COLOUR & STEEL

from William Turnbull Centenary Retrospective - Offer Waterman 2022

HORSE, POWER & PRESENCE

Following the completion of his series of totem sculptures in 1962, Turnbull sought to take his work in a new direction. Up until this point the sculptures he’d been producing could all be described as appearing ancient, yet modern. From 1963 to 1972 Turnbull made sculptures which were informed by American Minimalism. He often created repeating sequences of objects and worked with industrial materials and processes. This new phase exemplified the enthusiasm of British artists at that time for American art and culture.

By the 1960s America had become the cultural point of reference in the art world. Following the impactful Tate exhibition Modern Art in the United States in 1956, American art was shown more widely in Britain. Three years later the Tate mounted The New American Painting – the first large survey of abstract expressionism in Britain – which both shocked and divided critics. The Whitechapel Gallery was also responsible for expanding awareness of American art in Britain from 1958-1966 by presenting a series of solo exhibitions by American artists. 26 In 1963, the Royal Academy of Arts held Art: USA: Now, an exhibition showcasing contemporary American paintings, 27 and Sculpture: Open-air Exhibition of Contemporary British and American Works opened at Battersea Park, allowing the public to experience and compare recent British and American sculpture in an outdoor setting.

In these years Turnbull’s paintings increased in size, as he set about creating colour fields which immersed the viewer and created what he later described as ‘a dynamic between the painting as object and as surface experience.’ 28 At over five metres wide, 1-1972 (1972) (cat no.48) is one of the largest and most extraordinary paintings Turnbull ever made. In his sculpture, Turnbull turned to industrial materials, welding steel, as well as exploring aluminium, wood and fibreglass and Perspex, creating works on an environmental scale. The sculptures and paintings he produced in this period have a meditative quality which prompted the viewer to become more aware of their own body in relation to the artwork and more alive to subtle shifts in perception as their viewing experience is affected by time and space.

Although Turnbull’s sculpture and painting were two separate strands of his practice, there was much crossfertilisation and, in this period, the parallels between his two practices are more apparent than ever before. 29 Turnbull’s colour field paintings and his painted steel sculptures are both large to monumental in scale. They typically had unmodulated, flatly painted surfaces (with the exception of a small number of polished steel works) and were executed in colours designed to have an immediate visual impact. More figurative paintings, such as 15-1965 (cat no.42) also exhibit a similar visual vocabulary to the forms of steel sculptures like Ripple (1966-72) (cat no.43) and No.3 (1964) (cat no.41).

The sculptures which follow are all made from steel, a material Turnbull worked with for a 9 year period. While Turnbull was, by this stage, an experienced sculptor in his forties, the materials he wanted to work with were new to him and so required him to acquire new technical skills. Turnbull learned to arc weld and grind steel from Brian Wall while they were both teaching sculpture at the Central School of Art and Design. During his time at the college (1964-72), Turnbull made use of the foundry and metal workshop in the basement of the sculpture department, creating steel sculptures alongside Wall and the students.

To make his painted steel sculptures Turnbull would cut the steel, weld pieces together, sand blast and zinc-coat them, before spraying them with industrial paint to give an even finish. He invariably chose a gloss finish, unlike other artists working in painted steel, including Anthony Caro, who preferred a matt paint surface. Turnbull was aiming for a hardness to the surface and a reflective quality which, in his words, would ‘let the world in’. 30

In 1969, Turnbull talked about this recent period and specifically the role colour played in his sculptures:

‘I am not concerned with the creating of hermetic abstract works, but with non-figurative work that is the result of a powerful subjective response to things seen, particularly banal things, combined with a dialogue with art, so that there is a strong but ambiguous interaction between them. My increasing response to industrially produced raw materials (channel, angle, corrugation) used with as little modification as possible, and the factual rather than expressive quality of the surface, necessitate an industrial finish, both as an emotive response and as a method of controlling light. I don’t want colour to be expressive separately from material or structure. This is probably why I don’t use exotic colours. I am not interested in using colour to destroy weight. Colour isn’t new to my work, nor new to sculpture. When I was working in bronze or plaster I was just as concerned about colour and light as now. Although colour contributes very significantly to the emotive quality, I’ve not seen a sculpture where altering colour would be as radical a change of meaning as changing shape or structure.’ 31

Of the five steel sculptures included in this exhibition, Ripple is the only unpainted work. 32 It belongs to a small group of angle-grinded stainless-steel works which also includes Duct (1966), Steps (1967-68), Angle (1971-72) and Gate (1972). In these works, the sanded marks introduce a ‘painterly’ approach to the medium of sculpture, just as Turnbull brought a ‘sculptural’ understanding of the canvas to his painting practice. Here, in Ripple, Turnbull unites the original river form shape with a shimmering silver surface. In the Living Arts journal in 1963, Turnbull spoke of his admiration for Monet’s Nymphéas and this series of paintings is perhaps a reference point for these sculptures whose surfaces imitate the effect of light on water.

While the simplicity, modularity and repetition displayed in the works from this period have a close connection to Minimalism, Turnbull’s upright steel sculptures do not entirely fit within this movement – where, as Frank Stella said, ‘What you see is what you see’ – because they are inherently, albeit subtly, figurative and as such are part of a long sequence of standing figures within his oeuvre. Richard Morphet has commented on the ‘antennae-like’ shape of works like No.3; they are, he says, ‘like lingering particular vestiges of a human presence in Turnbull’s sculpture.’ 33

In 1973, the Tate Gallery mounted a major retrospective exhibition of Turnbull’s work, curated by Richard Morphet. On seeing so many different aspects of his work displayed together in this isolated setting Turnbull was prompted to rethink the direction in which he was going. His response was to revert back to and expand upon on the themes he had explored earlier, and to once again make bronze sculptures from plaster models which he could model directly with his hands.

26 The Whitechapel Gallery’s solo exhibitions for American artists included:

Jackson Pollock (1958); Mark Rothko (1961); Mark Tobey (1962), Philip Guston (1963);

Robert Rauschenberg (1964); Franz Kline (1964); Jasper Johns (1964); Morris Louis (1965); Lee Krasner (1965) and Robert Motherwell (1966) 27 Works shown were owned by Herbert Fiske and Irene Purcell Johnson, who had a large collection of works by over 100 American artists, which they exhibited internationally before donating the collection to the Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C., in 1966. 28 ‘William Turnbull in conversation with Colin Renfrew, 6 May 1998,’ William Turnbull,

Sculpture and Paintings, exh. cat., Waddington Galleries, London, 1998, p7 29 Turnbull’s development as both a painter and sculptor dates back to his early art education. In 1946, Turnbull enrolled on the painting course at the Slade

School of Fine Art, London. However, the school championed neo-Romanticism - the pervading movement in London at this time and Turnbull found restrictive and nostalgic. It was not long before he transferred over to the sculpture department. 30 Richard Morphet, William Turnbull, The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery,

London, 1971, p115 31 ‘Colour in Sculpture, Statements by Phillip King, Tim Scott, David Annesley and William Turnbull’, Studio International, Volume 177, no.907, January 1969, p24 32 Ripple, 1966 is in fact the second version of an identical sculpture made four years earlier which Turnbull painted a warm, earthy brown. The unpainted version was shown in his retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1973. 33 Richard Morphet, ‘William Turnbull’, The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery,

London, 1971, p113

Page 135: William Turnbull in his Studio, 1960s. Photograph by Kim Lim Page 136: Works by Turnbull in progress, Left to right: Ripple (1966-72), No.3 (1964) and Two (1965) Page 138-39: Offer Waterman booth of Turnbull works at Art Basel Miami, 2017. Left to right: Ripple (1966-72), Negative Green (1961), Duct (1966), Untitled (Yellow Violet Arc) (1962) Page 141: Portrait of the artist in front of Ripple (1966-72). Photograph by Andrew Caitlin

Page 142: The artist’s studio. Photograph by Kim Lim Page 143: Works by William Turnbull exhibited at the IX Bienal, British Pavilion, São Paulo, Brazil, 3 x 1 (1966) and No.3 (1964) in foreground

LIST OF WORKS

Works available for sale are marked with an asterisk * Additional cataloguing for these works can found at the back of the book on pages 197–203 Works not included in the exhibition are marked with △

(page 150-51) |41 No.3 (1964) * steel painted blue 257.8 × 45.7 × 38.1 cm unique (detail page 149)

(page 153) |42 15-1965 (1965) * oil on canvas 254 × 188 cm signed and titled on canvas overlap; signed on both stretcher bars

(page 154) |43 Ripple (1966-1972) * stainless steel 227.3 × 58.4 × 58.4 cm unique (detail page 155)

(page 157) |44 7-1970 (1970) * acrylic on canvas 254 × 139.7 cm titled and inscribed ‘Cryla and Mon. Blue + White’ on stretcher bar (page 162) |47 Echo (1966) △ steel painted white 157.5 × 188 × 73 cm unique (detail page 163)

(page 164-65) |48 1-1972 (1972) * oil on canvas 254 × 558.8 cm

(page 166-67) |49 12-1965 (1965) * acrylic / synthetic polymer on canvas 254 × 406.4 cm signed, dated and titled on canvas overlap

(page 158-59) |45 3 x 1 (1966) steel painted red (in three parts) 255.3 × 78.7 × 78.7 cm (each) unique

(page 160-61) |46 17-1970 (1970) * oil on canvas 254 × 457.2 cm