page_title: Frank Dobson (sculptor)
section_title: World War Two and later
hierarchical_section_title: Frank Dobson (sculptor) / World War Two and later
caption_attribution_description: English: Crowds of women factory workers in white overalls descend an escalator in the London Underground
context_page_description: Frank Owen Dobson RA was a British artist and sculptor. Dobson began as a painter, and his early work was influenced by cubism, vorticism, and futurism. After World War I, however, he turned increasingly toward sculpture in a more or less realist style. Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s he built a reputation as an outstanding sculptor and was among the first in Britain to prefer direct carving of the material rather than modelling a maquette first. The simplified forms and flowing lines of much of his sculptures, particularly his female nudes, showed the influence of African art. From 1946 to 1953 Dobson was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1953. While Dobson was one of the most esteemed artists of his time, after his death his reputation declined with the move towards postmodernism and conceptual art. However, in recent years a revival has begun. Dobson is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century.
context_section_description: At the start of World War Two, Dobson and his second wife, whom he had married in 1931, moved to Bristol, where a large retrospective of his work was held in March 1940. Dobson lived in the city throughout the Bristol Blitz and like several other artists painted the ruins of churches destroyed in the bombing. Dobson contacted the War Artists' Advisory Committee and offered his services as both a painter and sculptor. WAAC were reluctant to offer sculpture commissions but eventually did offer Dobson a short-term contract for two portrait busts of Naval personal. Later WAAC commissioned some paintings, including one of workers arriving for work at a factory that had been relocated to a tunnel.
  Dobson was appointed head of sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1946, a post he held until his retirement in 1953. For the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951, Dobson created London Pride. The sculpture was originally exhibited as a plaster cast but was later, after Dobson died, cast as a bronze and placed in front of the Royal National Theatre in 1987. Among his last commissions were a bronze head of Sir Thomas Lipton and the zodiac clock on the exterior wall of Bracken House in London.
caption: An Escalator in an Underground Factory (1944) (Art.IWM ART LD 4142)
exif: {"Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "Imperial War Museums"}