Dennis Williams
Gone but not forgotten
But now for a bit of arty stuff...not my favourite sculptor perhaps, but a famous Brummie Old Boy...and mixed with some pretty talented people in the art world on his travels....
Raymond Grieg Mason trained at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts under William Bloye, the Royal College of Art (for one term), and Slade School of Art. He lived and worked in Paris beginning in 1946. He was a close friend of the late Nobel Prize winning scientist Maurice Wilkins. He is perhaps best known for his sculptures of tightly packed people made from clay, with works on McGill College Avenue in Montreal; the Tuileries, Paris; Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; and Madison Avenue, New York. His controversial 1991 work, Forward! in Birmingham's Centenary Square was destroyed by arson on 17 April 2003. The statue carried a reference to DNA ("the secret of life") in connection with New Zealander Maurice Wilkins, who came to Brum aged 6, and who eventually worked on the unravelling of DNA project at the University of Birmingham with huge and very significant success.
Raymond was born on March 2 1922 in Birmingham to a Scottish motor-mechanic and a publican's daughter. He was educated at George Dixon secondary school before winning a scholarship to Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts. Called up in 1939, he joined the Navy but was invalided out in 1941. He won a painting scholarship to the Royal College of Art before returning, the following year, to Birmingham, where he earned a living producing portraits.
After being evacuated to Oxford he met Eduardo Paolozzi, then turned to sculpture, which he studied at the Slade at war's end. Keen to learn about his new medium, he visited Henry Moore in Hampstead; in 1946, he left for Paris, which was to become home for the rest of his life.
For a couple of years Mason lived a makeshift existence. Then he met Alberto Giacometti, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose example encouraged him to forsake abstract for figurative work. In 1952 Mason produced Man in Street – a low relief of a man's head in front of a building – which he considered the starting point of his career as a professional artist: "To get a spark, one thing has to strike another," he said. "So I sculpted the head and straightaway I put the façade of a house behind it. And that's how it started."
It was also at this time that Mason first met Picasso. This was in the south of France, where Mason was later to acquire a small farmhouse. He also became friendly with Francis Bacon, and Mason's entry into Paris' celebrated cultural milieu was completed in 1955, when the artist Balthus introduced him to a salon whose members included Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Poulenc and Jacques Prévert.
He was a welcome addition to the scene. A great storyteller, Mason was unsurpassed in the art of the anecdote. Drawing in the Musée Rodin when it was closed to the public, he once found his sketches being assessed by Paul Newman, who had arrived in a limousine for a four-hour private visit. Mason recalled that Newman – no doubt fearful of being quoted – refused to issue any utterance in their conversation apart from "uh-huh".
On another occasion, while dining at Le Grand Véfour, Mason found himself at a table next to Bill Clinton, with whom he immediately struck up a brief but laughter-filled acquaintance.
Once Mason was drawing his own sculpture, The Crowd, in the Tuileries Gardens. A stranger watched him for a long time in silence and eventually remarked: "You draw really well. But why are you drawing that sh-t?"
Mason gradually established an international reputation, chiefly through his monumental works. He joined successively the galleries of Claude Bernard in Paris and Pierre Matisse in New York, then the Marlborough Gallery in New York and London; and large, well-attended retrospectives were held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Mason's originality is less evident than that of Moore or Giacometti, but in work like The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, 28 February 1969, with its mastery and exuberant treatment of both the grave and the droll, it may prove as lasting. This piece, dense in its vision of the world's plenty, moves from level to level of a midwinter night's dream, ordering the procession of sad but rapt market workers; a lovers' kiss; a Harlequin; an offering to the night sky of a crate of oranges; and, rather than a Christ, a market gardener in majesty.
A powerful baritone (he would listen to opera, especially Verdi, while working on his larger pieces), Mason remained quintessentially English, with his Church shoes and sports jacket from the Old England store in Paris.
That was also true in a more inward sense, through his memory and imagination permeated by the Birmingham of his childhood, by its industrial architecture, its deep-red brick complementing the green of the countryside, its sense of work and of purpose, and above all its workers and its crowds.
Championed by André Malraux, and photographed several times by his friend Cartier-Bresson, Mason was appointed OBE and was made an Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Yet he remained at once famous and hardly known, admired by artists whom the public admire and ignored by most critics, with certain of his best works only to be seen in his flat on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince.
His monument to Birmingham, Forward, installed in Centenary Square and inaugurated by the Queen in 1991, was destroyed by vandals in 2003.
Raymond Grieg Mason trained at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts under William Bloye, the Royal College of Art (for one term), and Slade School of Art. He lived and worked in Paris beginning in 1946. He was a close friend of the late Nobel Prize winning scientist Maurice Wilkins. He is perhaps best known for his sculptures of tightly packed people made from clay, with works on McGill College Avenue in Montreal; the Tuileries, Paris; Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; and Madison Avenue, New York. His controversial 1991 work, Forward! in Birmingham's Centenary Square was destroyed by arson on 17 April 2003. The statue carried a reference to DNA ("the secret of life") in connection with New Zealander Maurice Wilkins, who came to Brum aged 6, and who eventually worked on the unravelling of DNA project at the University of Birmingham with huge and very significant success.
Raymond was born on March 2 1922 in Birmingham to a Scottish motor-mechanic and a publican's daughter. He was educated at George Dixon secondary school before winning a scholarship to Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts. Called up in 1939, he joined the Navy but was invalided out in 1941. He won a painting scholarship to the Royal College of Art before returning, the following year, to Birmingham, where he earned a living producing portraits.
After being evacuated to Oxford he met Eduardo Paolozzi, then turned to sculpture, which he studied at the Slade at war's end. Keen to learn about his new medium, he visited Henry Moore in Hampstead; in 1946, he left for Paris, which was to become home for the rest of his life.
For a couple of years Mason lived a makeshift existence. Then he met Alberto Giacometti, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and whose example encouraged him to forsake abstract for figurative work. In 1952 Mason produced Man in Street – a low relief of a man's head in front of a building – which he considered the starting point of his career as a professional artist: "To get a spark, one thing has to strike another," he said. "So I sculpted the head and straightaway I put the façade of a house behind it. And that's how it started."
It was also at this time that Mason first met Picasso. This was in the south of France, where Mason was later to acquire a small farmhouse. He also became friendly with Francis Bacon, and Mason's entry into Paris' celebrated cultural milieu was completed in 1955, when the artist Balthus introduced him to a salon whose members included Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Poulenc and Jacques Prévert.
He was a welcome addition to the scene. A great storyteller, Mason was unsurpassed in the art of the anecdote. Drawing in the Musée Rodin when it was closed to the public, he once found his sketches being assessed by Paul Newman, who had arrived in a limousine for a four-hour private visit. Mason recalled that Newman – no doubt fearful of being quoted – refused to issue any utterance in their conversation apart from "uh-huh".
On another occasion, while dining at Le Grand Véfour, Mason found himself at a table next to Bill Clinton, with whom he immediately struck up a brief but laughter-filled acquaintance.
Once Mason was drawing his own sculpture, The Crowd, in the Tuileries Gardens. A stranger watched him for a long time in silence and eventually remarked: "You draw really well. But why are you drawing that sh-t?"
Mason gradually established an international reputation, chiefly through his monumental works. He joined successively the galleries of Claude Bernard in Paris and Pierre Matisse in New York, then the Marlborough Gallery in New York and London; and large, well-attended retrospectives were held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Mason's originality is less evident than that of Moore or Giacometti, but in work like The Departure of Fruit and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris, 28 February 1969, with its mastery and exuberant treatment of both the grave and the droll, it may prove as lasting. This piece, dense in its vision of the world's plenty, moves from level to level of a midwinter night's dream, ordering the procession of sad but rapt market workers; a lovers' kiss; a Harlequin; an offering to the night sky of a crate of oranges; and, rather than a Christ, a market gardener in majesty.
A powerful baritone (he would listen to opera, especially Verdi, while working on his larger pieces), Mason remained quintessentially English, with his Church shoes and sports jacket from the Old England store in Paris.
That was also true in a more inward sense, through his memory and imagination permeated by the Birmingham of his childhood, by its industrial architecture, its deep-red brick complementing the green of the countryside, its sense of work and of purpose, and above all its workers and its crowds.
Championed by André Malraux, and photographed several times by his friend Cartier-Bresson, Mason was appointed OBE and was made an Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Yet he remained at once famous and hardly known, admired by artists whom the public admire and ignored by most critics, with certain of his best works only to be seen in his flat on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince.
His monument to Birmingham, Forward, installed in Centenary Square and inaugurated by the Queen in 1991, was destroyed by vandals in 2003.
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