The 1950s were an incredibly prolific and successful period in Butler’s artistic career. Formerly trained as an architect, Butler abandoned his architectural training in favour of sculpting, starting initially as a studio assistant to Henry Moore. In 1950, he became the first recipient of the Gregory Fellowship in Sculpture at Leeds University and two years later exhibited at the eponymous 1952 Venice Biennale alongside leading contemporary sculptors of the day Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Robert Adams and Bernard Meadows. This saw the emergence of a new and exciting aesthetic in British sculpture, born out of the angst of the post-war period, which art critic Herbert Read famously coined the ‘Geometry of Fear’. Read commented, ‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair or of defiance; and the more innocence of the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, of ragged claws … of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear’ (H. Read, quoted in exhibition catalogue, ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’, British Council, XXVI Venice Biennale, 1952). Read’s raw and violent description of these young sculptors’ work acknowledged the troubling age in which they were working; a world still recovering from the Second World War, with a political climate seemingly teetering on the edge of nuclear war.

In 1953 Reg Butler won the ICA’s competition for an artwork to commemorate the Unknown Political Prisoner and was propelled to international fame. This work was pivotal in Butler’s oeuvre, presenting a dichotomy between man and machine, sensuality and brutality and the organic and geometric. These preoccupations can be seen to dramatic effect in Manipulator, 1954. During this period figures are often seen suspended on wire so that they hang in space, dissociated with the ground. Butler also relished in the fragmentary, preferring to omit significant parts of the body to create a more expressive image of the figure. Here Butler’s male figure is whole but stands perched upon a grid-like structure, which adds a sense of instability and stress to his figure. This grid of poles is mirrored in the unidentified machine or tools, which the figure holds in his hands. The inclusion of these geometrical features is balanced by the soft drapery, which hangs around the figure’s shoulders, a feature reminiscent of his former tutor Henry Moore. There is an element of despair, or perhaps hope, about the figure as his head is upturned to the sky, a motif seen in the Unknown Political Prisoner. There is a sense of ambiguity and mystery with the viewer left to decipher the subject of the work, the title only adding to the sense of intrigue.

The present work is one of only three casts in private collections. Other casts of Manipulator are in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Charles Clifton Fund; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Another cast of Manipulator achieved £120,000 when it was offered for sale in December 2006.

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