The couple has been an enduring subject throughout Lynn Chadwick’s long and productive career. After spending twenty years distorting figures to become abstracted pyramids supported on spiky legs, the Seventies saw Chadwick return to the figure un-ambiguously and progressively adopted the triangle and the square head as a shorthand device for the symbolisation of the male and female.
Although more overt in this period, these elements have their origins rooted much earlier in the Teddy Boy and Girl draped coats and pencil skirts of the fifties where the triangle and the square themselves defined the female from the male. When once questioned about the reasons for the blanked faces in his couple series, Chadwick replied: ‘No expression is an expression...body language has more power in conveying mood and character than facial features which can be limiting.’ He preferred to leave the attitude of the figure itself to provide its identity and personality.
This proved to be a very rich vein of inspiration for Chadwick and he made couples in numerous aspects and configurations; reclining figures, seated couples, hieratic kings and queens Egyptian in their serenity, walking figures, winged and cloaked where graceful arabesques and complex curves are constructed with the characteristic strength of the straight rod technique giving a robust structure to the most delicate of fabric-like folds.
On the power of Chadwick’s couple series, Rungwe Kingdon states: ‘It is impossible somehow not to identify with these couples, not to recognise ourselves
in these positions and put oneself into their situations however formal; the vitality of a dance, the pride and warmth of strolling hand in hand and the leisure of watching the world go by. In their dignity and self-contained understated energy Chadwick’s couples are a unique expression of the most fundamental human unit and a reminder of our most intimate and trusting moments.