Willi Soukop was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1907 and studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. He left Austria for England in 1934 and until 1940 he lived at Darlington Hall, Devon, which had become a refuge for many artists escaping Nazi persecution. In 1945 he moved to London and taught at various schools, becoming Master of Sculpture at the Royal Academy schools in 1969. Soukop’s eclectic works were in the tradition of British Modernism and combined influences from Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Hans Coper and others. He preferred carving to modelling and produced figurative as well as abstract work characterised by harmonious and organic forms.
Sculptor Willi Soukop was born to an Austrian mother and Czech father in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 5 January 1907. His father, traumatised by action in the trenches during the First World War, drowned himself in the Danube shortly afterwards, leaving Soukop to supplement the family income. He became an apprentice to a local trader, carving umbrella handles and numerous small objects with great skill, while attending evening classes at the arts and crafts school in Vienna from 1921. By 1928 he had earned enough money to enter the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (1928–34), where he trained under Austrian, monumental sculptors Hans Bitterlich and Josef Muellner.
Soukop escaped Civil War in Austria after accepting an invitation to England in 1934 to spend three months at the progressive educational community at Dartington Hall, Devon, which in this period became a refuge for many artists and performers escaping Nazi persecution. He remained at Dartington until 1940, establishing his reputation and working as a part-time teacher in the school (1935–45). The works he produced during this time included the bust of pioneer Chinese dancer Dai Ailian (1939, Royal Academy of Dance), Donkey (1935) and, much later, the granite Swan Fountain (1950), commissioned for Dartington Hall gardens. He also created the masks for a performance of The Green Table by the German Kurt Jooss Ballet Company, which was in residence at Dartington, and met his future wife, the dancer and teacher Simone Moser. Other European exiles included Michael Chekhov (nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov) and his drama school, German stage director Hein Heckroth, and the celebrated potter Bernard Leach and his son David, with whom Soukop formed a lasting friendship and who taught him pottery.
Soukop first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1930 and with the progressive London Group in 1937. He also befriended the artist and gallery-owner Eardley Knollys, whose Storran Gallery gave Soukop his first one-man show in 1938, followed by another in March 1939 at the Stafford Gallery, St James, run by Viennese émigré gallerist Ala Story, which featured Soukop’s cement head of the Polish-Jewish refugee dancer, Pola Nirenska (1937, later gifted to the Ben Uri Collection). In the same year he contributed a blue limestone Head of a Woman to the Annual Exhibition of the National Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers and Potters, which was singled out for praise in the Times>/em> (6 February 1939, p. 12). The Elmhirsts gave him his largest show to that date at Dartington in March 1940. Soukop’s eclectic works were in the tradition of European Modernism and he cited Ernst Barlach as a major influence. A versatile artist, he preferred carving to modelling and worked in stone, wood, metal, clay, papier mâché and even ivory, producing figurative as well as abstract work characterised by harmonious and organic forms.
In June 1940 Soukop was among a small number of ‘enemy aliens’ shipped overseas to Commonwealth interment camps, spending nine months in a camp in Ottawa, Canada. Upon his return to Dartington he was offered the job of Art Master at Blundell's School, where he set up the sculpture department. In 1941 his terracotta Bird was included in the Exhibition of Sculpture, Pottery and Sculptors’ Drawings organised jointly by the Artists’ Internation Associaton (AIA) and Free German League of Culture (FGLC). In 1945 Soukop moved to London with his wife, teaching at Bromley School of Art (1945–46), then Guilford School of Art (1945–46) and Chelsea School of Art (1947–72). His teaching career culminated with the post as master of sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools (1969–82). Among his pupils were Anthony Caro, Elisabeth Frink and Faith Winter.
Soukop was commissioned to create three pieces for the Country Pavilion, designed by German-born graphic designer H. K. Henrion, another refugee from Nazism, as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951: his plaster Head of a Girl, and two large-scale works, a pair of hands (11-foot in size), and an immense plaster Oak Tree, complete with light-up singing birds, have not survived. He was among the numerous continental émigrés who participated in London County Council (LCC) open air sculpture exhibitions, which took place triennially at Battersea until 1960, and Holland Park in 1957 and 1966. He also received numerous public commissions, including for the Elmington Estate in Camberwell, creating a semi-abstract wall relief of joyful dancing children – as described in Browning’s poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin; the unveiling captured in a British Pathé newsreel in 1959. Soukop's other public commissions included a bronze bas relief for the Royal West of England Academy (1983) and a sculpture for the London Zoo (1990). Soukop was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1950, made a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1956 and elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1969. The RA’s longest serving exhibitor, he showed annually at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1935–1970, with the exception of the war years. A retrospective was held at the Belgrave Gallery, London, in 1991, then at the Woodlands Art Gallery, Blackheath, in 1993. In 1994, when he was 87, the Royal Academy celebrated his work in an exhibition of drawings and sculptures from the 1930s–1950s.
Willi Soukop died in Glasgow, Scotland on 8 February 1995. His work is represented in many UK collections, including Ben Uri, Tate and Royal Collection Trust and with numerous public monuments. Archive correspondence is held at Senate House Library, University of London, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies.
Willi Soukop in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Willi Soukop]
Publications related to [Willi Soukop] in the Ben Uri Library