Artist
Raymond Mason
British, 1922–2010
Raymond Mason was a British artist. 1 work is cataloged here, principally at Museum of Modern Art. Raymond Mason was born in Birmingham.
Raymond Mason left London for Paris in the 1940s and never quite moved back, trading rain for café tables and studio corners where he sketched passersby in quick, scratchy ink lines. He once told a friend he wanted to capture “the weight of a moment,” and those crowded sheets feel like stills from a play performed in real time. Hunt down one of his 1963 ink drawings in the Tate’s archive—you’ll see a woman hurrying past a lamppost, her coat and shadow tangled together in a single unbroken stroke.
Overview
Raymond Grieg Mason (2 March 1922, in Birmingham, England – 13 February 2010 in Paris, France) was a sculptor.
He trained at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts under William Bloye, the Royal College of Art (for one term), and Slade School of Art. He lived and worked in Paris beginning in 1946. He was a close friend of the late Nobel Prize–winning scientist Maurice Wilkins.He is known for his sculptures of tightly packed people made from clay, with works on McGill College Avenue in Montreal; the Tuileries, Paris; Georgetown, Washington, D.C.; and Madison Avenue, New York. His controversial 1991 fibre-glass work, Forward in Birmingham's Centenary Square was destroyed by arson on 17 April 2003. The statue carried a reference to DNA ("the secret of life") in connection with Maurice Wilkins, who went to school in Birmingham and worked at the University of Birmingham. He was the subject of an episode of the BBC television series Omnibus, "The Return of Raymond Mason," broadcast on 28 November 1982, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for "services to sculpture and to Anglo-French relations" in the 2002 New Year Honours. The sculptor Ron Mueck commented on his death: "I cannot remember there not being a Raymond Mason book on my shelf... The strong pulse of Life in his work always impressed me greatly. When I look at Mason's work it feels like seeing clearly through someone else's eyes. That can be an unsettling experience, but rewarding when it is a vibrant, unique vision of the world."
Works by Raymond Mason
Collections represented
Museum
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the…