The Manx factor

Bryan Kneale comes from the Isle of Man and, after winning the Rome Prize from the Royal Academy Schools, was one of the leaders of the British sculptural revolution of the 1950s and 60s. In 1970, against the advice of his friends and fellow-artists, he was the first abstract sculptor to join the Royal Academy. Many others followed, and the RA was saved for a while from its institutional fear of innovators. During the 1980s, Kneale was both head of sculpture at the Royal College of Art and professor of sculpture at the RA. But although this heavy load of teaching and administration left him little time for making sculpture, he did make a great many large coloured drawings of animal, bird and fish skeletons (from the collections of the Natural History Museum), which threw a bridge of naturalism between his earlier abstract sculpture and the work he has been creating full-time again since he retired from the Royal College in 1995.