Black Crab by Bernard Meadows
1951-2, Bronze, 425 x 340 x 242 mm
Tate Collection
From Meadows’ 2005 obituary in The Telegraph:
Bernard Meadows struggled free of the overwhelming influence of Henry Moore, whose studio assistant he had been, to become a leading figure in the surge of British sculpture in the immediate post-war era and an apostle of a movement popularly known as “the geometry of fear”.
Meadows first attracted international attention at the 1952 Venice Biennale, at which the British pavilion housed an exhibition of New Aspects of British Sculpture. There, works by Meadows, alongside others by Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, were immediately interpreted as a new generation’s challenge to Moore’s dominance of the artistic scene.
In his catalogue essay, Herbert Read suggested that the young sculptors exhibited an Oedipal rivalry to Moore, who nevertheless remained father to them all. With their spiky, disturbing depictions, contrasting with Moore’s smooth, rounded forms, they became known as the “geometry of fear” sculptors, after a phrase of Read’s, who wrote of the “iconography of despair, or of defiance” of this angst-ridden younger generation: “Here are images of flight,” he declared, “of ragged claws `scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.”
Read’s description was particularly apposite to Meadows, who sought to convey emotions through the frightened, and often frightening, depiction of animals. He had begun experimenting with images of crabs, cockerels and other birds in an attempt to break away from Moore’s humanism. His painful, twisted figures with their jagged, rough surfaces seemed obsessed by menace, injury and a sense of impending catastrophe, and they had more in common with Francis Bacon’s screaming popes than Moore’s placid forms.
From the British Council in Venice:
It looks prehistoric, and evil; it makes the viewer imagine they’re looking at the cockroachy last survivor of an apocalypse. In a 2009 display at the Tate, its claws had scratched some of the paint from the display cabinet floor. The unwieldy construction on top of the claws could be a lacerated, fleshless memory of a screaming face, with two little fangs left at the bottom of the smashed-out jaw. Mankind seems to be in the past, and the bony, alien monster is in the present.
Like the H-bomb, the image was a legacy of World War II; what [Herbert] Read called a ‘Geometry of Fear’. Meadows spent a lot of his time in the RAF observing giant crabs in the Indian Ocean’s Cocos Islands, and hatching a comparison with people: ugly, fearsome armour hiding a soft, fearful inside.
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