MICHAEL AYRTON (1921 - 1975), EVOLUTION OF THE MINOTAUR

bronze
signed with initials and numbered 'MA 3/3' on base
Modelled in 1963-1964, 165.5 BY 52 BY 75CM

PROVENANCE
The family of the artist
Bruton Gallery, Bruton, Somerset
Private collection; purchased from the above

EXHIBITED
Michael Ayrton, Grosvenor Gallery, London, 29 April-30 May 1964, cat. 7 (another cast)
British Sculpture in the Sixties, Tate Gallery, London, 25 February-4 April 1965, cat. 8 (another cast)
Michael Ayrton: Recurring Themes and Images, Bruton Gallery, Bruton, Somerset, 10 May-14 June; National Museum of Wales, Turner House, Penarth, 10 May-14 June 1981, cat. 31 (another cast)
Michael Ayrton: Recurring Themes and Images: Retrospective 1939-1975, Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, December 1990-January 1991, cat. 45 (another cast)

LITERATURE
Michael Ayrton and C.P. Snow, Drawings and Sculpture by Michael Ayrton (rev. ed.), Cory, Adams and McKay, London, 1966, illustrated (another cast), plate 142
Justine Hopkins, Michael Ayrton: A Biography, Andre Deutsch, London, 1994, p. 293
Jacob E. Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2003, pp. 119, 121 (illustrated, another cast), 255 (cat. 385)

'This strange sense of struggle, humanly inarticulate and yet with the intellectual impotence of the animal comes over in several of Ayrton's finest drawings and in the life-size bronze sculptures which show the Minotaur in his attempts to slough off his hide, hooves and horns and become wholly human, shedding the beast to become sensate man. The rough texture of his body is surmounted by an increasingly sentient face and we can read into this whatever allegory we like, from the ritual slaughter of a Spanish Sunday to modern man trying to rid himself of the violence, both within and without, which will always menace us and try to control us'.
(T.G. Rosenthal, Michael Ayrton, Grosvenor Gallery, London, 1964, pp. 5-6)