Bernard Meadows's lifelong service to art, and particularly to sculpture, came largely at the expense of his own fame as a sculptor. After having the good fortune to work as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1930s, he was one of 12 sculptors commissioned by the Arts Council to provide a work for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

As one of the younger generation of British sculptors, he featured at the 1952 Venice Biennale. While having regular exhibitions in Britain, the Continent and the US, he pursued a parallel career as a teacher, and he was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1980.

Bernard William Meadows was born in Norwich in 1915 and educated at the City of Norwich School and then Norwich School of Art from 1934 to 1936. In early 1936 he was one of three students who were introduced to Henry Moore by the sculptor Elizabeth Raikes; the next day he received a postcard from Moore asking whether he would like to work with them.

Initially Meadows worked for Moore during school holidays, living with the Moores when they were at their house at Marley in Kent and sharing their assiduous regime. The days started at 5am with a bucket of cold water for washing — and when preparing for an exhibition they worked from 7am to 3am every day for three weeks.

Meadows carved down to within about a quarter of an inch of the final surface of the sculpture. Moore, who was 17 years older, referred to the 21-year-old Meadows as “the boy”.

For Meadows it was a matchless sculptural education, and he was able to continue studying from 1936 to 1937 at Chelsea School of Art (where he joined Moore’s modelling classes for a time), and at the Royal College of Art from 1938 to 1940.

His four years with Moore were brought to an end by the war. He served with the Royal Air Force from 1941 to 1946. Although it interrupted his training, a period of service in the Cocos Islands inspired the crab motif of his early sculptures.

Meadows returned to the Royal College of Art from 1946 to 1948. He was commissioned by the Arts Council for one of 12 pieces of sculpture for the Festival of Britain in 1951; the standing figure in elmwood which he produced was donated by the council to the Tate Gallery in 1954.

Meadows — who was also teaching at Chelsea School of Art from 1948 — had developed his own style, unaffected by Moore; and in 1952 his work was featured in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale along with others of the young generation: Adams, Armitage, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Paolozzi and Turnbull. This exhibition was widely praised, and won immediate international recognition for British sculpture collectively.

“The geometry of fear”, a phrase from Herbert Read’s catalogue introduction, was much quoted subsequently by commentators and art historians; it is poetic but imprecise, and “the exposed nerve” might better fit the mood of the work of Meadows and others during the 1950s.

The aftershock of war’s destruction, the photographs that emerged from Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz of emaciated survivors and stick-limbed corpses, the impossibility of rendering all this in human terms, the anxieties of the Cold War and nuclear threat, and the sculptural equation of the exposed wire armature of clay-built sculpture with the exposed nerve, the taut sinew and the withered muscle — all these elements contributed to the sculpture of the period.

From 1954 Meadows, like several other artists, often took the fighting cock as theme; four relief sculptures on this theme from 1958 are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, bought by the Contemporary Art Society from Meadows’s second one-man show at Gimpel Fils gallery in London (his first solo show was at this gallery in 1957). In 1955 the Arts Club of Chicago toured his work across the United States in an exhibition entitled Young British Sculptors.

In the 1960s Meadows turned from these rather expressionist bronzes to a near-abstract style that was a complete contrast. In it, rounded, almost spherical, shapes with the suggestion of organic origin were grouped together in a variety of effects which sometimes suggest the fecundity of primitive Earth-Mother or Venus sculptures or cell reproduction, or that surreal sensation of inflated limbs — “Michelin Woman” — experienced in dreams.

He was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1980.

Exhibitions of Meadows’s work followed in New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. In 1968, when Bumpus opened a new bookshop in Baker Street, a sculpture by Meadows joined one by Frederick “F. E.” McWilliam as part of the permanent display.

He served as a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission, 1971-76. In 1972, the Royal Academy’s British Sculptors exhibition devoted a room to the development of Meadows’s Help theme from a pierced sphere squeezed between two flat surfaces. Meadows was fascinated by the forms of fruit, even exhibiting casts taken straight from them. The shows continued, though René Gimpel of Gimpel Fils, his gallery for many years, thought of Meadows as “very retiring. Never one to chase the market, he was unusual among artists because he had to be coaxed into having an exhibition.”

In 1983 Henry Moore was becoming increasingly frail, and making a slow recovery from a prostate operation; he asked Meadows, who had already been an active trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation since 1977, to take on extra duties as consultant, making decisions about enlargement, siting, and so on. After Moore’s death in 1986 this took even more of Meadows’s time.

Although his last major solo exhibition — Bernard Meadows: Sculpture and Works on Paper, an 80th birthday survey, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield — was in 1995, Meadows continued to work on drawings until the day before his death.

He is survived by his wife, Marjorie Winifred Payne, whom he married in 1938, and by their two daughters.







Bernard Meadows, sculptor and Professor of Sculpture, Royal College of Art, 1960-80, was born on February 19, 1915. He died on January 12, 2005, aged 89.