T he Victorians loved a bronze horse and rider or a versifying establishment figure plonked on a plinth. But the 20th century favoured rather different manifestations of public art. Bronzes, yes, but these were more likely in abstract forms. Memorials also, but again these tended towards the universal, the symbolic and the monolithic. Whether it was an office block or a housing estate, art was seen as an essential element, a civilizing influence and an act of generosity. Many of the greatest names in modern sculpture were asked to produce public art. Some of the most striking examples include Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form at the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York, Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 at the Brandon Estate in London, and Pablo Picasso’s huge unnamed sculpture in Daley Plaza, Chicago. In Britain perhaps the most ubiquitous exponent of municipal post-war art was William Mitchell, a sculptor who worked extensively in concrete. His work is immediately recognizable: usually concrete relief attached as part of a building, in primitive marks and shapes, built up into large-scale decorative pieces, sometimes coloured, often not.
Mitchell built up his portfolio of artworks while acting as design consultant for the London County Council from 1957–65, during which time he produced 49 pieces of art for 27 different sites across the city. His familiar rough-cast concrete art appears throughout Britain in housing estates, shopping centres, office blocks, subways and churches. On Hope Street in Liverpool alone his work adorns two major buildings just metres apart. He provided a strikingly controlled geometric design for the unconventional bell tower of Frederick Gibberd’s wigwam-like catholic cathedral, contrasting with the expressive freehand bronze mouldings for the doors. A short distance away, on what is now the Liverpool Media Academy, handmade concrete casts decorate all unglazed surfaces on the ground floor exterior, in a continuous riot of mark making. Arguably this effect is the most successful and familiar expression of his work, with the organic handmade patterns adding a dash of primitivism that subverts the structured grid of modern buildings. My favourite example is outside the old Three Tuns pub in Coventry (now the world’s most avant-garde fried-chicken shop), where he used concrete to decorate the walls facing into the Bull Yard shopping precinct with an energetic, free-wheeling Aztec-influenced design. As with much of his best work, it is like the wild, exotic world of a coral reef, packed with detail. You might expect colourful fish to dart from the deep relief work, or the concrete forms themselves begin to sway and pulse.
William Mitchell is not the only artist whose work is associated with brutalist architecture. Pop art sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi was there from the outset, cited heavily in Reyner Banham’s 1955 article on the New Brutalism. He also worked with Peter and Alison Smithson on exhibits for an influential art show called This is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. Fittingly, they collaborated on a post-apocalyptic house – half sculpture, half building. The exhibition famously helped inspire, among others, the writer JG Ballard, who later expressed his inner anguish in a succession of futuristic, dystopian stories set in a version of our world immediately recognisable to anyone who had seen these exhibits.
There is a strange tension between the brutalists’ fascination with both pop art and primitivism. One celebrates progress and the other harks back to something dredged from our collective past. But there are, of course, some similarities, and they revolve around romanticization. For primitivism it was in misguided notions of the ‘noble savage’, while pop art had its equivalent in the form of the nuclear family, figures to be both lionized and subverted through the products that defined their lives. Brutalism appeared to see both the primitive and the pop as inspiration.
Paolozzi’s creations vary from abstracted figurative sculptures to industrial machine art and colourful geometric murals. Many of his public artworks are exhibited in futuristic environments: Piscator is a substantial aluminium-sheen abstracted head, sat outside on London’s Euston Station plaza; another, Head of Invention, sits outside the former Design Museum building on the south bank of the Thames; and then there are the mosaics designed for the centre of the new town of Redditch. These days many of his public works are under threat: his mural for Tottenham Court Road London Underground station has been partially removed (a third of which was salvaged and is due to be restored and kept at Edinburgh University), and a continuing row over the ownership of Piscator has put its future in some doubt.
Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee, UK.
Architect: Victor Pasmore.
These pieces are all significant, but the single most famous icon of brutalist art in Britain is the Apollo Pavilion at Peterlee new town, created by Victor Pasmore. The artist had been brought onto the new town team to try to add a visual twist to the designs being created by the development corporation’s architects and planners. Instead of taking a minor, token role in the proceedings, Pasmore became an integral member of the team, advising on housing design and estate plans. Given this, his artwork for the town is a fittingly large structural piece, rather than a more modest sculpture. The Apollo Pavilion is a construction of slender concrete surfaces. It makes an almost-bridge, a concrete playground, a playful, abstract piece of entirely frivolous landscape, all created from the greyest of concrete and the cleanest of lines. It’s a generous piece of post-war art, placed within a housing estate and famous worldwide.
Some brutalist buildings are of such advanced modelling that they can be appreciated as works of art in their own right. One such is the Geisel Library (1968–70) at the University of California. Its architect, William Pereira, was already an old hand at creating space-age structures when he came to design this University extension in the mid-1960s. Built on the edge of a small canyon, the eight-storey cantilevered structure stands like a great concrete bloom in bud, a sturdy, spiky succulent rising up in the dry San Diego landscape. The library is named after Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, and its eccentric topsy-turvy form makes it the perfect monument to his elliptical rhymes and eccentric illustrations. Books in Nooks? Tomes in Homes? Tracts in Racks? Okay, I’ll stop now.
It’s not simply high-status buildings such as libraries that express pure artistic intent through their design. The soon-to-be demolished Welbeck Street Car Park (1968–70), behind the Oxford Street branch of Debenhams department store in London, should be a humble, apologetic structure. Instead it’s a fascinating patterned grid: a lattice of triangular concrete sections makes up the outer surface of the car park, shapes that act as both load bearing structure and decorative shell. The result is as dazzling as any Op Art painting by Bridget Riley. If even a car park can look this good, why do we put up with so many substandard buildings of significance?
Some brutalist structures are of course created with much higher ambitions in mind. In France, towards the close of the 1960s, there was a desire to produce a National Monument to the Resistance, whose bravery had helped change the course of World War II and whose fight symbolized the plight of the nation. Émile Gilioli, a sculptor who often worked in concrete, created a monument that sits somewhere between sculpture and building – a gigantic stylized hand holding a sun. The Free French Resistance group, the Maquis des Glières, had fought for freedom on the unpromising plateau between the Auges mountains and the Frêtes, where the monument has come to rest. At more than 15 metres (50 feet) tall and weighing 65 tonnes this was the largest commission Gilioli ever received. Its startling angles, standing out on the expansive mountain plateau, together with the rupture in history it symbolizes, make it one of the most powerful of all artworks constructed from concrete.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park contains other, even more moving, examples of brutalist sculpture. Perhaps the most famous is the Memorial Cenotaph, which like many of the pieces in the park was designed by Kenzō Tange. This saddle-shaped concrete form was unveiled in 1952, the first permanent memorial to the destruction caused by the atomic bomb in the city. The simple mournful shape is there to shelter the souls of the blast and fallout victims. Its cowed form is modest and unassuming, quite the reverse of the Resistance memorial in France, but this meekness and simplicity only adds to the poignancy of the symbol. The city’s dust, and all that it symbolizes, has been reborn as the grit in these concrete structures, with both history and tragedy moulded into objects that continue to haunt our imaginations.
