In her book about her life and work (London 1976) the sculptor Karin Jonzen recalled: 'My father, seeing my future as a possible Punch cartoonist, packed me off to the Slade School of Art - to my great dismay at the time.' At the Slade she won a scholarship, and then undertook further training in Paris, and at the Royal Academy. Stockholm. She was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1939 (competing against Kenneth Armitage), and, nine years later, she won the Royal Society of British Sculptors' award for a woman artist (founded by a bequest from Feodora Gleichen).
Jonzen makes figures and busts in terracotta and bronze. Her work may appear conservative next to some twentieth-century sculpture, but she described in her book making a deliberate choice of subject matter and media as a student. Although Jonzen shared the distaste that a number of her contemporaries felt for what she called 'the white marble bodies of the Victorian era, third hand in conception, being attempts to improve on Roman copies of Greek sculpture', she did not believe that this should make her reject figuration. 'It seemed to me that to turn away from the figure altogether, as my contemporaries were beginning to do, simply because one did not care for the way it had been handled before, was unthoughtful, akin to turning away from religious feelings simply because of the manner of the priests.1 In the catalogue for Jonzen's 1974 exhibition at the Fieldborne Gallery. London, Carel Weight described her as 'one of the small band of important sculptors left in the country who derive their inspiration from the human figure and are strong enough to resist the trend of fashionable art.'
Jonzen won a number of public commissions, in London for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Barbican Centre, for the World Health Organization in New Delhi and Geneva, for Selwyn College Chapel, Cambridge University, and for churches including St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London, and Guildford Cathedral. Her portrait sitters have included Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Scofield, Max von Sydow and Dame Ninette de Valois. |
