WHEN ATTITUDE OFFENDS FORM.
In 1991, after ‘retiring from trade’ as Flanagan put it, he commissioned me to find a book entitled “A Color Notation” written in 1905 by Albert Munsell who lived in Massachusetts. This system of defining color by hue, value and chroma Munsell invented so he and his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson who lived in California, could accurately communicate in their letters, the different variations of blue, between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
In 1957 Flanagan encountered the book while a young student at Birmingham college of Art and built the ‘three dimensional color castle’ included in the edition. It was his first introduction to sculpture.
Flanagan’s posthumous exhibition at Tate Britain entitled: “Early Works 1965 -82” is on show until January. Much of the exhibition concentrates on the ‘conceptual Sculpture’ produced at St Martin’s from 1965 – 1970. His inventive forms created by using rope, sacks, light, shadow, hessian and reflection are whimsical, jocular, revolutionary sculptures. There is no doubt that Flanagan’ s experimentation with ‘Space’, paved the way for the likes of Tracey Emin to make her ‘Bed’, or Damien Hirst to pickle his ‘Shark’ and yet the underlying influence of Munsell is not recognized by any, other than the Artist.
Ironically, St Martin’s college of Art where these works were created has just relocated to Kings Cross. Its curriculum has also altered proportionately, with ‘Fashion’ rather than ‘Art’, its fulcrum. It is a form of creativity like Flanagan’s in the 1960’s, awash with the influence of Munsell’s color system.
In 1971 Flanagan produced an etching entitled “When Attitude Offends Form,” as an adieu to conceptualism. He realized, partly through his ‘Jarryesque’ observations the limitation of being stuck in a genre. There are several examples of his 70’s experimentation with more traditional sculpture in one room at the Tate, that reflects this eight-year search for a ‘form’.
Often, during my close association with Flanagan from 1986 till his death, he would be met by the inevitable question:
“Why the Hare?”
The answer was always silence.
Many reviews of this show infer that Flanagan’s metamorphism; form wise, from experimentation to traditional bronze and working with a Foundry was not a sculptural evolvement.
Michael Glover for instance, in the Independent asks the question:
“Was there a Barry Flanagan before he became far too besotted by the motif of the hare?”
Like other critics he concludes that Flanagan one day stumbled on a book by Evans and Thomas entitled: “The Leaping Hare” and this inspired his later works. There are even insinuations that his motivation were financial rather than artistic, while simultaneously inferring his work as a student at St Martin’s was the peak of his creativity.
In 1996 Flanagan ‘invited’ me to create a digital archive of his drawings, etchings and linocuts. It was evident even to a ‘layman’ such as myself that the exquisite finesse of his hand is on a par with Matisse and Picasso. To draw on a ‘Daler Notebook’ in fountain pen, a ‘Hare’ that can be increased in proportion enough to grace the space of Park Avenue, is an immense achievement far beyond his respected experimentation in the 1960’s and should be recognized as such.
I agree with Jackie Wallschlager who entitled her review in the ‘Financial Times’ – ‘A Hare Brained Omission.’ To present the highlight of his career to be his student days is slightly derogatory to the greatness of Flanagan as a complete artist.
Wallschlager wisely concludes
“How canny of Flanagan to find a way of re-injecting human values into the medium (the Hare); how dim of concept-fixated Tate to miss the point.”
Or as Flanagan dictated to me once:
“Kenneth Armitage described the physical world as either horizontally or vertically orientated, which I absorbed in my youth.
“Thought in Sculpture and he is a fundamental thinker.
“I’ve made a success out of a Hare that thought, next to a thinker…Stick with it Sybil!””
In his post ‘Hare’ days Flanagan became slightly reclusive and eccentric. He absorbed certain features of his chosen subject. He hated openings and shunned any form of publicity or recognition, for he was protective of his ‘Art’ and despite being an enigma, his reputation ranks alongside the greatest Sculptors of the twentieth century.
Flanagan’s work bears comparison to the great surrealists such as Miro and Tapies. His bronzes match the creations of Calder or Frink and supersede poetically and conceptually, both Moore and Hepworth. In terms of the late twentieth century in the USA, only Louise Bourgeois, can be mentioned, sculpturally, in the same breath.
Perhaps it might be fitting to present his work in its entirety for there is a mystery to his evolvement as a Sculptor that is available to anyone who approaches his work. There is no intellectual barrier to his Hares just a need for a mutual emotional exchange. A gentle handshake as one of his sculptures depicts available after life, as well as in it.
Flanagan was oblique, obscure, loyal and diffident and his motivation for making Hares had as little to do with making money as Munsell’s system of color notation, had to do with ‘make up’ or ‘fashion’. Flanagan like Munsell was motivated by a wish to communicate through art. How the resonance of this practice manifests, monetarily or artistically, is not the responsibility of its creator
