- Artist
- William Turnbull 1922–2012
- Medium
- Bronze, rosewood and stone
- Dimensions
- Object: 1130 × 718 × 270 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Alistair McAlpine (later Lord McAlpine of West Green) 1970
- Reference
- T01381
Summary
In 1946 William Turnbull, while a student at the Slade School of Art, made his first known sculpture of a horse's head. It was painted bright yellow and consisted primarily of two intersecting planes, one of which was punctured by two holes that served as eyes. Eight years later he made Horse, an unpainted work. Along with Pegasus (private collection), which was made earlier in 1954, Horse is one of William Turnbull's first sculptures in which separate sections made from different materials are stacked on top of one another in a manner reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi's (1876-1957) work. Turnbull had visited Brancusi's studio while living in Paris between 1948 and 1950 and has acknowledged the importance of this encounter with a form of sculpture quite different to the Neo-Romantic tradition he had known in England. Horse itself is comprised of a cube of rough-hewn stone that stands directly on the floor; a smooth, rectangular block of rosewood; and an arch of striated bronze, shaped to resemble a horse's head and neck.
While there are clear continuities between Horse and Pegasus, particularly in the use of materials and the handling of surface texture, the treatment of movement is radically different in the two works. The open, centrifugal arc described by Pegasus suggests physical dynamism, whereas the closed arch of Horse imposes a considerable sense of stillness on the sculpture. Around 1953 to 1954 Turnbull increasingly introduced stasis into his work. Thereafter it was to be central theme, investing it with what the curator Richard Morphet has described as a 'numinous silence' (Morphet, p.27).
The bronze's ribbed surface, which was common to much of Turnbull's sculpture during the early to mid 1950s, was achieved mainly by pressing corrugated paper into the wet plaster of the original model. While he determined where to apply the paper, the precise details of the marks were not foreseeable. The immediacy and unpredictability of this method greatly appealed to Turnbull. Writing in 1960 about his sculptures of this period, he stated 'I used texture to invoke chance, to create random discoveries, not to elaborate the surface, but to accentuate that it was a skin of bronze' (Turnbull, unpaginated). Like many avant-garde artists at that time, he valued the subconscious and irrational elements involved in the process of making art and sought to demonstrate their presence in his work. In this context, Zen Buddhism, particularly through D T Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, published in 1950, and Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, published in 1953, was an important source for these artists.
The roughened surface gave Turnbull's works 'a rather battered look as if everything had happened to them' (Turnbull in a letter to Dennis Farr dated 31 May 1961, Tate Archive). Yet, despite their ancient appearance, these pieces were at the forefront of a contemporary challenge to the traditions of sculpture and cultural hierarchy. As a founding member of the Independent Group, a loose federation of avant-garde artists that emerged from the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1952, Turnbull sought to develop an approach to art that was relevant to the new reality of a modern, technological world. Central to this was a belief that, with the advent of the mass media, traditional distinctions between high and low art were no longer tenable. In their place the Independent Group artists pursued an inclusive approach to culture.
With Horse Turnbull borrowed from a wide range of sources, among them the Parthenon frieze, Brancusi and philosophy. He also challenged the role of the plinth, a fundamental element in the display of sculpture since antiquity. Like Brancusi, who had partially integrated the plinth with the sculpture, Turnbull also deliberately confused the status of the base. In Horse it is not clear if the blocks of wood and stone are part of the sculpture or simply the support. If they are considered as an integral part of the work then the piece is standing directly on the floor, sharing the ground with the audience, and thus the plinth, a mediating barrier between viewer, is eliminated. Arguably, in this way Turnbull anticipated Anthony Caro's breakthrough sculpture Twenty Four Hours 1960 (Tate T01987) by six years.
Between 1952 and 1956 Turnbull sold no work and was living in poverty. During this period he was forced to destroy many sculptures and paintings to make working space in his small London studio. Horse, which was made in an edition of two, is one of the relatively few sculptures that survive from those years.
Further reading:
William Turnbull, 'Head Semantics', Uppercase, 4, 1960, unpaginated
Richard Morphet, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1973, pp.27-8
William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1995
Toby Treves
July 2001
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Catalogue entry
William Turnbull b. 1922
T01381 Horse 1954
Not inscribed.
Bronze, rosewood and stone, 44½ x 28¼ x 10¿ (113 x 72 x 27).
Presented by Alistair McAlpine 1971.
Exh: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, October 1963 (28); Newport Harbor Pavilion Gallery, Balboa, California, March–April 1966 (1, repr.); The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery, June–August 1971 (45, repr.).
Lit: Richard Morphet, in catalogue of The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery, 1971, pp. 106–21.
Repr: Uppercase, 4, 1960, pages not numbered (detail only).
The notes on all acquisitions of sculpture by Turnbull from T01381 to T01391 inclusive are based on the compiler’s conversations with the artist in 1971 and were approved by him. They are quoted or adapted here from the text of the catalogue of the Alistair McAlpine Gift at the Tate Gallery in 1971.
T01381 is from an edition of two. Around 1953, Turnbull reacted against his early works’ concern with movement and space. He became preoccupied by stasis. His ‘Mask’ reliefs of 1953 (masks being symbols for the withdrawal of direct contact with particular personalities) presented human attributes only in generalised form—as, later, would the ‘Idols’ and the totemic sculptures. Turnbull was anxious to reduce both the metaphoric associations, the formal complexities, and the exclusively aesthetic character of the use of materials, seen in much sculpture of the mid-1950’s. Thus ‘Horse’, a generalised horse-head form, relates as closely to the sculpted horses in the Parthenon frieze (again, nature at one remove) as to the appearance of an actual animal. Its greater vigour (for all its stillness) than conventional horse sculpture of its period results from Turnbull being more interested in material and form than in metamorphosis. The idea ‘horse’ emerged from rather than motivated or permitted the sculptural process. The desired primacy of object over subject was facilitated by formal compression. The immediately preceding ‘Pegasus’, 1954, though close in subject and identical in technique, thrust into space in several directions, from a long spine. ‘Horse’, though only a part of the body, has greater self-sufficiency; moreover, resting nearly symmetrically, creating an elementary arch-form, it is more matter-of-fact.
It also exemplifies the rejection, typical of the new art of its period (as in Bacon, Paolozzi, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Kitchen Sink and early Pop) of a conventionally art-like look springing from a respectful handling of materials. By contrast with the lengthy craftsmanship of plaster for bronze, the animated surface of Horse results from pressing corrugated paper direct into soft plaster—a process in which marks are made instantly and in which the surface is articulated, to an important degree, by the operation of chance. The aim was not so much surface decoration as varied kinds of control as the eye moved across the surface. This manner of surface handling, an assertion of the nature of the plaster and bronze process, had propensities of swift change which augmented Turnbull’s sense of discovering something through the working process rather than subordinating that process to the making of a preconceived entity. He wanted sculpture to emerge with the directness of a suddenly found (rather than wrought) object, almost as if it had been dug up (an attitude which links him with Paolozzi and Hamilton in the ‘contemporary archaeology’ of popular culture). Turnbull’s interest in the art forms of ancient cultures parallels those which he shared with his contemporaries in myth, junk culture, the mass media, and the art of children, the primitive and the insane, in the wish to combine detachment towards (often powerful) subject-matter with directness in the use of materials and the creation of form.
As his totemic sculptures would make explicit, Turnbull preferred the atmosphere of stonemason’s or wood yard to that of the fine artist’s studio. Like the strong feeling for the archaic in his work, this quality, projected by a sculpture, would help to avoid an inhibiting feeling of ‘modern art’ by, in Turnbull’s words, ‘taking it out of time’. This direct feeling is expressed in ‘Horse’ by the elementary blocks of wood and stone which are part of the sculpture, and nor base or pedestal as such. The focus of the sculpture remains on the head, but ‘Horse’ shows Turnbull’s developing sense of the mode of a sculpture’s connection with the ground as an essential part of the work.
Published in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972, London 1972.
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