Horses Fleeing

Pamela Boden

Pamela Boden lived and exhibited in Paris in the 1930's and was associated with the Surrealists. She was a close friend in Paris of avant-garde Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks and composer Stanley Bate (to whom Glanville-Hicks was married, despite his being openly gay). Boden designed the decor for Bate's 1939 revival of 'Perseus.'

Boden's work from the late 1940s to the 1960s was greatly influenced by Surrealism and Cubism, and by the time she began creating three dimensional works, the tone of her style also echoed the organic forms found in nature, especially of the high desert of New Mexico where she lived from 1946 to 1955.

"Horses Fleeing" was exhibited with 6 other sculptures in 1978 through the Australia Music Centre in Sydney with the help of composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Australian music expert and author James Murdoch. Each sculpture had a short composition written for it, each by a different composer.

“Horses Fleeing” was exhibited with a composition by Australian Aboriginal actor, composer, author, and dancer David Gulpilil (1953-2021) to be played on a didgeridoo. Unfortunately, we have been unable to locate a recording or copy of the composition.

Pamela Boden was born in Derbyshire, England on April 23, 1905. She was principally home-tutored except for one year at Heathfield. When she was seventeen, her family moved to Germany, where she studied music and art in Dresden and Munich. She also studied life drawing in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1927, Boden moved to the South of France where she began an irreverent novel, Persian Paradise; while never published, her writing set the tone for the attitude she displayed in her future work, whatever the form. Returning to Paris she met the avant garde Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Among of her circle of friends were the Surrealists, Dadaists, and Cubists including sculptors Hans (Jean) Arp and Ossip Zadkine and the painter Albert Gleizes. Another close friend was the Portuguese writer and film maker Virginia de Castro e Almeida with whom Boden began a relationship that lasted until Virginia’s death.

At age twenty-seven, Boden began to carve decorative panels but soon turned to three-dimensional sculpture. In 1936 she had her first one-woman show in Paris at a small gallery and exhibited at La Salon d’Automne with Albert Gleizes’s group. Stanley Bate had joined the Arts Theatre group at the end of 1939 and revived his score for the ballet Perseus. Boden designed the decor and costumes for Perseus and Keith Lester provided the choreography and Harold (Hal) Turner danced the title role. Perseus was performed in London on July 2, 1940 at The Arts Theatre Club. During this time Boden was living on the Ile St. Louis in the apartment Louis Süe had designed for Helena Rubinstein.

In 1938, Pamela and Virginia moved to Portugal where Pamela illustrated a number of Virginia’s books and exhibited her sculpture in Lisbon. In November of 1940 Boden, Antonio Dacosta and Antonio Pedro organized the first Surrealist exhibition, titled EXPoem Esculture e Pintura at Repe House in Lisbon, Portugal, which was a key exhibition in Portugal for modernism. Boden exhibited six of her carved and assembled wooden sculptures.

After Virginia died in 1945 Boden immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. In 1946 she exhibited in a two-person show titled 5 Sculptures / Pamela Bodin (sic) / Clyfford Still: First Exhibition - Paintings from February 12 to March 7 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery at 30 West 57th Street.