W illiam Turnbull is perhaps best known as one of the most significant British sculptors of the post-war period. Both sculptor and painter, the large abstracts he made in the late 1950s and early 1960s are some of the most daring and beautiful works ever painted during this time in Britain. William Turnbull, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon; to name a few, were creating work that rivalled the output of the New York art scene.

The number of works found in major museum collections throughout the world is indicative of Turnbull’s influence as a sculptor. Perhaps more interesting, is the appearance of his sculptures in David Hockney’s iconic paintings of California art collectors from the 1960s, such as Beverley Hills Housewife (1966-7, Private Collection) and, in particular, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968, Art Institute of Chicago). Here, the Weismans pose not with an Alexander Calder or David Smith but with the latest word in contemporary art, from the most exciting city on earth: a Turnbull (their Henry Moore is relegated to the background). Eagerly collected by the most important American collectors of the 1960s and 70s, Turnbull was regularly shown in New York exhibitions alongside Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Turnbull left the Slade School of Art to live in Paris, where revered masters such as Alberto Giacometti could still be found and befriended in the cafés of the Left Bank. Turnbull returned to London in the early 50s and his breakthrough came soon after, at the 1952 Venice Biennale, when Herbert Read selected him along with Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and others, in an exhibition entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture. While the exhibition was an instant, international success, attracting interest from both major institutions and private collectors, Turnbull could not afford to travel to the Biennale and was working night shifts at an ice cream factory.

As a sculptor, Turnbull was concerned with archetypes; images that describe our presence in the world and act as intermediaries between us and the divine. An aspect lost to industrial Western culture but preserved and very much ‘alive’ in non-European tribal art or the artefacts from ‘primitive’ cultures. Simultaneously, his work remains absolutely modern. The rough surfaces of Turnbull’s sculptures (where the artist’s fingers can be seen to drag and work the matière) reference both Brancusi and Giacometti as well as Art Brut.

In 1955 Turnbull was introduced to American collector Donald Blinken, who purchased Standing Female Figure (1955). Turnbull introduced Blinken to the work of Mark Rothko. Blinken would subsequently arrange for the two artists to meet in person. Undoubtably, an encounter that was the catalyst for significant developments in Turnbull’s own painting. Blinken noted in the documentary, Beyond Time, that Turnbull’s was the only sculpture he thought ‘timeless’ enough to stand next to a Rothko and in fact Rothko himself had commented to Blinken that, "Bill’s work has a timeless quality."

Turnbull’s paintings of the early 1950s – mainly monochromatic heads built from an armature of interlocking, architectonic bars – certainly reflect developments in his sculpture.

However, from 1957 onwards this figurative element dissolves and the grid of marks coalesces into a dense, impenetrable surface that stretches to the edge of the canvas. The work is reductive and minimal (including all-white, all-black) and explores the boundaries between gestural abstraction, colour-field painting and hard-edge abstraction. As the hegemony of abstraction and minimalism began to waver during the 80s and 90s, Turnbull remained a resolute modernist, becoming even more reductive.

A Tate Retrospective of 1973, stretching back to the work of his student days, confirmed Turnbull’s consistency of approach through his years of production. His work was shown widely around the world with a selective retrospective at the Sepentine Gallery in 1995, a major exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2005 and the Tate Duveen Galleries in 2006. A large-scale exhibition was shown at Chatsworth House in 2013 and his work is currently on exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Past Auction

William Turnbull - The Eternal Now: Works from the Artist’s Estate

10–17 June 2020 | 2:00 PM BST | London