Alan Durst - Career

Career

After leaving art school Durst became Curator of the George Frederic Watts Museum in Compton from 1919 to 1920. He left that museum to take up sculpture and wood carving on a full-time basis, and taught wood carving at the Royal College of Art from 1925 to 1940 and from 1945 to 1948. Durst had his first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1930 and another in 1935. He was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy. We learn from Durst's Tate Britain Archive papers that when Durst returned to his studies after the 1914-1918 war he was very much drawn to the concept of "Direct Carving" as advocated by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. He also states that he was an admirer of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska the French sculptor killed in action in 1915.

George Pace, an English architect who worked with Dunst wrote of his philosophical approach towards sculpting:

In 1964 when he had finished carving seven statues for the upper part of Peterborough Cathedral he told me that in his early days when he wanted to learn “direct carving” he found that the art schools of the day could only teach him modelling; for it was still the fashion for sculptors to make models which were then translated into stone or marble by technicians using pointers and masons’ skills. After World War 1 the more realistic approach to sculpture enabled him to learn the techniques of direct carving and this equipped him to devote the rest of his life to spirited direct carving in stone, wood and ivory. From the summer of 1914 his life ambition was to complete a series of statues carved in the spirit he had extracted from Chartres.

He was appointed a member of The British School at Rome in 1945- Faculty of Sculpture.