Jocelyn Chewett was born near Toronto, Canada, in 1906, to a Canadian father and English mother. She trained at the Slade School, London, and in Paris under the emigre sculptor Ossip Zadkine. She lived in London, England from 1935, then in Dublin, Eire from 1940 to 1945, before settling in Paris, France where she developed her mature abstract sculpture, shown at the ICA in London. Jocelyn Chewett died in London, England in 1979 and her work was celebrated posthumously with a show at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2006.
Sculptor Jocelyn Chewett was born in 1906 on a farm near Toronto, Canada, to a Canadian father and English mother. In 1913, the family crossed the Atlantic to visit England, but the outbreak of the First World War forced them to remain. (Chewett's brother, Albert Ranney Chewett, who subsequently studied at Herkomer Art School, later purchased Reveley Lodge.) While in England, Chewett's mother took her daughters to see exhibitions in London, including work by William Morris and Wyndham Lewis. Having completed her general education, Chewett was accepted as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London by the painter Henry Tonks, and she studied drawing under Tonks and sculpture under the school's sculpture tutor between 1927 and 1930, deciding early on to concentrate on sculpture. It was at the Slade that she met the painter Stephen Gilbert, then a fellow student. In 1931, she moved alone to Paris, where, after considering the studios of Jacques Lipchitz and Constantin Brancusi, she chose to work under the emigre sculptor Ossip Zadkine, taking a studio of her own nearby in Montparnasse.
Under Zadkine, Chewett learned the technique of direct stone and wood carving, known as taille directe, which was then returning to favour among sculptors after a long period of neglect, and she worked in his studio for over two years, producing carvings that show the cubist-derived stylisation of the human figure associated with her teacher. In 1935, she married Gilbert and the couple lived for two years in London, where their son, Humphrey, was born. In 1937, she completed a public commission of two stone figures for a park entrance in Kettering, Northamptonshire. In June 1940, Gilbert, exempted from military service, and Chewett relocated from London to Dublin, Eire, where they remained until June 1945; their daughter, Frances, was born during this period. Introduced to Dublin's artistic circles by the painters Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, both of whom had studied under Albert Gleizes in Paris in the 1920s, Chewett and Gilbert joined the White Stag group of refugee artists, and Chewett's sculpture was included in the group's Exhibition of Subjective Art in January 1944. By the end of 1945 the family had returned to England, and in 1946 they settled in Paris, where from 1948 Chewett resumed carving and began to develop an independent, non-figurative sculptural language.
From 1948 to 1951, Chewett exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris, and in 1952 she showed a large abstract carved column at the 6e Salon de la Jeune Sculpture at the Musée Rodin, a work noticed by several French critics; a related, more austere column followed at the salon in 1954. This carved geometric abstraction, developed independently of the formal abstract schools then dominant in Paris, anticipated the direction later taken by free abstraction, and shows affinities with Suprematism and De Stijl. Chewett's sculpture is generally grouped into three broad phases: an initial purist idiom, a series of studies on the triangle, and a final phase incorporating the sphere. Chewett showed regularly in Paris salons and cultural centres, and in London her sculpture was included in the 1965 group exhibition Works by Chewett, Humphry, Piper, Rego, Schottlander, Teasdale hekld at the influential ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), followed in 1972 by a small solo exhibition at the same institution. In 1969 and 1973, she was invited to exhibit at the Biennale di Carrara in Italy, showing at the Accademia. Following her death, her work was surveyed in the retrospective, Jocelyn Chewett: sculpteur, son oeuvre abstraite, 1949-1979 at the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris in 1981, and, more extensively, in The Sculpture of Stephen Gilbert and Jocelyn Chewett in Post-War Paris at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2006.
Chewett died in London, England, in 1979. Her sculpture is held in public collections both in the UK, at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, and in France, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. The Ben Uri Research Unit welcomes contributions from researchers or family members who may have further biographical information.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jocelyn Chewet]
Publications related to [Jocelyn Chewet] in the Ben Uri Library