Franta Belsky (Czech / British 1921 – 2000) 1959 Richard Astley as Child Portrait Head Bronze

Fine Art : Sculptures

 

Franta Belsky (Czech / British 1921 – 2000); Portrait Head Study of Richard Jacob Astley (b.1950) as a Child; Bronze; signed and dated in the bronze “F Belsky”, and “59”; mounted on a black marble pedestal; 34cm (13.4ins) high, including pedestal; bronze excluding pedestal 25cm (9.8ins) high.

An unusual opportunity to acquire a fine “book” work by this highly acclaimed sculptor, whose works, held mailnly in public of private family collections, rarely come to the market.

Literature: This bronze is pictured in Franta Belsky's book : "Sculpture" (Richter, Prague 1992) (see photograph) – a copy of which we have available.

CONDITION: Very good. A few minor chips to the marble pedestal.

BIOGRAPHY: Franta Belsky was a Czech sculptor, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1921. He spent his boyhood in Prague where, aged 16, he won first prize in a student sculpture exhibition. He entered art school the following year despite the opposition of his father, Joseph Belsky, who was an eminent economist. However, in the next year, 1939, he and his immediate family fled from the Nazis to England, where he joined the Czech Exile Army.

Belsky fought in France as a gunner and was twice mentioned in dispatches. When he returned to Prague after the war, he discovered that many of his relations had perished in the Holocaust. He designed a paratroop memorial, and a medal in honour of Emil Zátopek, before he fled to England yet again to escape the Communist takeover in 1948.

He was not to return for another 42 years, but when he did he created the Prague memorial to Czechoslovaks who had served with the Royal Air Force, and the statue of Churchill outside the British Embassy. In 1999 the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, awarded him the rank of colonel (Rtd) in the Czech army and the the Presidential Medal of Merit.

In England, Belsky became a major force in British sculpture. He was the first foreign-born sculptor to be commissioned for a work in Trafalgar Square, where Prince Philip unveiled a bust of Admiral Cunningham in 1970. His statue of Lord Mountbatten stands on Horse Guards Parade and his bust of Lord Cottesloe is in the National Theatre. Belsky also designed the Tortion Fountain at the Shell Centre in London.

He sculpted portrait busts of four generations of royalty, the Queen Mother (for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham), the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Andrew (as a baby and as a young man) and the three-and-a-half-year-old Prince William. He has five works - including three of the royal family - in the National Portrait Gallery, and 15 public sculptures in central London.

His work includes not only traditional statues and busts, but also large-scale more abstract works. He produced a number of statues of Winston Churchill, one of them completed in 1968 at the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library in Fulton, Missouri. In 1988 the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, stood near the statue and, commenting that "the sculptor of this statue expressed the spirit of wartime England," announced the end of the cold war.

His sculpture of a mother carrying her child in the Town Square, Stevenage as well as the Shell Fountain on the South Bank are listed as a Grade II sculptures to be preserved even if, as in the case of the fountain, the building they were commissioned for are no longer in use. These pieces and his Triga (three rearing horses in Knightsbridge), the Totem in the Arndale Centre, Manchester, and an owl and pussycat on the wall of an infant school in Baldock, Herts, all demonstrate Belsky's belief that sculpture should be for the public rather than an elite.

He won the Otto Beit Medal of the Royal British Society of Sculptors for excellence in sculpture, was a long-serving member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors' council, and a governor of St Martins School of Art from 1967 to 1988; which position he resigned in protest against the consolidation of London's art colleges. He was a founder member - and twice president - of the Society of Portrait Sculptors.

He sculpted two busts of U.S. President Harry S. Truman before dying on 5 July 2000.

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Item ID: RL-0654