them into question and “reshuffle” the cards. The most remarkable of these main features was rooted in a dialectic specific to an English art often made by non-English artists- it was Phillip King who first noticed it about himself- who liked to emphasize their own isolation, and go back and forth between sculpture -in the sense given to painting by Clement Greenberg- and statues. But it is another story... 

Here, a little reminder might be necessary. Phillip King has always introduced unexpected developments to the main features that structured his experiments. I won’t go into it in too many details, even though many series of works deserve to be considered with the utmost attention. I am thinking of very architectural and totemic aluminum sculptures like Diamond, 1973, but also of brutalist works, deliberately unsophisticated and rough, made of barely prepared, unsquared blocks of assembled wood, slates, and heavy steel panels like Within, 1978-1979. Such pieces put emphasis on the mass and weight of their materials. After that, King produced bronze sculptures, as well as somewhat surrealist figurative works evocative of Chirico and the Italian Novencencis,’s juxtapositions of “metaphysical” objects. But the artist kept using steel and fiberglass. He also used resins in his models, and even polyurethane for very heavy pieces like Watching Green, 1993-1994. 

Very quickly though, King returned to color, which reintroduced a more intense and vibrant polychromatic dimension to his work, visible in the late production shown in this exhibition, such as Colour on Fire, 2017, which astonishing materiality is a mix of polyurethane and polycarbonate. In this work, two square blocks frame two perforated panels, one erected, and the other bent over one of the supporting blocks, like a piece of softening cheese. The installation of such work almost requires a closed and brightly colored space. Statuary and sculpture here collide into both serious and ironical commemorative monumentality. King’s quest for monumentality is patent in most of the “models” shown in the exhibition we are holding in our Luxembourg showroom. A piece like Rapanui Queen, 2019, is remarkable in that regard. Viewed upfront, we see three shapes entangled: one, minimalist, looks like the door frame of an empty mastaba, while the other two are more abstractly anthropomorphic. In front of such a piece, we cannot but think of Max Ernst’s and Henry Moore’s frontal figure associations. But, here, they take on a totemic status thanks to their polychromy... 

It is worth noting that King’s late works have parted with paper-folding and unfolding, in which we can sense a surprising propensity to open architecture. They could bring to mind some speculations of Francisco di Giorgio Martini, as well as ruins -beautifully renovated and restored ruins. As if waiting for the latent rebirth promised by a sculpture endlessly renewed by its “modernist” projection. Like the displays of Carthage’s vestiges alluded to in Declaration, and even more so in Span. But then, we have to suggest than Span, 1967 – because it was conceived as an installation, like many of Phillip King’s pieces - evoke prehistorical standing stones, and the enigmatic logic of their gatherings -in Stonehenge and Avebury, Dorset- which fascinated Paul Nash. However, Phillip King never succumbed to melancholic dereliction. He kept away from it, but these prehistorical settlements might have given him the basis of the existential presence of his sculptural statues For ever Now. 

Bernard Ceysson

Ceysson & Bénétière