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Lot 45AR,TP
William Turnbull(British, 1922-2012)Sculpture 143 cm. (56 1/4 in.) high
Amended
21 June 2023, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £119,780 inc. premium
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William Turnbull (British, 1922-2012)
Sculpture
stamped with monogram, numbered and dated '3/4 T 56' (on the base)
bronze with a brown patina
143 cm. (56 1/4 in.) high
Conceived in 1956 in an edition of 4 plus one artist's cast, and cast circa 2008 by Livingstone Art Foundry
stamped with monogram, numbered and dated '3/4 T 56' (on the base)
bronze with a brown patina
143 cm. (56 1/4 in.) high
Conceived in 1956 in an edition of 4 plus one artist's cast, and cast circa 2008 by Livingstone Art Foundry
Footnotes
Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London
With Alan Wheatley Art, London, from whom acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
Exhibited
Balboa, California, Pavilion Gallery, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, 13 March-24 April 1966, cat.no.5 (another cast)
London, Tate, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, 15 August-7 October 1973, cat.no.32 (another cast)
London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Sculptures 1946-62, 1985-87, 28 October-21 November 1987, cat.no.8 (another cast)
London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Paintings 1959-1963, Bronze Sculpture 1954-58, 24 November-22 December 2004, cat.no.14 (another cast)
Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, William Turnbull: Retrospective 1946-2003, 14 May-9 October 2005, unnumbered (another cast)
London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings 1946-1962, 31 January-24 February 2007, cat.no.5 (another cast)
London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, Beyond Time, 9 June-3 July 2010, cat.no.15 (another cast)
Literature
Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, cat.no.71, p.99, (ill.b&w, another cast)
William Turnbull's Sculpture from 1956 has its roots in a series of columnar figures, idols and totems which he began in 1955 and were inspired by archaeological and anthropological artefacts, as well as religious statues and pre-classical forms of art. While Post-war sculpture in Britain focussed around the 'geometry of fear' - the term coined by Herbert Read to describe the jagged sculptures of Bernard Meadows, Lynn Chadwick and others exhibiting at the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1952 - and on the continent sculptors such as Giacometti were producing long, etiolated figures who stride forward into an uncertain world, Turnbull's move in the mid-1950s to these substantial, calm works offer a meditative alternative. Harking back to a range of early influences instead of the current tumult of the age, these totems can be read as part of an examination of mankind's history of image-making.
Indeed, Turnbull offered a commentary on his search for meaning and spirituality in an increasingly secular world: 'What is the nearest we have come to the equivalent of a temple or shrine in this century (and of this century)? The closest I have got to this experience has been the large exhibitions of Pollock or Rothko; the Monets in the Tuilleries (the Nymphéas); and especially the late Matisses exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. These were for me an experience close to the exaltation of the sacred, a ritual of celebration which avoided the guilt of the Crucifixion or the blood of sacrifice.' Turnbull goes on to ask: 'Is it a desire to create environmental experiences of this sort that makes some artists prefer personal exhibitions, and find group showing unsatisfactory? It is with some such idea in mind that I work'. (William Turnbull quoted in Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, The Henry Moore Foundation in Association with Lund Humphries, 2005, Much Hadham and Aldershot, p. 35).
Centring our understanding of the present lot in this context, Sculpture takes on a deeper symbolic meaning than could be discerned by simply observing the work. Standing at nearly a metre and a half tall, Sculpture is a form that dominates the physical space it inhabits. With a thick, trunk-like 'body' and solid bronze 'arms' which sit atop, the references may be figural, but the interpretation is wholly abstract, even geometric, and shows his move into balancing forms. Turnbull's works from this period are often calculatedly either just under or just over life-size, distancing them from the human element, however he recalled a significant memory which may have formed part of the impetus for this work: 'There are certain images which seem to stay in my memory ... I remember seeing an image of somewhere in the West Indies where there was this man walking along a beach and he had this long thin coffin balancing on his head. The image, every time I see it, seems to act as a trigger: it excites me, I seem to respond to it' (William Turnbull, quoted in William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings, Waddington Galleries, exh. cat., 1998, p.9).
Its sense of timelessness – created both through the deep brown patination of this work, and the ridged and seemingly weathered surface, which would have been created by pressing corrugated cardboard into the wet plaster model – is enhanced by Turnbull's move at this time to do away with conventional plinth bases and instead create an integrated base, which allows the piece to stand freely on the floor, further creating an immediacy which moves it out of the sphere of 'art' and into that of 'object'. The rough and elemental quality of the two cylindrical shapes which make up the work could easily prompt a viewer to question which era the piece originated from, embodying Turnbull's statement written the same year of the work's conception in the now-iconic exhibition catalogue, This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery: 'Sculpture used to look 'modern'; now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time during the past forty thousand years. Sculpture = totemic object. It can exist inside or outside architectural space'. (William Turnbull quoted in Amanda Davison, op. cit., pp. 34-5).
Here, then, is an abstract idol for the secular age: in vertical stature it has a totemic quality, the weight and physicality of the bronze giving it a timeless and immovable character. We are reminded of the religious function of icons, but Turnbull has stripped this back for a contemporary audience, providing instead a vessel which is open to our own interpretation. The two balanced forms evoke both movement and stasis, a moment of stillness in an ever-moving world, while the frontal quality demands our attention. As Amanda Davison has written: 'Turnbull's sacred-like ancient-seeming images stand apart from the drama of the moment and set up a challenge from possible alternative states', going on to note that: 'he suggested a state by showing its opposite; his calm pieces were a direct answer to the cacophony of the world.' (ibid., p.36).
Decoding William Turnbull's work allows an infinitely greater appreciation of each piece, but nevertheless each sculpture he created has a tangible presence, a timelessness and solemnity that is rarely found. As David Sylvester has noted – and the present lot is one such piece - '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'. (David Sylvester, 'Bronze Idols and Untitled Paintings', William Turnbull sculpture and paintings, Merrell Holberton and Serpentine Gallery, 1995, London, pp.9-10).
We are grateful to the Estate of the Artist for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Saleroom notices
Please note that there is a further artist's monogram stamped on the underside of the horizontal element.