RAYMOND MASON (1922–2010)

Raymond Mason, a British sculptor whose teeming street scenes and narrative tableaux evoked an animated world of ordinary people caught up in the drama of daily life, died on February 14 at his home in Paris, writes the New York Times. He was eighty-seven.

Mason’s narrative, realist style made him something of an outsider in the United States but in Britain and France, where he received major exhibitions, he was held in high regard as a sculptor in the grand tradition extending from the Romanesque carvers to Rodin.

The somber, spectral figures of his modestly scaled early work, descending into the Paris metro or crowding the streets of the Left Bank, gave way to massed Technicolor figures, sometimes freestanding, whose faces and emotions were depicted with the pinpoint accuracy of a Daumier caricature—or the cartoonish style of R. Crumb.

In 1946, Mason moved to Paris, where he became acquainted with the principal artistic and literary figures of the day, notably Giacometti, whose influence on him was profound, Balthus, Picasso, Dubuffet, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He left a lively record of this period in his memoir, At Work in Paris: Raymond Mason on Art and Artists (2003).

He executed numerous works of public sculpture, often on a monumental scale, including the ninety-nine seething figures of The Crowd, twice cast in bronze and installed in the Tuileries in Paris and along East Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan.

In 1960, he opened an art gallery with his wife, Janine Hao.