Underwood, Leon

Underwood, Leon (1890–1975). British sculptor, painter, printmaker, teacher, and writer, born in London, the son of an impoverished dealer in antiquities and coins. He studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1907–10, the Royal College of Art, 1910–13, and (after war service as a camouflage officer in the Royal Engineers) at the Slade School, 1919–20. A versatile and original figure, Underwood was out of sympathy with the main trends of modernism, describing abstraction as ‘artfully making emptiness less conspicuous'. Nevertheless, from the early 1960s critics began to speak of him as ‘the father of modern sculpture in Britain', in view of the streamlined stylized forms of his carvings and bronzes in the 1920s and 1930s and the influence of his teaching. He taught part-time at the Royal College of Art (where Henry Moore was one of his pupils) from 1920 to 1923, resigning after an argument with the principal, William Rothenstein, and at his own Brook Green School in Girdlers Road, Hammersmith, which he opened in 1921 and ran intermittently until 1938. Underwood travelled widely and wrote several books, including three on African art. In Art For Heaven's Sake (1934) he expressed his ideas about the superiority of intuition and imagination over technology, often in pithy, epigrammatic form: ‘Type your circulars and keep a pen for your love letters.’ He illustrated his own books (and a few by other authors) with etchings and woodcuts. His painting, which was sometimes influenced by primitive art, was generally less interesting than his sculpture.

In 1931 Underwood edited a literary and artistic periodical called The Island (four issues, June to December, issues 2 and 3 being combined in September). The contributors included Eileen Agar (who provided financial backing), Henry Moore, and the painter-engravers Gertrude Hermes (1901–83) and Blair Hughes-Stanton (1902–81), who were both former pupils of Underwood and who married in 1926. Christopher Neve (Leon Underwood, 1974) writes that ‘in the course of regular fortnightly meetings in Underwood's studio, starting in March 1931, they began to realize that they shared a belief … that poetic imagination was more important than style or method. Moving round this theme, they conceived the idea of setting themselves up as a group, The Islanders, not so much with the intention of disseminating their ideas—that part of The Island''s function, since it was never run as a commercial proposition, was purely incidental—as to provide opportunities for members to discuss the problem among themselves … The result was a good deal of talk about the priestly function of the artist … The issue of December 1931 includes a statement written specially for The Island by Mahatma Gandhi in which he wishes the project well and says that religion is “the proper and eternal ally of art”.’