Sculptor born in Dalston, London. In c.1891 he was working as a haberdasher’s assistant but by 1900 was studying art at the North London School of Drawing and Modelling, Camden Town. In that year he won a two-year scholarship from the British Institution and gained entry into the Royal College of Art (RCA). After completing his course, he stayed on as an assistant to Professor Edouard Lantéri. In 1905, he was among the second wave of sculptors invited, ‘without further nomination’, to join the Society (later Royal Society) of British Sculptors (RBS); he was elected a Fellow in 1923. His earliest known public sculpture commission was for two stone panels with high-relief figures of a boy and girl to flank the window over the main entrance of Rowland Plumbe’s Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital Out-Patients’ Department in Bolsover Street, London (opened 1909; demolished c.2010; panels reinstalled on the new hospital building in Greenwell Street). In 1911, he executed the sculptural decoration for Arthur Beresford Pite’s new entrance for the Burlington Arcade, Piccadilly (Pite was professor of architecture at the RCA during Clemens’s time as assistant teacher of modelling). Clemens had begun showing his work at the annual Royal Academy (RA) exhibitions in 1902 and thereafter maintained a regular presence until 1944, when he seems to have retired as an active sculptor, his membership of the RBS being reclassified as honorary in 1946. His early RA exhibits were mostly imaginative subjects, a number of them selected for illustration in Academy Architecture and Architectural Review: Sappho (1902), Eurydice (1906), Andromeda (1907; praised by the critic, M.H. Spielmann ‘on account of its grace, refinement, and expression’), Aurora (1908), Kephalos and Prokris (1910), Immolate (1912) and Galatea (1913). After 1919 these subjects are joined by titles which reflect his First World War experiences (he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps [RAMC]): “Miserere mei Deus” (1289) and Remembrance (1926) and, most poignantly, following the outbreak of the Second World War: Unmoved, Unshaken, Unterrified (1941). In 1920, he participated in two exhibitions of work produced by former members of the RAMC organised by Lieutenant-Colonel F.S. Brereton. The first, in 1919, was at the Army Medical War Museum, the second, in 1920, was at the Imperial War Museum which purchased two of his bronzes for its collection: St John’s Ambulance Bearers (1919; cat. no. Art.IWM ART 2777) and A VAD Worker (1920; cat. no. Art.IWM ART 3572). As with many sculptors of his generation, the post-war years provided commissions for war memorials: Clemens contributed the figures to two designed by his old colleague, Beresford Pite: Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester, and Canterbury, Kent (both unveiled in 1921); and also to Stockwell, south London, designed by Frank T. Dear (1922); and, along with sculptor William Fagan, to Royston, Hertfordshire, by P. Morley Horder (1922). In these years Clemens also carved the sculptural decoration for Trehearne and Norman’s Africa House, Kingsway, London (1921–22). His last major commission appears to have been the six colossal lions in concrete, which adorned the steps of the Government Pavilion at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (two of them are today sited near the entrance to Woburn Abbey’s Animal Kingdom). Following Clemens’s death in 1957, a letter signed ‘G.L.’ (thought to be Gilbert Ledward) appeared in The Times, the writer announcing himself as one of Clemens’s former RCA students. ‘Professor Lantéri’, he wrote, ‘was an enthusiastic master, but Clemens was even more enthusiastic in his fiery and forthright criticisms,’ adding, ‘but he was also warmhearted and kindly and all his students loved him.’ Nevertheless, G.L. thought Clemens’s devotion to pedagogy had come at too high a cost, noting ruefully that his ‘career was sacrificed to his teaching duties and he never received the recognition he deserved’.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 112, 113, 429; Mapping Sculpture; R.B.S. Modern British Sculpture (Country Life Ltd), London, 1939, pl. 19 (British Empire Exhibition Lion); M.H. Spielmann, ‘The Fine Art Section’, in Sir I. Spielmann (comp.), Souvenir of the Fine Art Section. Franco-British Exhibition 1908, [London], [1908], pp. 83–83; The Times, 7 January 1958, p. 11 (letter of tribute from ‘G.L.’); Wikipedia: ‘Benjamin Clemens’; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 340, 442.
Terry Cavanagh, 2007; revised, August 2024
