Phillip King
Perennially inventive ‘New Generation’ British sculptor and former President of the Royal Academy
PHILLIP KING, who has died aged 87, was considered one of the best and most inventive of British sculptors but, unlike his friend and one-time tutor Sir Anthony Caro, never became a household name, partly because his work evolved constantly, making him difficult to pigeonhole.
His most famous works were made in the 1960s, when he began to experiment with unconventional materials – fibreglass, resin, steel sheet – and, influenced by Matisse, to work in bright colours. Early conical sculptures in pinks and purples, such as Rosebud (1962) and Genghis Khan (1963), abstract but rooted in organic form, were hailed as ground-breaking and established King as a key figure in the “New Generation” movement that injected life into British postwar sculpture.
King’s work was acquired by the major museums: The Tate purchased Genghis Khan, while Rosebud was snapped up by the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the personal instigation of its founding director Alfred Barr.
King represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968 and later had retrospectives at the Hayward in 1981 and at the Tate in 2015. In 1997 he became only the second British sculptor, after Henry Moore, to have a major retrospective at Forte Belvedere in Florence.
He taught for most of his career, first at St Martin’s School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art, where he was Professor of Sculpture throughout the 1980s. During the 1990s he was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools and served as President of the Academy itself from 1999 to 2004.
Many artists are wary of moving on from what brought them initial acclaim, but King was always experimenting with new materials and developing new ideas, his works ranging from the light and lyrical to smooth and monumental, and from the small and intimate to the craggy and dark. “With his sculptures we now have to begin from the beginning, every time,” complained a critic, “and not everyone cares to do that much work.”
“My primary focus is always on what I am doing today,” King explained on the eve of his Tate retrospective. Reacquainting himself with his work from the 1960s, he said, was like “seeing someone again you were once in love with. Do you deny that love existed just because you have moved on to somebody else? No, you don’t. After a time you accept it as part of a longer story.”
Phillip King was born on May 1 1934 in Tunis, French Tunisia, where his British father ran a trading company. His mother was French. The family returned to Britain just after the war (“My father was very nearly shot as a spy, perhaps because he was a spy”).
Though Phillip could always draw well and recalled making small objects from clay he found on the beach as a small child, art was not encouraged at Mill Hill School and in any case he was more interested in playing rugby.
It was during National Service in the Army that he “discovered” sculpture. As a French-speaker he had been posted to Paris to work as a member of a general’s staff. But the post had gone to somebody else, so he found himself with time on his hands.
He began to make drawings of sculptures at the Louvre: “I found that while I could sense there were certain forms within the marble, no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t see them.” When he touched the sculptures, however, he could feel the forms he had sensed: “It made me think for the first time about sculpture being the art of the invisible; it was quite a discovery.”
Returning to Britain, King studied Modern Languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but devoted his energies to sculpture, producing a series of small clay works that were exhibited and sold well.
After graduating in 1957 he enrolled at St Martin’s where he was tutored by Anthony Caro. Caro introduced him to Henry Moore, and within a couple of years he had followed Caro to become Moore’s assistant, before returning to St Martin’s to teach.
King began as a figurative sculptor, but the art world in the late 1950s was buzzing with new ideas which, to begin with, he did not fully understand. There were two major influences which led him to abandon the figurative for the abstract: the Romanianborn sculptor Constantin Brancusi (“There was a moment of truth, in about 1958-59, when I suddenly saw what a wonderful sculptor Brancusi was”) and the American Abstract Expressionists, who “were doing things in painting that left sculpture way behind”.
In 1959, after visiting an exhibition in Germany featuring such contemporary artists as Jackson Pollock, King destroyed all his existing work and began working in a completely new style, his “Declaration” (1961), consisting of two circles, two squares and two crosses in concrete threaded on a steel bar, representing a sort of abstract manifesto.
Over the years, King worked in everything from clay, wood and plastic to steel and aluminium, and combinations thereof, to, later, Japanese paper and PVC foam. Describing himself as being in a “constant state of keeping an eye open for things that might be a trigger”, in the early 1990s he turned unexpectedly to ceramics and created a series of powerful unglazed, vessel forms which were the focus of an exhibition in 2004.
Life at St Martin’s, where he taught for many years, was not always easy, and in the late 1960s he and Caro found themselves dealing with a generation of artists – among them Gilbert & George, Barry Flanagan and Richard Long – who rebelled against the formalism they supposedly represented. “The ’60s were a very exciting time, but also very fraught,” King recalled. “At St Martin’s in ’68 and ’69, people were questioning everything so much that you couldn’t really be a teacher.” Though King was only in his mid-30s he felt that he was becoming regarded as “the establishment”.
King later endured more friction as President of the Royal Academy, a position to which he was elected to succeed Sir Philip Dowson in 1999. He had pledged that the artists, not the administrators, would run the show, but in the end proved incapable of reconciling the two sides, while under his watch the Academy was hit by financial scandal and reports of infighting. King endured the humiliation of being sent a list of all his managerial shortcomings signed by 30 academicians, and, having undergone major heart surgery in 2002, in October 2004 he resigned, citing ill health.
King, who also served at various times as trustee of the Tate and of the National Portrait Gallery, had an engaging sense of humour. “I’ve always argued that one of the attributes of sculpture was that it should be useless,” he told an interviewer before an exhibition of his work in San Antonio in 2011. But as he sat down on and leant into a work entitled No Sitting, no Leaning, he added: “I’ve begun to rethink that idea.”
King was appointed CBE in 1995, but later refused the customary knighthood when he stepped down from the RA. In 2010 he received the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
He married first, in 1957, Lilian Odelle. The marriage was dissolved and in 1988 he married, secondly, Judy Corbalis, the historical novelist and children’s writer, who survives him. A son from his first marriage predeceased him.