William Turnbull

London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, William Turnbull: New Sculpture and Paintings, September - November 1957, cat. no.23 (this cast);
London, Tate, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, 15th August - 7th October 1973, cat. no.29, illustrated (this cast);
London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 28th October - 21st November 1987, cat. no.6 illustrated (another cast).

Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, William Turnbull - Retrospective 1946-2003, 14 May - 9 October 2005 (this cast).

London, Tate, William Turnbull, 14 June – 26 November 2006 (another cast).

Bakewell, Chatsworth House, William Turnbull, 10 March – 30 June 2013 (this cast). 

Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, cat. no.67, p.98, illustrated (another cast).

Structurally sound. There are some very minor traces of very light surface dirt and matter to the feet area, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition with a richly varied patina. Housed on a 10cm. high stone plinth, with some very minor nicks and nips visible. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘I was very much concerned that a sculpture was an object and a painting was an object. The paintings I made were objects, they weren’t illusions. They didn’t refer to something else, they only refer to themselves, and so they were actually in the same area but they were made with different stuff’

(The Artist, in William Turnbull: Beyond Time, a film by Alex Turnbull and Peter Stern, 2013)

Turnbull is best known as one of the most significant British sculptors of the post-war period and yet for as long as he was a sculptor he was painter too, with the large abstracts he made in the late 1950s and early 1960s being some of the most daring and beautiful works painted in Britain, at a time when a number of our artists – Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, to name a few – were also making work to rival much of what was going on in Europe and, in particular, America.

Turnbull’s influence as a sculptor can be measured in the number of his works that can be found in major museum collections throughout the world, but perhaps more interestingly in his regular appearances in David Hockney’s iconic 60s paintings of California art collectors, such as Beverley Hills Housewife (1966-7, Private Collection) and, in particular, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968, Art Institute of Chicago). Here, on a patio in front of a modernist pavilion (swimming pool no doubt off stage-left), the Weisman’s pose not with a Calder or a David Smith, as one would expect, but with what then must have been the latest word in contemporary art, from the most exciting city on earth: a Turnbull (Hero 2: their Henry Moore is relegated by Hockney to the background).

Having left the Slade School of Art to live in Paris – where revered masters such as Giacometti could still be found – and approached – in the cafés of the Left Bank– Turnbull returned to London in the early 50s. His breakthrough came in 1952 when Herbert Read selected him to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, along with Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Palozzi, in an exhibition entitled New Aspects of British Sculpture. The show was an instant, international success, attracting interest from both major institutions and private collectors, especially in America.

As a sculptor, Turnbull was concerned throughout his career with the idea of archetypes – images that speak about the human condition, beyond time and without geographical boundary, both describing our presence in the world but also acting as intermediaries between us and the divine. (Something lost to industrial Western culture but preserved and very much ‘alive’ in non-European tribal art or the artefacts from ‘primitive’ cultures.) And yet the unforgiving brutality of Turnbull’s forms, the roughness of their surfaces, where the artists fingers can be seen to drag and work the matière, is absolutely modern, referencing both Brancusi and Giacometti, as well as Art Brut.

In 1955 Turnbull was introduced to American collector Donald Blinken, who bought Standing Female Figure (1955). Blinken would later become the chairman of the Rothko Foundation and, when interviewed for the recent Turnbull documentary, Beyond Time, noted that it was the only sculpture he thought ‘timeless’ enough to stand next to a Rothko.  When Turnbull visited New York in 1957, it was Blinken who introduced him to a number of the leading artists of the New York school, such as Rothko and Barnett Newman, a visit that was no doubt the catalyst for significant developments in Turnbull’s own painting.

His works of the early 50s – mainly monochromatic heads built from an armature of interlocking, architectonic bars – feel like a ‘sculptor’s painting’, in the same way the early graphic works of Turnbull’s friend and contemporary Eduardo Paolozzi do. From 1957 onwards, however, this figurative element dissolves, the grid of marks coalesces into a dense, impenetrable surface that stretches to the edge of the canvas. The work is reductive and minimal, about the power of colour (including all-white, all-black), exploring the boundaries between gestural abstraction, colour-field painting and even hard-edge abstraction, at the time the latest advance in American painting. In 24-1958, with its subtle shifts between rich areas of red, the black ‘zip’ squeezed from the tube that pulls this colour-field back from the deep to the surface, there is all this – and even a hint of early Op-Art, in the sensory vibration and after-image created by the green lozenge alone on the red.  And yet despite Turnbull’s endless experimentation, all of the paintings made in these break-through years, from 1957 through to 1960 and beyond, are clearly by the same hand, a hand that can be seen too in his sculpture: both modes of expression are bounded by a single and singular sensibility, pared-down so as to speak most clearly.