March of the makers

Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nestled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Manchester Square in Marylebone, an address once made famous by the cover of a number of albums by the Beatles. The building has since been renovated into smart, slightly anonymous offices and the sculpture suited it. Few knew that it was a work by Tony Cragg, who towards the end of the 1980s was one of Britain’s best known artists, winning the Turner Prize in 1988 and representing the country at the Venice Biennale the same year. Last winter the sculpture, titled ‘Under Circumstances’, was taken away. There was no fanfare or report as to why, or where, it had gone.

It would have been easy to conclude that this was fair enough. After his high point of the late 1980s, Cragg quickly faded from the art-world stage, retreating to Germany (he moved there in the late 1970s) where he turned out disappointingly anodyne sculptures that adorned plazas and lobbies around the world without ever being particularly noticed or loved.