Leon Underwood
The Pursuit of Ideas - 1960
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Bronze
Signed and numbered II from the edition of 2 casts
124 x 180 cm (inches: 48¾ x 70¾.)
Commissioned by London County Council in 1960 for the Hilgrove Estate, Finchley Road, London.
Literature: Leon Underwood by Christopher Neve, Thames & Hudson, 1974, Cat No 162 (illustrated p.205)
The Sculpture of Leon Underwood by Ben Whitworth, The Henry Moore Foundation/Lund Humphries, 2000, Cat No 182
Exhibited: Hammersmith Open 1971, Cat No 237
Extract from: Leon Underwood by Christopher Neve, Thames & Hudson, 1974, p.204:
"Fortunately, as a commission, the Hilgrove Estate bronze is in line with Underwood's own work of the early 1960s and sprang directly from it, with correspondingly happier results. It continues, on a large scale than usual, his investigation of weightlessness in metal sculpture, with a group of two running figures, six feet wide and 4 ft 6 in. high, set on a Brescia marble column nine feet tall which began shell-pink but has weathered and oxidized to blue-green. It stands on a lawn among pleasant trees, of which the branches complement its spiky stick-like silhouette in winter, overlooked by a housing estate of tall blocks by Louis de Soisson that range downhill on a sloping site from Finchley Road. Commissioned in 1960 on the recommendation of the Arts Council, The Pursuit of Ideas vividly symbolizes the way in which thought develops by ratiocination, one line of reasoning linked to, and leading to, another - not perhaps, for Underwood's purposes, so much by firm logic as by leaps of the imagination. He would say that ideas run after one another to propagate, to breed others.
The lateral movement is further emphasized in the original maquette by an undulating horizontal line cut in the base, but it remains a dynamic sideways and upwards drift even when mounted on the fierce vertical of a column. The weighlessness is achieved very skilfully by using the leading foot of the front figure as a pivot to take the balance of the second by linking its legs, piercing them at calf and thigh. To keep the weight forward and to distribute it symmetrically above the pivot, the back figure overlaps the front and both their arms are elongated forwards. This in turn results in a most effective purely sculptural consideration which is the play of space between the two, the underside of the top figure opened-out to accommodate the curved back of the one below, a formal exercise that gains from the piece being above head height, and which adds to its interest from back and front in what would otherwise be a design consisting of only two sides.
The fact that this was comparatively strong meat for a new housing development led to a certain amount of criticism of the LCC for failing to spend the money on something more useful, like a children's playground, but a cartoon in Punch in January 1964 quickly puts this into perspective by showing Underwood's sculpture in use as a climbing frame.
Significant subject matter, like Ideas, combined with just such inventive solutions to the problems of defying gravity in bronze are typical of the late work. It has thrived on Underwood's home ground and made only periodic appearances in public, and the comparative failure of some of those works commissioned specifically for public consumption should not be allowed to detract from its importance."
Extract from Leon Underwood by Christopher Neve, Thames and Hudson, 1974, p.204.
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