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Lynn Chadwick

London, England, 1914 - 2003

BiographyLynn Chadwick, a British sculptor whose expressionistic, figurative works in welded iron and bronze earned him international acclaim, died on April 25 at his home in Lypiatt Park in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

He was 88.

Mr. Chadwick came of age as an artist after World War II, when a mood of existential anxiety converged with traditions of humanistic representation and Modernist abstraction. In the 1950's he developed a spiky vocabulary of skeletal lines and rough planes organized into generalized images of people or animals that evoked feelings of pain, rage and fear.

In 1956, when he was 41 and just six years into his art career, he won first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale and, along with that award, international fame and enormous financial success.

In 1964, he was made a Commander of the British Empire.

Lynn Russell Chadwick was born in London on Nov. 24, 1914. After studies at the Merchant Taylors' School, he worked as an architectural draftsman from 1933 to 1939. He served as a pilot during World War II, and then began designing furniture, textiles and architectural projects.

He also began building mobiles similar to those by Alexander Calder, whose work was at first unknown to him. This led to his first solo exhibition, at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London in 1950.

Mr. Chadwick soon eliminated the kinetic elements of his sculpture, but continued to use construction and assemblage methods rather than carving or modeling.

His first major success came in 1953, when he was among a dozen semifinalists for the Unknown Political Prisoner International Sculpture Competition, and received an honorable mention.

In the 1960's Mr. Chadwick's work was partly eclipsed by increasingly abstract tendencies in modern sculpture, but he enjoyed a lucrative career into the 1980's.

His characteristic sculptures during this period were human figures cast in bronze. Clad in rough drapery with geometric, pyramidal heads, these works blended Surrealism, the angst of Alberto Giacometti and the monumentalism of Henry Moore.

In 1988 Mr. Chadwick was again invited to exhibit in the Venice Biennale. For the occasion he created a pair of seated figures, male and female, titled ''Back to Venice.''

Mr. Chadwick's first marriage, to Ann Second, ended in divorce. Their son, Simon, lives near Lypiatt Park. He and his second wife, Francis Jamieson, who died in 1964, had two daughters, Sarah Marchant of Oxford, England, and Sophie de Martino of France.

In addition to his son and daughters, he is survived by his third wife, Eva Reiner; their son, Daniel, of Stroud; and nine grandchildren.

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