Beschreibung:

Garden statues/sculpture: A monumental carved sandstone figure of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev mid 20th century 250cm high. The following lot originally stood on the roof of the Communist Party Headquarters in Prague, and was removed following the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1991. In 1950 a set of six statues were commissioned of which this is one. Each was carved from a two ton block of sandstone, and since Czechoslovakia had recently become a Communist satellite, they fulfilled a primarily propaganda role in glorifying the exploits of the October 1917 revolution. Given pride of place on the parapet of the Communist party headquarters, which later became the Lenin Museum, they were carved collectively by three of the leading Czechoslovakian sculptors of the time, Svata Hajerova, Irena Sedlecka and Ludvig Kodym. All three were awarded the prize of City of Prague and were Laureates of the State Prize for previous achievements. Of the three, Irena Sedlecka is the only one still living. She went on to become a well-known sculptor in the West. Born in 1928 in Plzeò, Czechoslovakia, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and was awarded the Lenin Prize for sculpture before fleeing the communist regime in 1967. Her first private commission in Britain, in 1975, was from Kathleen Hunt of Walthamstow, for a 70cm resin statue of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus (The Madonna). She has sculpted many monumental portraits and busts since, including Freddie Mercury of Queen, now in Montreux, Switzerland; Beau Brummell in Piccadilly, London, and many in private collections. (Her statue of Mercury served as a model for the large illuminated statue that currently dominates the front of the Dominion Theatre in London since the May 2002 premiere of the musical, We Will Rock You.) Commissioned portrait heads include Laurence Olivier (she also modelled the huge head used for his appearance in Dave Clark’s musical Time at the Dominion Theatre), Donald Sinden, Paul Eddington, Richard Briers, Jimmy Edwards, Ted Moult, Bobby Charlton, Lord Litchfield and Sir Frank Whittle. In August 1992 her work was shown at the Czech Embassy in London as part of an exhibition devoted to the work of five distinguished Czech émigré sculptors. She has been married several times, lastly to the sculptor Franta Belsky who died in 2000. In late 2010, visual artist Aleksandra Mir befriended Sedlecká. A series of interviews in the following spring led to the publication of a monograph on Sedlecká’s life and work together with an unsolicited proposal of bringing the statue, now exiled in Montreux, back to London on temporary loan and to place it on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar square. The idea has been met with varying reactions while the petition continues to gather signatures from all over the world. She is a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev 1887 -1919 was a celebrated Russian soldier and Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War. During World War I, he fought as a non-commissioned officer and was awarded the Cross of St. George three times. In September 1917, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). In December he was elected commander of the 138 Infantry Regiment by a vote of the regiment’s soldiers. He later commanded the 2nd Nikolaev Division and the 25th Rifle Division. On September 5, 1919, the divisional headquarters near Lbishchensk (now renamed Chapayev in his honour) were ambushed by White Army forces. According to official sources, Chapayev tried to escape by swimming across the Ural River, but was never again seen alive. His body was never recovered, but the town where he died was later renamed Chapaev, and a museum was established in 1927. After the Soviet Union had been established, Chapayev was immortalized by Soviet propaganda as a hero of the Russian Civil War. In 1923, a Russian writer, Dmitriy Furmanov, who served as a commissar in Chapayev’s division wrote a popular novel entit