Stephen Gilbert

Stephen Gilbert (15 January 1910 – 12 January 2007) was a painter and sculptor from Scotland. He was one of the few British artists fully to embrace the avant-garde movement in Paris in the 1950s. Gilbert was born in Wormit, in the north-east of Fife, Scotland, of English parents. His father was a commander in the Royal Navy; his grandfather was the sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert. He studied architecture at the Slade School of Art in London from 1929 to 1932, where he befriended fellow student Roger Hilton. Gilbert won the Slade Scholarship at the end of his first year, and the principal Sir Henry Tonks encouraged him to start painting from 1930. He also met sculptor Jocelyn Chewett at the Slade, and they were married in 1935. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1936, and put on an early solo show in London, at the Wertheim Gallery in 1938. He moved to Paris in 1937, where his wife studied under Ossip Zadkine, leaving before the Second World War. He failed a medical for military service, and he spent the war in Ireland near Dublin with his wife and son, Humphrey. He joined The White Stag group of refugee artists. His work was inspired by Masson, and by reading Jung, Nietzsche and Jakob Böhme, with fantastic creatures and plants painted in vivid colours. He returned to Paris in 1946, after the birth of his daughter Frances. He exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendents in Paris in 1948, attracting the attention of Danish artist Asger Jorn, and leading to his membership of the CoBrA avant-garde art group. He was one of only two British members, the other being William Gear. He was included in the first issue of the group's journal and participated in both major exhibitions: the Bregnerød congress in August 1949, where he worked on the collective mural, and the Amsterdam exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in November of that year, where he worked with Constant Nieuwenhuys. A French art critic described him as "le plus français des sculpteurs anglais et l'un des plus européens parmi les artistes" ("the most French of British sculptors and one of the most European of artists").