20 Facts About Leon Underwood

George Claude Leon Underwood was a British artist, although primarily known as a sculptor, printmaker and painter, he was an influential teacher and promotor of African art.

Leon Underwood did not hold modernism and abstraction in art in high regard and this led to critics often ignoring his work until the 1960s when he came to be viewed as an important figure in the development of modern sculpture in Britain.

Leon Underwood was born in the west London suburb of Shepherd's Bush.

Leon Underwood was the eldest of the three sons of George Underwood, a fine art dealer and he attended Hampden Gurney School.

Leon Underwood worked with Solomon Joseph Solomon as a camoufleur, creating battlefield observation posts disguised as trees.

Leon Underwood sketched and painted scenes of this work, notably in his 1919 oil painting Erecting a Camouflage Tree, which was intended for the, never built, British national Hall of Remembrance and was in turn purchased by the Imperial War Museum.

At Brook Green, Leon Underwood initially, concentrated on teaching printmaking with woodcutting but began making sculptures.

In 1925, with some of his past pupils, Leon Underwood created the English Wood-Engraving Society to promote the art form.

Later in his career, between 1935 and 1945 Leon Underwood created a significant number of colour linocuts.

In 1922 Leon Underwood had his first solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in London.

Leon Underwood taught a life drawing class at the Royal College of Art from 1920 until 1923 when he resigned and travelled to Paris and Iceland.

Leon Underwood spent 1926 in the United States where he published an illustrated book of verse, Animalia, illustrated some volumes by others and painted and made engravings.

Leon Underwood created several surrealist paintings, six of which were shown at the first, and only, exhibition of The Neo Society held at the Godfrey Phillips Gallery in London in May 1930.

From 1932 to 1934, Leon Underwood made a series of sculptures of dancing figures including Herald of New Day, the plaster cast of which is in the Tate collection.

Leon Underwood was always convinced that subject matter formed a fundamental role behind the power of both his own and primitive art, and had no belief in subject-less or purely abstract form in his own work.

From 1939 to 1942, during World War II, Leon Underwood worked at the civil defence camouflage centre at Leamington Spa.

Leon Underwood had begun collecting African art in 1919 and, after his 1944 tour, had acquired over 550 pieces including several significant works by Yoruba artists, including sculptures by Olowe of Ise.

Some works Leon Underwood later sold to the British Museum while others were eventually acquired by National Museum of African Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States.

From 1948 onwards, Leon Underwood cast his bronze sculptures in his own studio and throughout the 1950s, concentrated on his sculpture and on promoting his theories and philosophy of art.

In 1961 Leon Underwood was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and further recognition followed in 1969 when the first full-scale retrospective of his work was held at The Minories in Colchester.