Ronald Moody

Ronald Moody (12 August 1900 – 6 February 1984) was a Jamaican-born sculptor, specialising in wood carvings. His work features in collections including the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain in London, as well as the National Gallery of Jamaica. He was the brother of anti-racist campaigner Harold Moody and award-winning physiologist Ludlow Moody.

Biography

Moody was born Ronald Clive Moody in 1900 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a well-off professional family. He attended Calabar College, Jamaica, moving to England in 1923 to study dentistry at King's College London, obtaining his degree in 1930."Ronald Moody: Sculpture and interwar Britain"
The Equiano Centre, UCL, 16 June 2015. In London, he was inspired by the British Museum's collection of non-Western art and decided to become a sculptor. Early experiments with clay led him to teach himself how to carve. He produced his first carved figure in oak wood. Entitled ''Wohin'' (meaning in German "where to?”, the name of a song by Schubert),Manheim, James
"Moody, Ronald 1900–1984"
''Contemporary Black Biography'', 2002. Encyclopedia.com. that sculpture was bought by Marie Seton in 1935.

Among Moody's most famous works from this period was his great female head, ''Midonz'' (1937),''Midonz''
at The African & Asian Visual Artists Archive. which he described as "the goddess of transmutation". By the late 1930s, he had accumulated an impressive collection of work and had a solo show in Paris, France. The success of the show encouraged him to move to Paris in 1938. That year, 12 major sculptures were sent to the Harmon Foundation in the United States to be included in exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. Moody's success in France was cut short by the onset of the Second World War. In 1940, two days before Paris fell to the Germans, he was forced to flee the city, abandoning his sculptures.Ronald Moody - Artist biography
Tate website. (They were retrieved after the war, along with the works that had been sent to the US for exhibition.)

After having escaped from Paris, Moody travelled through occupied France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and eventually arrived back in England in October 1941. His Paris success followed him to London, where he resumed his work after the war and had a one-man show in May 1946 at the Arcade Gallery, off Bond Street. In 1946 he cast a bronze head of his eldest brother Harold Moody (1882–1947, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples).

From 1950 until the early 1960s regular London exhibitions brought Ronald Moody a growing presence on the British art scene. In 1964 he created a sculpture called ''Savacou'' for the University of the West Indies (UWI), a stylised depiction of a bird, which is sited on the UWI campus at Mona, Jamaica. He is among those artists associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement