Dulce et decorum est

Michael Sandle is the Wilfred Owen of art, with his deeply felt sense of the futility of violence. John McEwen traces the career of this extraordinary artist ahead of his 88th birthday

- John McEwen

MICHAEL SANDLE is a great man and a great artist with a conscience-stricken sense of outrage at the futility of violence, which gives an extra edge to his imaginative genius. The word 'genius' does not exactly spring to mind when viewing some of the recent trivialisations of sculpture in England, but, in Prof Sandle's case, I am deploying it with precision and from solid.

comparative evidence... '[his] drawings are among the most beautiful and haunting of the 20th century and have to be considered on equal terms with the sculpture' This tribute to the monumental sculptor could not be more authoritative. Bryan Robertson (1925-2002), as post-war director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, was the most artistically influential British curator of his time. This emerges clearly from a new book to which I have contributed the foreword, Michael Sandle: Works on Paper. It was published ahead of the artist's 88th birthday on May 18-through the initiative of writer and curator Jon Wood, formerly of the Henry Moore Institute, and with support from the Isle of Man Arts Council-and comes 22 years after my own The Sculpture of Michael Sandle. Mr Wood devotes the book, adeptly designed by Peter McGrath, to 250 drawings, watercolours and prints, with explanatory captions by the sculptor.

At the outset of his career, Prof Sandle vowed to try to make at least one monumental masterpiece every decade. Described by art historian Marco Livingstone as a 'radical traditionalist', he has fulfilled his ambition, despite the efforts of commissioning committees a task he has called 'like climbing Everest on a pogo stick'. He is famed abroad to an exceptional extent for an English artist and has spent a fair part of his career overseas, especially in Germany,