War, sex, corruption and God
Andrew Lambirth
THE SCULPTURE OF MICHAEL SANDLE by John McEwen The Henry Moore Foundation, in association with Lund Humphries, £60, pp. 144, ISBN 0853318174 Public art in Britain deserves the mixed press it gets. Too much of it is slack,
unimaginative work, the visual equivalent of muzak, making no concession to the setting in which it is placed, and bringing little in the way of beauty or enlightenment. The sculptures of Michael Sandie constitute a heroic exception to this rule. Sandie, born in 1936 and christened on HMS Ark Royal (his father was 29 years in the navy), grew up mostly on the Isle of Man. From the moment the family was bombed out of Plymouth in 1940, the young Sandie was intensely aware of the war. Later he was to do his national service in the Royal Artillery which provided useful first hand experience of weaponry. When he reached maturity, after training at the Douglas School of Art and Technology and at the Slade in London, war — together with sex, corruption and God — became his principal subject and abiding preoccupation.
Sandie was a painter first, a prodigiously talented draughtsman with a particular gift for watercolour, before he felt impelled to work in three dimensions. His first sculptures were near-abstract, but he fought his way back unfashionably to the figurative and monumental, to make memorials to specific follies of the 20th century. An international figure who has lived and worked abroad for long periods, Sandie loves the music of Gesualdo, Wagner, Mahler and Bruckner, and the sculpture of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. (Charles Sargeant Jagger, of the Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner, is a favourite.) He is outspoken, and something of a rebel: a man at war with himself, both radical and conservative, compelled to bear witness to history.
This handsome book, the first on his work, is perceptive and well-written, and lavishly illustrated with 120 duotone illustrations. (Here I have to declare a personal interest — I am the figure in the doublepage spread standing at the guard-rail of the belltower of Sandle's greatest commission, the Malta Siege-Bell Memorial on the Grand Harbour of Valletta, giving the photograph its human scale.) These richly tonal illustrations are very elegant, perhaps a bit too elegant for a sculptor of Sandle's forcefulness. Certainly the book is too expensive at £60, underwritten as it is by the wealthy Henry Moore Foundation. But for all those interested in contemporary public sculpture, it is an essential reference book and a wonderfully uplifting document.
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