Frank Owen Dobson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 18 November 1886 (1886-11-18) London, England |
| Died | 22 July 1963(1963-07-22) (aged 76) Princess Beatrice Hospital London |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | |
| Known for | sculpture,drawing |
Frank Owen DobsonCBERA (18 November 1886 – 22 July 1963) was a British artist and sculptor[1] and during his time was considered one of the best sculptors in Europe.[2] He was a contemporary ofJacob Epstein andHenry Moore.
Dobson is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century.[3]
Dobson was born in central London and grew up inClerkenwell. His mother was Alice Mary Owen and his father, who was also named Frank Dobson, was a commercial artist who specialized in bird and flower designs for greeting card companies. The younger Dobson attended school inForest Gate and then inHarrow.[4] When his father died in 1900, the fourteen year old Dobson was sent to live with an aunt in Hastings. There he attended evening classes at theHastings School of Art and was then trained as an apprentice with SirWilliam Reynolds-Stephens.[5] After eighteen months in Reynolds-Stephen's studio, Dobson moved to Devon and then to Cornwall where he lived, for two years, by selling landscape paintings.[6] In 1906 he obtained a scholarship to study at the art institute inHospitalfield House in Arbroath and studied there for four years.[4] From 1910 to 1912 Dobson attended theCity and Guilds of London Art School inKennington, after which he returned to Cornwall. In Newlyn, he metAugustus John who used his influence and contacts to enable Dobson to stage a one-man show at theChenil Gallery in London in 1914.[4] In, or around, 1915 Dobson created his first sculpture, a small piece in wood.[6]
In 1915, during theFirst World War, Dobson enlisted in TheArtists Rifles and served in France from October 1916 as a Lieutenant with the 5thBorder Regiment. In January 1917 he developed a duodenal ulcer and returned to England. In April 1918 he married Cordelia Clara Tregurtha, whom he had first met in Newlyn. Dobson was formally invalided out of the Army in November 1918 and by then had already submitted several drawings to theBritish War Memorials Committee and was commissioned to paint a barrage balloon site on theThames estuary. The Air Force representatives on the Committee did not approve of the picture and Dobson did not receive any further official commissions.[7][8] Dobson set up a studio in the Tregurtha family home in Newlyn but towards the end of the war he took a studio inManresa Road in Chelsea and would live there until the start of the Second World War.[4][6]
Dobson began as a painter, and his early work was influenced bycubism,vorticism, andfuturism. AfterWorld War I, however, he turned increasingly toward sculpture in a more or lessrealist style. Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s he built a reputation as an outstanding sculptor and was among the first in Britain to prefer direct carving of the material rather than modelling amaquette first.[9] The simplified forms and flowing lines of much of his sculptures, particularly his female nudes, showed the influence of African art.[10]
Throughout the 1920s Dobson focused increasingly on sculpture, exhibited work in several influential exhibitions and played a leading role in a number of artistic groups. He was the only sculptor to take part in the 1920Group X exhibition.[11] Dobson was a founding member of the London Artists Association and spent three years as President of theLondon Group between 1923 and 1927. He made bronze portraits of several public figures. At the Group X exhibition he exhibited two sculptures and studies ofBen Nicholson and his bronze head ofH. H. Asquith was shown at the Leicester Galleries in late 1921.[4] Other subjects includedOsbert Sitwell,[12]Lydia Lopokova andTallulah Bankhead. Dobson exhibited at theVenice Biennale in both 1924 and in 1926, was featured in the 1925 Tri-National Exhibition which visited London, Paris and New York and was also included in the 1926 European artists exhibition that toured America and Canada. In March 1927 he had his first major one-man exhibition when the Leicester Galleries exhibited twenty-three of his sculptures and several bronzes.[4]
In 1930 theTate purchased a larger-than-life sculpture from Dobson and erected it outside the gallery onMillbank. During the early 1930s Dobson continued to receive portrait commissions, most notably for SirEdward Marsh and the actressMargaret Rawlings. Dobson worked in other media including textiles and silver, as well. His silver gilt cup,Calix Majestatis, to mark the coronation ofGeorge VI andQueen Elizabeth is now in theRoyal Collection.[4] During 1933 Dobson fractured his left arm which greatly limited his ability for heavy carving and his last monumental stone carving was to bePax, which was first shown at the London Group in 1935.[citation needed]
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At the start of World War Two, Dobson and his second wife [Caroline] Mary Bussell, whom he had married in 1931,[13][14] moved to Bristol, where a large retrospective of his work was held in March 1940. Dobson lived in the city throughout theBristol Blitz and like several other artists painted the ruins of churches destroyed in the bombing.[15] Dobson contacted theWar Artists' Advisory Committee and offered his services as both a painter and sculptor.[16] WAAC were reluctant to offer sculpture commissions but eventually did offer Dobson a short-term contract for two portrait busts of Naval personnel. Later WAAC commissioned some paintings, including one of workers arriving for work at a factory that had been relocated to a tunnel.[17]
Dobson was appointed head of sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1946, a post he held until his retirement in 1953. For theFestival of Britain site on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951, Dobson createdLondon Pride. The sculpture was originally exhibited as a plaster cast but was later, after Dobson died, cast as a bronze and placed in front of theRoyal National Theatre in 1987. Among his last commissions were a bronze head of SirThomas Lipton and the zodiac clock on the exterior wall ofBracken House in London.[4]
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Dobson died in 1963 and his ashes were scattered in the Thames.
In 1995 the art criticBrian Sewell recalled the great loss of much of Dobson's work after his death: "After his death, his widow asked me to help her clear the studio at Stamford Bridge, and I was appalled at the destruction that she wrought, smashing to smithereens small clay and terracotta models, tearing fine drawings in red and black chalk, hundreds of them, buring [sic?] the fragments in a dustbin, all because the subjects were erotic. I was allowed to save pastel drawings of exotic and rare birds, and watercolours of farmyards and a pastoral life long gone, but for the figures engaged in sexual congress, face to face, head to toe and doggy style as explicit as any by his old friendEric Gill, Mrs Dobson would accept no plea that they were beautiful, no argument that they were fired by a quality not to be found in the "pure essence" of the torsos that survive, and like a ferociously implacable angel at the Last Judgment, she bent to the business of destruction."[18]
Frank Dobson Square was constructed by London County Council in 1963, the year of Dobson's death to commemorate his life and work. The centrepiece of the square was theWoman and Fish fountain, a sculpture designed and completed by Dobson in 1951.
While Dobson was one of the most esteemed artists of his time, after his death his reputation declined with the move towardspostmodernism andconceptual art. However, in recent years a revival has begun.
