ELISABETH FRINK | ‘NERVOUS NASTINESS’
It’s often been written that Elisabeth Frink’s bronze statuettes Assassins I and Assassins II, both made in 1963, were a response to the shooting of John F Kennedy. Frink herself always said that they were ‘associated with the killing, rather than inspired by it’. A quick bit of research shows that the sculptures were shown in a solo exhibition of her work opening at the Wadsworth Gallery, London, on November 28th of that year. Kennedy was shot on November 22nd. Frink was a remarkably quick worker, but it’s extremely unlikely that she was that quick.
Elisabeth Frink (1930 - 1993) Assassin 2, Bronze, 51 x 17cm, out of 8. Courtesy of Willoughby Gerrish
Frink (1930-1992) was brought up during WW2. Her father saw active service, being one of the lucky ones to escape from Dunkirk. She saw planes shot down in flames, buildings bombed, and survived a strafing by a German fighter. She would almost certainly have seen the newsreels evidencing the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps. Like many artists of that era (including the Geometry of Fear sculptors a few years older than Frink) all this had a profound effect on her work.
And particularly on her male figures. She was attracted to the male form, but terrified by men’s potential for violence. ‘She had’, writes Frink collector Chris Bartram, ‘mixed feelings about aggression and futility… the beauty and the beast live together in her work.’ You can see this in Assassins II (pictured). ‘There is a particular nervous nastiness about Miss Frink’s killers’, wrote the Times reviewer of that 1963 show. The two subjects’ smooth armour masks dehumanise them, but their spindly bird-like legs, and their arched complicity lend them an aura of vulnerability. Have they completed their gruesome task yet, or are they yet to go through with it?
The statue wasn’t Frink’s only inadvertent connection to JFK. Her first-ever major commission, from Basil Spence in 1961, was a bronze eagle, for the lectern at Coventry Cathedral. Of these she cast five, one of which was bought by Texan property developer Fred Trammell Crow. He donated the work, in 1964, to the JFK Memorial, in Dallas, where it still stands.
Assassins II (from an edition of eight) is on the books of Willoughby Gerrish, showing Frink’s work at Stand 6 of British Art Fair, along with pieces by Kenneth Armitage, Anthony Caro, Barbara Hepworth, Gerald Laing, Michael Lyons, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Austin Wright and Emily Young.