Born in Hertfordshire to parents who ran the Buntingford Union Workhouse, Reg Butler studied and taught at the Architectural Association School in London during the 1930s. A conscientious objector during World War II, he set up a small blacksmith business so that he would be exempt from military service. Butler worked repairing and making farm tools and agricultural machinery, and his iron-forging skills are visible in his early sculptures.
In 1948, Butler worked as an assistant to his neighbour at the time, Henry Moore, and began to develop his own distinctive style as a sculptor. He abandoned his architectural training and worked as an artist, first exhibiting at The Hanover Gallery, London, in 1949, and then at the South Bank Exhibition as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Butler’s sculptures were included in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952, alongside works by Robert Adams, Geoffrey Clarke, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows; as part of the new movement in British sculpture – termed by the critic Herbert Read as the ‘Geometry of Fear’ – Butler’s work had a contorted and brutalised quality, reflective of the mood of post-war Britain.
Throughout his career, Butler’s prime focus was the human form. His early figurative work used metal frameworks to suspend a contrastingly naturalistic and modelled figure in space. From the 1950s, Butler’s bronze works show more tangible volume and texture, though his continued preoccupation with line is visible in the tense and contorted poses of his nude figures. His female nudes are often headless or with incomplete limbs which taper off to a point; their poses explore the stress and strain undergone by the female form: tying of hair, dressing and undressing, bending forward and twisting sideways. Solely preoccupied with the female nude in his later career, Butler’s figures became more realistic, though he also produced numerous African-inspired nudes akin to fetish figures, which he considered as descendants of the Venus of Willendorf and Lespugue.
Butler was one of the most revered British sculptures of his generation, and taught at the Slade School of Art for three decades. His work is found in major public collections worldwide; with several of his works held by the Tate Gallery in London, who held an extensive retrospective exhibition following his death, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.