Footnotes

Provenance
Lord Alistair McAlpine
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 24 November 2004, lot 283, where acquired by the present owners

Exhibited
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, cat.no.L.275 (on loan)
Edinburgh, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Beyond Appearance, 2007 (catalogue untraced)

Although better known now as a sculptor, William Turnbull is an artist who excelled in both three - and two - dimensional practices. His output as a painter spanned his entire career and whilst he tended to work at any given period in either one or other discipline rather than concurrently, there was always synergy between his sculptural and painterly process. This is certainly true of his work of the mid-1960s. His sculptures of this period are underpinned by a conceptual approach and adopt inorganic forms executed in steel and painted boldly in single all-over tones. As we see in the present example, his paintings of the mid-1960s speak the same language.

Writing on the occasion of Turnbull's Tate 1973 exhibition, Richard Morphet explains that the artist's aim was: 'to potentialise a single colour surface without making shapes or compositions, and to give the spectator an experience which was highly particular, without the painting being perceived as simply an object.' (Richard Morphet, William Turnbull, Sculpture and Painting, Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1973, p.44).

Turnbull himself elaborates 'I do not consider myself a 'hard-edge' painter, nor am I concerned with geometric abstraction. I am concerned with the canvas as a continuous field, where the edge created by the meeting of coloured areas is more the tension in a field than the boundary of a shape.' (William Turnbull, 'Images without Temples', Living Arts 1, 1963, p.15).

The present canvas previously resided in the collection of politician and businessman Lord Alistair McAlpine of the McAlpine construction family. Lord McAlpine formed several major and wide-ranging collections, including a modern British sculpture collection which he donated to the Tate Gallery in 1971, featuring several important Turnbull sculptures such as 5 x 1 (1966), Parallels (1967), and Butt (1966).

We are grateful to the Estate of the Artist for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.