Randomly opening the book (published in 1962, when Armitage was "one of the leading British sculptors"):"One must assume that the artist's emotional response to circumstances and events is not fundamentally different from our own: Armitage too lives in a world overshadowed by the threat of war and suicidal defences against war and divided by affluence and famine, race and dogma, but his life is dominated, as are ours, rightly or wrongly, by the more immediate problems and rewards of human needs and satisfactions. A work whose initial tone may well have been one of crisis can in the process of creation be modulated into a happier key - the image of dread becomes an object of pleasure - and the adding of a title can serve to fix its final character."
"At the age of 45" (said Norbert Lynton) "he has before him several decades of potential productivity."
Armitage died in 2002 aged 85. The obituary in the Guardian said: "In the elongated, fragile forms of his work, his overriding concern was always with humanity; a preoccupations with feelings expressed through the language of the body... He saw sculpture as communicating essential truths."
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