Kenneth Armitage

Kenneth Armitage, sculptor: born Leeds 18 July 1916; Head of Sculpture Department, Bath Academy of Art 1946-56; Gregory Fellow in Sculpture, Leeds University 1953-56; CBE 1969; RA 1994; married 1940 Joan Moore (died 1996); died London 22 January 2002.

Kenneth Armitage in some ways resembled the painter Gulley Jimson in Joyce Cary's novel The Horse's Mouth – his art overrode almost everything else in his life. Armitage's moods swung from thunder to geniality, provocation to glee, and in as many seconds. But always, underlying the emotion of the moment, was his enduring passion for art, firing an intense creative energy and a fiercely enquiring mind.

He loved to learn, and his studio table was always piled high with his own and library books – on scientific discovery, space exploration, engineering, mythology, rocks and standing stones. He embraced ideas from the pursuit of the human genome project to belief in the Dagda of Irish myth with childlike enthusiasm. He loathed political correctness, made friends and enemies galore and was a constant and ardent admirer of the female form.

While his mother's Irish connections would always be a strong influence, he was born and schooled on the outskirts of Leeds and became part of the Yorkshire tradition of monumental sculptors – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Damien Hirst. One of Armitage's schoolteachers, Foxy Walker, persuaded his mother to let him take up the arts, for which he remained ever thankful. So he spent the 1930s at art school in Leeds and at the Slade, half a dozen years in the Royal Artillery over the Second World War, and roughly the same at the School of Art in Bath and Corsham up to the early 1950s. As a sculptor he started as a carver, but soon became a modeller and caster.

Armitage brought humour and a certain dancing movement to the works of the post-Moore generation of British sculptors. That new wave – Bernard Meadows, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Robert Adams, and Armitage himself – were launched into fame abruptly by their sell-out success with the British pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale, at that time a central event in the arts calendar.

The originality of Armitage's work was particularly appreciated in his major bronze groups. The earliest of these dated from his time teaching at Corsham – Linked Figures (1949) and People in the Wind (1950, the most famous of his pieces, both at maquette size and later in a larger form). The series of groups continued with Friends Walking (1952), Children Playing (1953), Diarchy and Triarchy (1957-60) and others.

By 1960, advised by the Gimpel Fils gallery, Armitage was selling his works, large and small, in the United States, Japan, Venezuela and other parts of the world. Then, his spirit always tending to the lone-wolf, he diverted from what the critics and the major buying public wanted. His tall bronze standing slabs, usually named Pandarus, with projecting funnels, shelves and dramatically reaching arms (partly inspired by a time spent in the dense Venezuelan jungle) were less well received and understood. But they continued until about 1970. His own interpretation was that they were about communication (trumpets out of orthostats) and the nature of cast bronze itself (he did everything possible in their making himself and unusually made only one of each).

I met Kenneth Armitage in 1980, when his second flowering was just starting, though his fame of the 1950s was much faded. In a book I had written on Arts and Crafts architecture, I had complained of the state of the roof of his house at 22 Avonmore Road, Kensington, built in 1888 by the talented arts and crafts architect, J.M. Maclaren, for a Victorian monumental sculptor, hence the enormous doors on to the street.

Happening to read my book, Armitage blued his next major fee on good repairs and wrote, somewhat indignantly, inviting me to come for a drink and inspect the result. By then I was writing about standing stone monuments and that evening, over his diminishing bottle of whisky, we made plans for expeditions.

We would go to Newgrange in Ireland, the stone rings and mounds in Orkney, the Carnac standing-stone alignments in Brittany and the stripped limestone crags of the Burren in County Clare, western Ireland, which he particularly wanted to see again for inspiration and to show to me and my wife Zandria. During the following decade we went together to all these places, all of us excited by the shapes and the sense of history, but Kenneth in particular, stubborn as a "billy goat gruff" while stiffly clambering over rocks and mounds. The Burren inspired many of his best etchings and he never lost his tendency to equate the human figure with the standing stone and vice versa.

In the meantime, his sculpture was flowering anew from the late 1970s onwards. The work of this renaissance is entirely different from the products of the 1950s and continues to divide critics. His 1970s work produced small white or bronze human figures of much humour and delight but little of monumentality and grandeur. In 1978-85 the enormous old oak trees in Richmond Park seized Armitage's imagination and inspired him to a series of bronzes, that led to the 18ft-high version commissioned and installed in 1986 in the garden of the British Embassy in Brazil.

Next, a competition design (not executed) for Wells Cathedral was the forerunner of a sequence of simplified thrones ("chairs" he called them) from which noble human faces and limbs emerge. Armitage here was clearly building on features of his earlier work, and the same is true of the next area he explored – enigmatic couples of full-size, but anonymous, human figures, apparently meditating on their relationships despite the physical barriers between them. Smooth experimental bronzes, often white or silvery, replaced the highly textured surfaces in some cases.

Many of the pieces of the 1990s have flattened forms which are descended from those of his early work, but not all. The last major piece, People Walking, consisted of very rounded legs stepping forward. To me, these last works are undeniably vital and thought-provoking.

During the last year and more before his death, Armitage was fortunate to have the enthusiastic assistance of a friend who was also a sculptor, Dick Budden, in enlarging his maquettes to monumental size. Appropriately, one of these, Both Arms, has been purchased by his native city, Leeds, to be the centrepiece of its new Millennium Square, to be followed before long by a major Armitage retrospective exhibition in the City Gallery. Londoners must hope that the Tate will also give people the opportunity to compare Armitage 1950s with Armitage 2000 soon.

Alastair Service