The Geometry of Fear was an informal group or school of young British sculptors in the years after the Second World War. The term was coined by Herbert Read in 1952 in his description of the work of the eight British artists represented in the "New Aspects of British Sculpture" exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia of 1952.^[1][2]

The eight artists who exhibited "New Aspects of British Sculpture" in the British pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia of 1952 were Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull.^[3] All were under 40, with years of birth ranging from 1913 to 1924, and of a younger generation than established British sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. A large bronze by Moore, Double Standing Figure, stood outside the British pavilion, and contrasted strongly with the works inside. Unlike the smoothly carved work of Hepworth and Moore, these were angular, jagged, rough-textured or spiky. They were more linear and open; Philip Hendy compared Butler's sculptures to three-dimensional drawings.^[3] Many of the sculptures in the pavilion were of human or animal figures, and several showed the influence of the continental sculptors Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti, works by whom had been shown at the Anglo-French Art Centre in London in 1947.^[2] The British sculptures were seen as reflecting the angst, the anxieties and the guilt of the immediate post-War period, with the recent memory of the War, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the fear of nuclear proliferation and the effects of the Cold War.^[3]

In his catalogue description, Herbert Read wrote:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, of ragged claws "scuttling across the floors of silent seas", of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.^[4]

Read's quotation "scuttling across the floors of silent seas" is from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot and is a reference to Crab, a sculpture by Bernard Meadows in the exhibition.^[3] Read's words were widely quoted, and despite the differences in style and technique between the eight artists, they came to be known as the Geometry of Fear group.

While the Geometry of Fear group initially consisted only of the eight sculptors who exhibited in Venice in 1952, and never had any of the characteristics of an art movement, other artists have been associated with it, or thought to have been influenced by it. These include, among others, the sculptors Ralph Brown, Anthony Caro (in his early work), Robert Clatworthy, Hubert Dalwood, Elisabeth Frink, George Fullard, John Hoskin and Leslie Thornton, and the painter John Berger.^[3][8][9] The post-War paintings of Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland share some of the Atomic Age anxieties of the Geometry of Fear sculptors.^[3]