Scottish painter and sculptor Stephen Gilbert, grandson of Sir Alfred Gilbert, stands out as a British artist within the milieu of the Parisian avante garde. In 1929 Gilbert was afforded an architectural scholarship to the Slade School of Art, before moving to Paris in 1938 where he was freed from the Slade’s rigorous approach to academia.
He held his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1939, but his trip was ended by the outbreak of the war. After being rejected by military service Gilbert moved to Ireland where he spent his time painting abstracted insects inspired by the surrealist works of André Masson, the psychoanalytics of Carl Jung and the philosophy of Nietzsche. The heightened emotions of this period are visible in Gilbert’s anguished and gestural brushstrokes. His time in Ireland led to his association with the White Stag group of refugee artists, with whom he regularly exhibited.
After the birth of his daughter in 1946 the Gilberts returned to Paris where he was invited to join the radical Cobra group, the only other British member being William Gear. His role in Cobra was central and in 1949 he painted the mural in their house at Bregnerod, near Copenhagen. This period saw his move towards an architectural approach to sculpture, with a growing concern for the possibilities of three-dimensionality. In the late 1940s he worked between Paris and Amsterdam; the works of Mondrian, Malevich and Rietveld in Holland provided an antidote to the Parisian preference for Tachisme.
The 1950s saw the development of Gilbert’s architectural ideas. In 1955 he created a model house to be built by Peter Stead in Yorkshire, alongside plans for metal and glass blocks of flats. Such works led to his reception of first prize for sculpture in the 1965 Tokyo Biennale.
Upon the death of his wife, sculptor Jocelyn Chewett, in 1979 he created a collection of large copper pillars with gently undulating edges. These works, likely in honour of Jocelyn’s own work, serve to displace space rather than create it, yet remain consistent with Gilbert’s lifelong pursuit of formal abstraction. Gilbert returned to painting in the 1980s and held his last exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds 2006, exhibiting his architectonic works of the 1950s alongside Jocelyn’s contemporaneous sculptures.
