Willi (Wilhelm Josef) Soukop (1907–1995)

Sculptor. Born in Vienna to an Austrian mother and a Czech father, he became an apprentice engraver before studying sculpture at evening classes. He then enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art (1928–34), where his teachers were Hans Bitterlich and Josef Müllner. His early works were mainly nude figures in the tradition of Georg Kolbe and Emil Barlach. In 1934 he was invited to spend three months at Dartington Hall in Devon, but, because of the deteriorating conditions in Vienna, he decided to stay on as a teacher there, and was much influenced by the ‘visionary’ style of the painter Cecil Collins, and by the artistic cosmopolitanism of Dartington. During the Second World War he was interned in Canada, but after the war returned to Dartington and proceeded to set up sculpture courses at the public schools, Blundells and Bryanston. In 1945 Soukop moved to London, teaching at Bromley, Guildford and Chelsea Art Schools. In 1949 and 1950 he showed work at the Battersea Park open air sculpture exhibitions. Soukop carried out several commissions for the Leicestershire Education Authority in the 1950s, creating sculptures intended to enhance the authority’s new school and college buildings: examples include Euterpe (1949), purchased for Sarson High School, Melton Mowbray, 1952; three sets of glazed earthenware relief panels illustrating the Signs of the Zodiac, installed c.1957 at The Martin High School, Anstey, Burleigh Community College, Loughborough, and Guthlaxton Community College, Wigston; and The Spirit of Adventure, for Loughborough College (now Loughborough University), purchased 1958. His other public sculptures include Mother and Child, Whitelands College, University of Roehampton, south London (1951); Donkey, Pittmans Field, Harlow, Essex (model, 1935; cast in bronze by the Fiorini Art Bronze Foundry, Fulham, 1955); The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Caspian Street, Camberwell, south London (1959); Kett’s Oak (relief in sandstone), Station Road, Cambridge (1962–63); Man and Woman, Albany House, Petty France, Westminster (erected 1964); and a bust of William Cobbett, the garden of the Museum of Farnham, Hampshire (unveiled 1965). His stone sculpture of an Owl (1961–62), after being exhibited at the Royal Academy, was purchased for the Tate Gallery through the Chantrey Bequest.

Soukop was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1956. From 1969, when he was elected a Royal Academician, to 1982, he was master of sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools. Soukop worked in a variety of styles, influenced by British and European modernism, as well as by the craft traditions of Central Europe. Towards the end of his life, Soukop gave instruction in life classes held in a London studio which had belonged to his friend, the sculptor Arthur Fleischmann.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. xix, xvii, 1–2, 201, 227, 242, 284, 285; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 225–26, 313; Henry Moore Institute Newsletter, No. 45 (December 2022–January 2003): ‘The Willi Soukop Archive’; The Independent, 9 February 1995 (obituary); D. Olsen (ed.), Sculpture in Harlow, Harlow, 2005, p. 88; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 16, 114–15; W.J. Strachan, Open Air Sculpture in Britain, London, 1984, pp. 50, 126, 214, 273; The Times, 9 February 1995, p. 21 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, p. 218; P. Ward-Jackson, 92-96 Carlton Hill. A House and its History, London, 2014.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025