Lightness of Being: The Works of William Turnbull

W hat are these tall, sharp-tipped objects, plunging headlong into solid blocks of stone? They are lean, strong and purposeful, like a knife. They share their shape with things seen in nature too; a folded leaf, perhaps, a petal or a seedpod. When viewed in sequence, you notice they are repetitive but irregular, like a single letter practiced over and over again in different shades of ink.

But unlike a letter, plant or tool, William Turnbull’s Blade Venus sculptures do not have any fixed function or hidden meaning. Instead they have what David Sylvester has described as an ‘incredible lightness of being’; as though Turnbull has asked himself: ‘How little substance can a structure have and still hold its own in space?^’1 Like their suggestive titles, they are deliberately ambiguous, and yet somehow not vague. They guide us onto paths in our imaginations, leaving us free to explore them at will. In 1984, five years before Turnbull began the Blade Venus series, he said, “You can never understand every work of art completely. Each time you encounter it you have a new experience. The mystery is in this elusiveness.”²

Looking is a process, Turnbull believed, in which the viewer must play an active part. He was never interested in making naturalistic sculpture in the Greco-Roman tradition, where narrative triumphs over form and physicality. Nor was he interested in pure form alone, like many modernists. Revealing a private dream-world, as the surrealists or neo-Romantics endeavoured to do, held no appeal for him either. He was concerned instead with the way sculpture conflates both image and object; and how each informs the other. “I have always been very interested in this idea of metamorphosis,” he said in 1998. “Ambiguity can give the image a wide frame of reference [which] creates cross-reference between something that looks like an object and that looks like an image. For me in making sculpture there is always that tension.”³ He wanted his art to be experienced, not appreciated in aesthetic terms alone.

Born in Dundee in 1922, Turnbull left school at 15 after his father lost his job in the shipyards. Working as a labourer during the day, he took art classes in the evening, and soon got a job as a commercial illustrator. In 1941, he joined the RAF as a pilot. He was posted to Canada, Sri Lanka and India; when he was demobilised five years later, he settled in London. Though he avoided making work that directly reflected his war-time experiences, it was while flying that he became aware that “the world didn’t any longer look like a Dutch landscape: it looked like an abstract painting. You looked down and you realised that so much of what one felt was true depended upon where you were standing to look at it.”⁴

In London, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. Uninspired by the strict technical teaching, he swiftly transferred his allegiance from painting to sculpture. His most valuable lessons came from the British Museum, however, which captivated him far more than any teacher ever would. “I just thought it was the most extraordinary place,” he once recalled, “the further back the exhibits were, the more modern they looked.”⁵ He left the Slade prematurely to live for two years in Paris, then the most important artistic centre in Europe. There, he found the art world open and congenial, and he was able to meet and exchange ideas with artists he admired: Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi and Fernand Leger among them.

Turnbull developed a way of thinking about art that was generous and non-hierarchical, encompassing not only the way an artwork is created, but how it is received too. When he travelled to Italy for the first time, he was impressed by the way art was integrated into the streets, and encountered as part of the everyday. He was troubled by the prevailing idea that art had progressively improved over time, and that this should determine the context in which it was viewed; he found ‘primitive art’ a patronising and erroneous term: “The people were primitive in technology but not as artists. Their art was very, very good.”⁶ His sources of inspiration were always diverse, ranging from comic books to Cycladic fragments to skateboards. For a long time, he never kept sketchbooks or notebooks, preferring to leave himself open to “hazards and chance remarks of conversation” and “the peripheral glance, the observation from the corner of my eye”.⁷

In spite of these diverse interests, his retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1973 revealed consistencies that surprised even Turnbull himself. Certain images acted as a kind of “trigger” - his word - for sculpture, such as a person balancing something on their head, or the horses of the Parthenon. Knowing that the history of sculpture was full of repeated motifs, he saw how there was huge potential for variation within a particular theme. Moving away from the sleek minimalist steel forms that had preoccupied him since the 1960s, he began to create small, quickly executed figures in clay that revisited work from years before, trusting that the process of making would take the original idea to a new place. From these emerged person-sized sculptures made from plaster, then cast into bronze, that echoed the standing figures he had made during the 1950s, such as Idol 2 and Idol 4 (both 1956), now in the collection of Tate Britain.

In these late works, he made the connections to the things that triggered them more tangible than before. In the Blade Venus series, for instance, the shape of blade goes undisguised; in Ancestral Figure, references to the human body are clear. Turnbull is exploring metamorphosis, playing with the idea that art can render the prosaic object near-sacred. The heavily worked surfaces of the sculptures hint at the alchemy of the artist’s touch, while their clear relation to things seen in ordinary life reminds the spectator of their own power to endow impassive objects with special meaning, according to the context in which they are seen. As David Sylvester put it, “There’s a quality in some of Turnbull’s figures which creates an expectation that, if some of them were placed in a simple well-lit building, it would become a temple.”⁸

The formal economy with which Turnbull executed these later sculptures is notable, and may owe something to his interest in Eastern art and philosophy, which developed during the 1950s. He was also a painter, and his talent for describing complex sensations in graceful, calligraphic gestures can be seen in his illustrations for The Garden of Caresses (1970); apposite complements to the poetry’s succinct sensuality. The Blade Venus sculptures certainly have the clarity and elegance of a deftly inked character, yet such comparisons should not be taken too far. For despite their sense of authority, their affinity to signs and symbols, Turnbull’s sculptures are never illustrative or descriptive. They are invitations to the imagination: they stimulate, rather than state. “I have always felt that an idea is a good place to start,” he once said, “but not a good place to finish.”⁹

1 D. Sylvester, ‘Introduction: Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings’, Serpentine Gallery, London 1995, p. 9
2 W. Turnbull quoted in A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, London 2005, p. 74
3 William Turnbull in conversation with Colin Renfrew, Waddington Galleries, 6 May 1998
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 W. Turnbull, quoted in A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, London 2005, p. 9
7 W. Turnbull, quoted in R. Morphet, William Turnbull, Sculpture and Painting, Tate Gallery, London 1973, p. 25 8 D. Sylvester, ‘Introduction: Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings’, Serpentine Gallery, London 1995, p. 9
9 William Turnbull in conversation with Colin Renfrew, Waddington Galleries, 6 May 1998

Past Auction

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

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