Art: Yorkshire Cradle

In all of England’s green and pleasant land, few areas are more blighted than Yorkshire’s grim and dour West Riding, with its blackened industrial valleys forested with smokestacks, jug-shaped cooling towers, sooty spires and reeking slag heaps. Yet last week, as the Leeds City Art Gallery staged a five-man, 58-piece sculpture show of Yorkshire’s native sons, it became abundantly clear that this area of bleak moors is the cradle of Britain’s sculpture renaissance.

Most famed are Henry Moore, 60, the first major sculptor Britain has produced in centuries, and Barbara Hepworth, 55, whose pebble-smooth, elegantly shaped forms echo the thin abstractions of her former husband, Painter Ben Nicholson. Approaching fame is Ralph Brown, 30, who aims in roughhewn style at creating images that “parallel the personality of the people,” and Leslie Thornton, 33, a welder of bronze cages in which tortured figures seem suspended or crucified.

Best of the middle generation is tousle-haired, big-beaked Kenneth Armitage, 42, already hailed by the New Statesman as “our most considerable sculptor since Moore.” Armitage has long since left Yorkshire and set up his studio in London, but he admits that, once Yorkshire’s industrial grimness gets under the skin, it cannot be washed off. Says he: “There’s a hardness, a discreetness; everything is somehow bitten off and sharp, like Greece, but of course without the warmth of Greece.”

Much the same could be said of Armitage’s own work. Barrel-bodied shapes such as his Standing Figure (see cut), with stiff, sticklike legs and doorknob heads, could have been dug out of a slag pile or found beneath Pompeii buried in volcanic ash. They represent a recent departure for Armitage, who since 1952 has moved away from his flat, screenlike groupings, created figures in the round that won him a $1,000 sculptor’s award at this year’s Venice Biennale.

But Yorkshire was not impressed with the fame gained by its native sons in the outside world. Most Yorkshiremen stared stonily at the works, pronounced them “poozling” and just plain “dommed silly.” Said one housewife: “Eee-ee. Did you ever? I wouldn’t even have that in our Nellie’s attic.” Armitage was not surprised. Said he: “The social atmosphere is so puritan and esthetically barren that any artist who fights his way to any kind of recognition there is bound to do all right in the rest of the world.”