CONCAVE FORM VIII
earthenware and white slip
48 x 79cm; 19 x 31 1/2in
52 x 79cm; 20 1/2 x 31 1/2in (including base)

Property from the Estate of Martin Froy

Executed in 1961.

Provenance
A gift from the artist to the late owner in the early 1960s (Martin Froy, 1926-2017, became friends with James Tower at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court where Froy was Head of Fine Art from 1954-65. After Corsham Court Froy was appointed head of painting at Chelsea School of Art, and then Professor of Fine Art at Reading University. In the 1970s he was a trustee of both the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery)

Exhibited
London, Gimpels Fils, James Tower, Recent Sculpture, 1963, no. 2 (illustrated in the catalogue)

Literature
Timothy Wilcox, The Ceramic Art of James Tower, London, 2012, p. 62, fig. 47, illustrated (incorrectly dated and described)

I look to the strong English tradition of absorption in landscape and organic forms, the search to find a poetic metaphor for landscape, sea and weather, to try and translate the ephemeral into the permanence of terracotta and glaze (James Tower)

The present work is from the series of thirteen Concave forms that Tower showed with Gimpel Fils gallery in London in January 1963. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue illustrating all thirteen (fig.1).

Describing the series Wilcox wrote: 'Each of the forms has a strong silhouette, a defining edge that encloses a shallow volume [...] Though made of fired earthenware, they are finished with white slip so they appear like plaster.' He goes on to note that the pieces were going to be cast in bronze, but 'in practice only one or two were'. (Wilcox, p. 43). A bronze cast of the present work was sold at auction in Canada in 2011 (Sale, Heffel Fine Art Vancouver, 28th April, 2011, lot 30).

Tower's work became hugely collectable in the 1950s and 60s when he was represented by the fashionable London gallery Gimpel Fils. Executed mostly in ceramic, Tower pushed visual boundaries and introduced a new way to appreciate sculptural form in Britain, much like the work of two of his contemporaries Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, whose work was regularly shown along side his at the gallery.

Wilcox notes in his analysis of Tower's Concave form series that: 'Each of the Concave forms has a grooved surface, in some the grooves run horizontally, regardless of the curvature of the form.' He continues: 'In the present work [this lot]..., the graphic skin twists and bends more than the shape itself, introducing new cross rhythms. A central spine divides the inner space in half, creating two equal chambers' (Wilcox, p. 63).

Tower reflected on how the concave form that so intrigued him recurs in the landscape, the human body and inert objects in apparently equal measure: 'The shallow concavities which hold light and shadow on the downs, parallels the same shallow concavity which holds light and shadow on the palm of the hand. Again, it is paralleled in the concavities and convexities of objects worn by use.'

Born on the Isle of Sheppey on the north Kent coast, Tower grew up in a landscape between land and water, windswept beaches and the mudflats of the tidal Thames which revealed to the artist many configurations of pattern and texture. Tower later studied in London at the Royal Academy Schools (1939-41) and at the Slade (1946-49) where he was taught drawing by Thomas Monnington (1902-1976). After graduating, he enrolled at the University of London's Institute of Education to train as an art teacher where ceramics was taught by the New Zealand potter William Newland (1919-1998). Tower showed immediate talent for the medium and began teaching the new Slade intake two days a week, before leaving in 1949 to set up the ceramics department at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court with minimal experience. Fellow new artists appointed there included William Scott and Kenneth Armitage to teach painting and sculpture respectively. In 1957 Tower was awarded the Steuben Corning Travel Fellowship and in 1961 the Leverhulme Research Award.

sold with a copy of the 1963 Gimpel Fils exhibition catalogue in which the present work is illustrated