In September 1941, a German bomb fell near Douglas on the Isle of Man. The sculptor Bryan Kneale, who lived in the town and has died aged 95, remembered it well.
His father owned a local newspaper, Mona’s Herald. Running to see what had caused the explosion, he returned carrying a piece of shrapnel for his 11-year-old son. “I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful,” Kneale told Studio International in 2015. “I took it to school the next day and some swine stole it.”
Despite this setback, the piece of twisted metal was to play a talismanic role in Kneale’s life and art. For seven decades, his work would be marked by an interest in reconciliation: of soft, organic shapes with hard, man-made ones; of skin with the skull beneath it. His shrapnel was both an abstract form and a piece of his own life, a part of his story. This same duality applied to the bits of agricultural machinery Kneale found on tholtans, those deserted farms dotted around the Isle of Man. “Turnip choppers and what have you – it’s like finding a shell on a beach,” he said. “It comes from your own life, where you come from.”
Where Kneale came from was, insistently, the Isle of Man. Both of his parents, William and Lilian (nee Kewley), were from long-settled Manx farming families. Like his elder brother, Nigel, later to find fame as the author of the Quatermass stories – Bryan’s painting of a lobster would inspire the Martians in the 1958 television series Quatermass and the Pit – he was sent to Douglas high school, moving on to study at the Douglas School of Art.
This, though, was as far as art teaching went in the place Kneale was always to refer to as “the island”. In 1947, he left for London and the Royal Academy Schools. “They were crammed with soldiers back from the war,” Kneale recalled. “You could hardly get into the life room.” Instead, he installed himself in the antique room, learning to draw from sculptures and casts. His only companion there asked if he would help him with his application for the Rome prize. Kneale also applied, and won it.
His interest at the time lay in mural painting. At the end of his scholarship in 1951, Kneale went back to the island, making two large murals for Noble’s hospital in Douglas. The disparate subjects of these – one a sunlit Italian piazza, the other a figure on the edge of the Irish Sea – suggested the opposing directions in which the young artist felt himself pulled. A Leverhulme scholarship the following year and a subsequent show at the Redfern gallery took him back to London.
On the £750 winnings from a Daily Express Young Painters’ prize in 1955 – his entry, Pony in the Snow, was of an unhappy looking horse in a wintry Manx field – Kneale married Doreen Lister, a fellow muralist whom he had met at the Royal Academy.
His paintings of the time, and particularly his portraits of actors such as Michael Redgrave and Richard Attenborough, were made with a palette knife, lending their surfaces a sculptural quality. Kneale squared this circle by spending a further year, in 1959-60, in the Isle of Man and taking welding lessons there. When he returned to London, it was as a sculptor.
By 1962, he was making works such as Standing Figure and Sparta, the latter now in the collection of Abbot Hall in Kendal. These seemed unplaceable, neither abstract nor concrete, organic nor man-made. A piece such as Knuckle (1964), in the Tate collection, is clearly a meditation on the joint of the title without being a literal representation of it. It is, perhaps, a study of articulation, the joining of two things into one.
Kneale now also began to teach, at Hornsey College of Art and at the Royal College of Art, where he worked from 1964 to 1995, as head of the sculpture department and latterly professor of drawing. He was also master of sculpture and then professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy (1982-90).
His breakthrough as a sculptor had come in 1966, with a one-man show at the Whitechapel gallery. Its curator, Bryan Robertson, wrote of Kneale as a figure of resolution, bridging the gap between the likes of Henry Moore and the so-called New Generation sculptors, younger artists who had been taught at St Martin’s School of Art by Anthony Caro.
In 1971, one of Kneale’s works, Nikkessen, was included in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, the piece’s humanoid and faintly tragicomic air winning it critical comparisons with the plays of Samuel Beckett. The other sculptures in that year’s RA show were all figurative, including ones by Elisabeth Frink. Pressing the RA’s director, Thomas Monnington, Kneale was allowed to curate British Sculptors ’72 the following year. This would turn the hidebound academy into a showcase for groundbreaking work. In 1974, Kneale became the first abstract sculptor to be elected a Royal Academician.
While living in London, he continued to see himself as a Manxman. Some of his best-known pieces were made for the island, notably the seven-metre-high bronze Legs of Man that greets arrivals at Ronaldsway airport.
Kneale’s statue of the Manx hero of Trafalgar, Captain John Quilliam, installed in his native Castletown, won the 2007 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.
A stroke in 2012 slowed Kneale down more than it might other of his contemporaries. Where sculptors such as Caro and Eduardo Paolozzi were happy to use prefabricated elements in their work, Kneale “always wanted to be in charge of the shape, make my own shapes myself”.
“I think all my work is about the problem of what one sees and what one knows,” he said. “It’s an attempt to fuse the two and, in a special sense, to disrupt both.” He was made MBE in 2019.
Doreen died in 1998 and their son, Ben, in 1996. Bryan is survived by a daughter, Kate, and two grandchildren, Thomas and Eve.