William Turnbull born 1922

Executed in 1955 in an edition of four, Idol 1 begins the series of monolithic pieces that Turnbull made in plaster and then cast in bronze between 1955 and 1958, returning again to the theme in 1979.

In his introduction to the Serpentine catalogue of Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings, David Sylvester contends that the word 'hieratic' is often misused in describing works of art, yet that in Turnbull's case its use is justified: "an alluring word... used to designate any frontal, symmetrical, compact, simplified, static image with a somewhat autocratic look. The word's true sense, consistent with its etymology, has to do with what is priestly - more broadly with what pertains to sacred persons or functions" (Merrell Holberton, London, 1995, p.9).

Turnbull was committed, as were many of his fellow sculptors in the 1950s, to a modernist tradition that sought to elevate primitive forms and visual precepts above the classical Greek ones as venerated by the artists of the Renaissance. Patrick Elliott (ibid. p.34) describes the Idol figures of the latter 1950s as "unambiguously frontal", in the manner of Archaic Greek and ancient Egyptian art. This was Turnbulls' attempt to have the piece dominate space and radiate out into it: Giacometti thought the same effect of primary importance, once observing ''You don't walk around a person when you meet, so why do it in sculpture?'' (quoted ibid.) Turnbull's Idols can thus be interpreted as figures, forbidding and aloof, and with defined and differing backs, sides and fronts, yet they nonetheless defy narrative. The artist himself later offered a succint directive - "The work must be perceived instantly, not read in time" (Notes on Sculpture, 'Studio International', November 1968, quoted ibid.)