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JOHN MILNE (1931-1978) Milne's elegantly sculptural vision of flowing, harmonious surfaces often captured broad landscape topographies and pagan or sacred architectural features in Cornwall, Greece, Morocco and the Middle East. His sculptures were deft exercises in shifting surfaces and planar lyricism while maintaining the solidity, bulk and inert presence of an originating formal idea. The extent to which this idea was naturalistic or abstract in orientation was a moot point as the one time Barbara Hepworth studio assistant and later St Ives neighbour shuffled between the two. This resulted in a counterpoint between conceptual plan and sensual process. We are very grateful to Peter Davies for his assistance cataloguing the present lot and lots 558-562 and 571-573.

John Milne (1931-1978)

Sentinel

Details

John Milne (1931-1978)
Sentinel
signed with initials, dated and numbered '1976/J.E.M. 2/6' (on the underside of the base)
bronze with a green patina
14 in. (35.6 cm.) high, excluding the base
Conceived in 1976 as an edition of 6.

Literature

P. Davies, The Sculpture of John Milne, London, 2000, p. 90, another cast illustrated.

Special notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Lot Essay

Though cast from a plaster Sentinel owes a palpable debt to the carvings of Barbara Hepworth in whose studio during the early 1950s Milne worked. The interior/exterior dialogue of Hepworth is repeated in Milne's piece which is a solid, robust form containing suggestions of an iconic head, a boat hull or even a gathering wave. Conceived in 1976, Sentinel harks back to Milne's early St. Ives carvings of the 1950s. Its mysterious presence, a function of an ambiguous, even metamorphic, abstraction coheres with Milne's general interest in Pagan, Classical or Islamic forms or in symbols that carry sacred associations.
P.D.

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