Laurence Bradshaw
Laurence Bradshaw (1899–1978) was an English sculptor, printmaker and artist.[1] Bradshaw had been a socialist since his youth and had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1930s.[2]
Bradshaw joined the artist Frank Brangwyn as his assistant in the 1920s, Brangwyn himself had been an assistant to the socialist polymath William Morris.[2] Bradshaw designed several posters for London Transport from 1935 to 1937.[1]
In 1955 Bradshaw won the commission to design the monument to Karl Marx at his burial place in Highgate Cemetery.[2] Bradshaw designed the whole of Marx's monument including the plinth and the calligraphy of the texts on the monument, but did not sign the finished work. Bradshaw considered that his design must be "...not a monument to a man only but to a great mind and a great philosopher."[1][2] The tomb was designated a Grade I listed monument in 1974.[3]
Other notable communist figures that Bradshaw sculpted included the African-American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the Trinidadian musician and actor Edric Connor, the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid, and the British communist leader Harry Pollitt.[2]
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- 1899 births
- 1978 deaths
- Alumni of Liverpool John Moores University
- Alumni of the University of Liverpool
- Artists from Liverpool
- English communists
- English printmakers
- English sculptors
- Transport design in London
- 20th-century English painters
- 20th-century British sculptors
- Communist Party of Great Britain members
