Robert Adams

Robert Adams (5 October 1917 – 5 April 1984) was an English sculptor and designer. Whilst not widely known outside of artistic circles, he was nonetheless regarded as one of the foremost sculptors of his generation. In a critical review of a retrospective mounted by the Gimpel Fils gallery in London in 1993, Brian Glasser of Time Out magazine described Adams as "the neglected genius of post-war British sculpture", a sentiment echoed by Tim Hilton in the Sunday Independent, who ranked Adams' work above that of his contemporaries, Ken Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows. Education and early life Adams attended the village school in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire, now a suburb of the town of Northampton. He lived there until 1951. He left school at age 14 and did various manual jobs, firstly as a van-boy for a printer and later with the agricultural engineering company, Cooch & Sons, where experience gained in crafting metals proved useful in his later artistic creations. From 1937 to 1946 he attended evening classes part-time in life drawing and painting at the Northampton School of Art. During the Second World War, Adams was a conscientious objector, but joined the Civil Defence as a fire warden.