A key figure in the post-war development of modern British art, Geoffrey Clarke rose to prominence through his inclusion in the 1952 Venice Biennale. It was here that art critic Herbert Read famously identified a new generation of sculptors whose work embodied the psychological scars of a world emerging from war. In the catalogue for the British Pavilion, Read coined the term ‘Geometry of Fear’ to describe these artists, including Clarke.
Read’s phrase spoke to an existential mood prevalent in society during the post-war period. The welded and forged sculptures, often made from iron rather than traditional bronze, expressed an acute sense of fragility, aggression, and transformation. In Clarke’s work, the fusion of human and animal forms revealed this uneasy tension, suggesting a world in which the boundaries between species, civility, and savagery had collapsed.
Though the ‘Geometry of Fear’ group was more a critical invention than a formal movement, its artists—Clarke, Turnbull, Chadwick, Meadows, Paolozzi, and others—shared common preoccupations. Their bestiaries of strange, hybrid creatures reflected the vulnerability of the human condition. For Clarke especially, the interplay of fragility and threat gave his sculpture a lasting emotional and symbolic power.
Clarke’s early acclaim at Venice launched a significant career that spanned sculpture, stained glass, and public commissions. Yet it is his early post-war works—charged with raw emotion and existential force—that remain central to understanding his enduring impact on twentieth-century British art.
