Kim James Collection

‘I would never start a piece of work with an
idea which would carry through to the end, nor was I ever taken by a particular form of bone or wood which inspired me, as Moore or Hepworth were. Instead I nearly always started with something, usually in the 50’s and 60’s a piece of clay. I would spend ages just cutting and squeezing it with a glazed air, almost catatonic, deaf to whatever went on or sometimes thinking about something entirely beside the point, frequently beautiful women of whom I seemed to know an awful lot. A lot of my work was expressed as a tribute to beautiful women.’

Kim James was one of Britain’s most interesting young sculptors of the 1950s and 1960s with an international following. At Borough Polytechnic art school he attended David Bomberg’s drawing classes whose students at the time included Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. It was Bomberg’s futurist work which Bronze was to be his major influence. Following his move from figurative art with pieces like ‘Torso’ and many others another influence which ran alongside his interest in futurism was the portraiture of Jacob Epstein. This came about through meeting Deborah Garman who was the niece of Lady Epstein. Deborah was a communist and it was to be through her that James joined The Young Communist League. After several years this culminated in him sitting on the Cultural sub-committee of the British Communist Party which was to be his “chief source of adventure” throughout the formative years of his life. On completion of his art studies he went to Paris where he met his first wife, Madeleine Hopfeld. It was she who introduced him to the leading French intellectuals, writers and painters of 1950s, including Fernand Léger, Jean-Paul Satre and André Fougeron

On returning from Paris in 1962 he started teaching at Camberwell School of Art, where he remained until 1974. Having gained an extraor- dinary insight into the cubist and futurist movements, his work attracted the attention of many London galleries including the Grosvenor Gallery, Wildenstein Gallery and the Hanover Gallery, the latter being London’s leading con- temporary art gallery for over twenty years where the careers of many highly acclaimed artists were launched, most notably that of Francis Bacon. In 1966 the Hanover Gallery held a one man show of Kim James’ works, followed in 1968 by a show at the Galerie Vercamer in Paris, the Charles Byron Gallery in New York, The Salon des Jeunes Sculpteurs in the grounds of the Musée Rodin and The Royal Academy in London. In 1969 he was chosen as one of a group of artists, headed by Henry Moore, to represent Great Britain at the Middelheim Sculpture Biennale in Belgium.

Born in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, James was born into a strict Baptist family and despite his rejection of organised religion at an early age, the bible was to represent a powerful source of inspiration. In 1960 Kim James was commissioned by Anthony Lewis to make a very large relief panel in the Church of St Matthew
in Bethnal Green and to decorate the ceilings of two churches in Middlesex. The plaster reliefs ‘Dove’, ‘Angel’, ‘Susannah’, ‘Ram’ and ‘Adam and Eve’ exhibited here are motifs from these ceilings. At the same time James created ‘Madeleine Hopfeld’ and ‘Les Amants’, the latter being influenced by a work that Léger had created some years earlier.

Word of the church ceilings, which James cites as one of his key pieces over the period of 1956–1966, lead to a commission in 1962 from the Hoveringham Gravel Company in Nottinghamshire to design the entrance ceilings of their new office; also, ‘The Mammoth’, which remained as Britain’s largest steel sculpture until the construction of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ in 1998. ‘The Mammoth’ now resides on the campus of Nottingham Trent University. The immense solid aluminium panel named ‘Excavator’ is the original cast commissioned by Erica Brausen for the one man show at the Hanover Gallery. Two years spent working on steel sculptures and the decorated ceilings with their references to industry turned his attention to the strength of industrial motifs. The ‘Man and Machine’ series, which included works such as ‘Power Tool’, ‘Machine Mender’, ‘Lathe Maker’ and ‘Dynamo Maker’ were shown at the Hanover Gallery in 1966 alongside his romantic expressionist Bronze pieces such as ‘Women like Flowers’ and ‘Jennifer’. ‘Jennifer’ was later chosen for the Middelheim Biennale in 1969. After the exhibition at the Royal Academy James made a series of works which included ‘Girl Turning in a Room’, ‘Girl Undressing’, ‘Girl in an Armchair’ and ‘Large Reclining Woman’ which were to be his last works. Citing disenchantment with the art world, just as he had reached his peak, James decided to pursue an academic life researching the use of art in psychotherapy for the next 20 years.

Working together over five years from 2001 to 2006, Alex von Moltke and Kim James painstakingly tracked down collectors as well as unearthed in James’ attic pieces or original casts in plaster which were never completed in bronze.