1963 Sculpture Exhibition

The fourth major sculpture exhibition was held in 1963. he first three have been dealt with in previous issues of the Review, numbers 50, 59 and 60. By this time over half a million people had visited the Park to see these exhibitions. As with the 1960 exhibition luckily a map exists showing us where the sculptures were placed in the sub-tropical garden.This time the emphasis was on contemporary British and American works (20 works by 20 different artists). Leading British artists included Moore, Chadwick, Caro, Frink and Hepworth. Hepworth, fortunately, leaving her familiar Singular Form in the Park on the southern lake margin.

It was the American section of the exhibition that was most noteworthy, as most visitors had had little chance of seeing works by such important American sculptors as Smith, Ferber, Lipton and Calder. The collection aimed to show the wide range of American work available at that time.From the 1940s a “New Sculpture” movement had developed in the USA, at first centred around David Smith. Then a younger generation of artists, including Lipton and Ferber, came into prominence. This was all regarded as a sculpture renaissance. They were using welded metal to create abstract sculptures with elements of animal forms, and in the case of Lipton tortured humans.The Museum of Modern Art in New York helped to provide and ship these sculptures. It seems a great pity that such impressive collections of outdoor sculpture are now just a distant memory as far as the Park is concerned.