After military service in World War II, Kenneth Armitage RA CBE (1916-2002) achieved early recognition. Armitage held his first solo show in London at Gimpel Fils in 1952, the same year that he was selected by the British Council for their New Aspects of British Sculpture at the XXVI Venice Biennale, the venue where Armitage returned to represent Great Britain in 1958 and in which he received the prize for the best international sculpture under age 45.

In 1953, Kenneth Armitage was appointed Gregory Fellow in Sculpture at Leeds University, the city of his birth. That same year, Gimpel Fils commissioned a lithograph, Seated Figures, in an edition of 50. Armitage’s work is a combination of abstraction and figuration, and over the years, he modelled his figures in various modes of rest or movement, singly, in pairs and in groups. The two-tone lithograph, with its sombre black lines offset by an olive-coloured wash is a balanced composition executed with the confidence of an artist who knows how to render in two dimensions his sculptural vision.



A year before his death, Leeds installed a commission, Both Arms, for Millennium Square. The unveiling was performed by Nelson Mandela. As the BBC put it at the time, ‘The open arms are expressing a feeling of welcome. The work is envisaged as a monument to friendship.’ How remarkable that Kenneth Armitage should start his career with a lithograph of a couple, arms outstretched towards each other; while at the end of the sculptor’s productive life, his career is crowned with a sculpture expressing the self-same sentiments.