nick bibby

LIMBLESS WONDERS

When the Venus de Milo was unearthed in 1820 on the Greek island of Milos, it was almost immediately recognised as a paragon of feminine beauty. A pity about the arms, of course, giving rise to endless conjecture about what, precisely, the lady (goddess, presumably) was doing: weaving, serving, worshipping or offering a prize? But was it really a pity that the arms had disappeared? Somehow their absence, taken with the perfection of form in what remained, in some ways set off, or even enhanced, the abstract beauty of the figure and face. By an historical accident, the sculpture, dating from the second century BC, was to represent a sculptural tradition according to which the part, cunningly isolated, might prove in some ways more expressive than the whole.
To this tradition, celebrating if you like the power of the close-up, Nick Bibby`s heroic torsos unmistakably belong. He even signals the classical connections by labelling the male torso Apollo and the female Artemis, which indicates that he is clearly aware of the tradition into which he is inscribing himself. We call it Classical, but it is very doubtful whether the sculptures of Praxiteles or Alexandros of Antioch, the apparent creator of the Venus de Milo, were ever partial figures when they left the artists` studio. Indeed, the idea of deliberately producing a partial figure sculpture seems to be a relatively modern one. Significantly, the Venus de Milo was discovered at the height of the Romantic era, just four years before Byron died fighting the cause of an independent Greece at Missolonghi. And it is easy to associate the rise of deliberately fragmentary sculpture with the Romantic craze for ruins.
Busts are one thing, associated particularly with funerary sculpture ever since ancient Rome. But armless, legless, and, perhaps especially, headless torsos, male and female, are really a Romantic, Nineteenth-Century invention. Essentially late-Romantic at that. The last of the self-consciously Classical sculptors, such as Canova, Flaxman and Thorwaldsson, would not have dreamt of deliberately presenting a fragmentary or unfinished-appearing sculpture to public view as an achieved work in its own right. Even later, more Romanticism-tinged figures like Carpeaux might make such works only as a preliminary study or transitional piece, to remain hidden from prying eyes in the studio. It is not until we come to Rodin that we encounter a sculptor who glories in the idea and constantly turns to it in his public art.
There are two aspects of Rodin that contribute to this revolutionary attitude: that he was almost exclusively a modeller, a master of bronze rather than of stone, and that he lived very consciously in the artistic world of the Impressionist painters, and shared their fascination with the transitory, the evanescent. He wanted to achieve in the sometimes obstructively solid medium of sculpture a sense of panta rei (all things flow), so that his figures, like the humans they represent, seem to be constantly in a state of flux, moving from place to place and evolving in time. Sometimes Rodin would have the "excuse" that his small individual pieces were all really studies for the great and complex works like The Gate of Hell, with its myriad souls in torture. This was frequently true enough, but still he sold the fragmentary maquettes as self-sufficient works of art.
Through Rodin`s recognition as the greatest sculptor of his generation, his views on the nature and possibilities of sculpture became acceptable and then accepted. Since Nick Bibby, unlike, say, Henry Moore, a carver to the roots of his being, is also primarily a modeller whose favoured medium is bronze, it has been impossible for him to remain totally outside Rodin`s sphere of influence. This is particularly noticeable in his human figures and some, but not all, of his animal figures. There it depends on the animal: Rodin`s Impressionism is appropriate to the soft and gentle outlines of a bloodhound, but would hardly do for a monumental figure of a Kodiak bear or a champion carthorse. But wonderful though these are, his relatively few human figures remain among his finest achievements.
The two torsos may not be quite monumental, but they are certainly heroic. As indeed they should be, if they are associated, however loosely, with classical gods and goddesses. Paradoxically, they are both intensely realistic and unmistakably ideal. Among the skills required of a sculptor working in a broadly realistic context is the ability to choose exactly the right model. I do not know where Bibby found his models for these two torsos, but it looks as though they came as close to physical perfection as even a god could desire.The structure of bone and muscle beneath the skin is beautifully (and accurately) rendered, by a master hand, as capable as Rodin of framing their fearful symmetry.

John Russell Taylor
Author and Art Critic

"Bones to Bronze" Extinct species of Mauritius, Rodrigues & Réunion, Iles Aux Aigrettes, Mauritius
"Indomitable" Monumental Kodiak Brown Bear: Brown University, Rhode Island
Life Size Emperor Penguin: The Wilson Museum, Cheltenham

Bugatti Foundation, Paris Damien Hirst`s Murderme collection Brown University, Rhode Island Ashmolean Museum, Oxford The Wilson Museum, Cheltenham