9 minute read
HEADS & MASKS
For Turnbull the head (like the standing figure and the horse) was an archetypal image which recurred throughout art history and was eternally relevant even in the modern world. Since the very beginning of his career Turnbull explored the possibilities of the human head as a subject for his own art. Reflecting on his fascination with this subject in 1960, Turnbull described how,
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‘The word ‘Head’ meant for me what I imagined the word ‘Landscape’ had meant for some painters – a format that could carry different loadings. Almost anything could be a head – and a head almost anything – given the slightest clue to the decoding … I wanted to make a head-object as autonomous as a football…The sort of thing that interested me was - how little will suggest a head, how much load will the shape take and still read head, head as colony, head as landscape, head as mask, head as ideogram, head as sign, etc.' 7
One of Turnbull’s earliest recorded sculptures, Mask (1946) (cat no.9) is a flattened head form, shaped like an elongated trapezium and displayed standing upright on a small stone block. The sculpture was originally made from cement, with the details of the face pressed into the surface using string, and it was cast in bronze the following year. As Turnbull intended, although Mask (1946) is highly abstracted, it remains identifiably a head. The form tapers down from a wide ‘forehead,’ to a narrower ‘chin,’ a large triangle indicates the nose, holes become eyes, spirals delineate sockets and a hole surrounded by three semicircles reads as a mouth and lips. Three-dimensional, but also flat and frontal, this object inhabits a space somewhere between sculpture and drawing.
Turnbull was interested in prehistoric art, seeking inspiration in ethnographic collections, particularly those held in the British Museum, where he was a regular visitor. He believed that something 3,000 years old could look as modern as something made yesterday. Mask (1946) exemplifies this idea, seeming to exist in a realm beyond time, combining imagery both ancient and modern, abstract and figurative.
Having made Mask and another head in plaster in 1946, Turnbull didn’t revive this subject until the early 1950s. His renewed interest in heads and masks may have been sparked by the egg-like heads he saw in Brancusi’s studio in Paris in the late 1940s. But while Brancusi’s heads were smooth, radically reduced forms, Turnbull’s own heads were often highly textured and ranged in detail and legibility, from primitive-looking mask reliefs, through to large ‘head-objects’ with rough, deeply scored surfaces. In this decade, Turnbull also combined a number of his heads with other elements to create new multipartite sculptures, see for example Sun Gazer (1956), where an earlier sculpture Head (Reclining Head) (1955), is positioned on top of a fluted column.
The experimental exhibition The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head held at the ICA in Spring 1953, which examined a wide variety of images of heads across history, also had a profound impact on Turnbull. Herbert Read’s foreword for the accompanying book elucidates why the head has been, and continues to be, of such resonance in art history:
‘The selection of this particular object is not so arbitrary as it might at first seem. The head is not only man’s most dominating feature, in the physical sense – the seat of his controlling intelligence, the judgement of his vision and hearing – it is also his most vulnerable feature. It therefore becomes, as we have said in the title, a thing of wonder and horror. (…) Artists of every kind and of all periods have exploited its power to charm or to terrify, and thus a collection of human heads in art becomes a revealing index of the range of the aesthetic sensibility.’ 8
With these ideas in mind, in the same year as the ICA exhibition, Turnbull created a series of bronze mask reliefs, which were hollow and designed to be mounted directly to the wall (cat nos.10-16). The masks were a continuation of Turnbull’s interest in the tension between the static and mobile: ‘The mask is a marvellous example of the attempt to fix that which is most continuously fleeting and mobile – the expression on a face.’ 9 Aesthetically, however, they were a departure from the sculptures he’d been making to this point, as he described:
‘In 1953 I became dissatisfied with the possibilities of the linear sculpture I had been making for some years. Perhaps it seemed too schematic – too close to intellectual aesthetics. That year I made a series of masks which are concerned with surface as a skin; the division of inside and outside space in volume sculpture. My linear sculpture had been concerned with motion, and later, I realised that a mask is an arrest of movement. I began to try to infer a quality by its opposite.’ 10
Turnbull made his masks by impressing forms into clay and then pouring bronze directly into the resulting dips and hollows. This fast and simple method, (which had been explored earlier by Picasso), was taken up by a number of Turnbull’s contemporaries including Eduardo Paolozzi. The crude nature of the technique gives the masks, with all their magical lumps and bumps, a spontaneous, child-like energy. In these reliefs, mouths are tilted and off-centre, left eyes are different sizes and shapes to the right and are, like the ears, not aligned. In gallery shows, and in his studio, Turnbull liked to display the masks all together in a scattered formation which highlighted their individual personalities.
Alongside his sculpture, in the same period, Turnbull produced a large volume of paintings, works on paper and prints on the subject of the head. He eschewed naturalistic detail, creating abstract heads which gave the impression of, rather than directly translated, the subject, as he explained:
‘In the paintings I didn’t want to ‘‘transpose a head from three-dimensional reality to a flat surface’’ – but to imagine what a head would be if flat (squeezed between two pieces of glass like a micro slide) and made of paint marks.’ 11
To explore this idea, Turnbull experimented widely using different painterly marks, varying his palette and working on different scales. In Head, 1955 (cat no.20) for example, he uses wide, intersecting black brushstrokes on a white ground, while in the large canvas Head (1956) (cat no.17) he reduces his head motif to a field of dynamic marks in an array of colours. In addition to these calligraphic marks, a series of paint splatters radiate out from the edges of the head and neck like sun beams, showing the trace of the artist’s hand, in the manner of Pollock. The composition of this painting directly mirrors the small bronze Head Relief (1955) (cat no.18) made the year before, showing Turnbull’s ability to move fluently between two and three dimensions. Meanwhile, Head (1956) (cat no.19) speaks more quietly, the hazy silhouettes of the heads emerging mysteriously from a similarly coloured background.
While Turnbull explored this subject throughout his career, in the pages that follow you will find a focused selection of heads covering the years 1946 to 1956. As a group, these works demonstrate Turnbull’s creative genius and his willingness to explore a single motif to its limits.
7 Ibid 8 Herbert Read, ‘Foreword,’ Wonder and Horror of the Human Head,
An Anthology, Lund Humphries, London, 1953, p5 9 William Turnbull, Statement, in Theo Crosby (ed.), Uppercase 4,
Whitefriars, London, 1960, unpaginated 10 William Turnbull, letter, cited in The Artist’s Reality, An International Sculpture
Exhibition, exh. cat., New School Art Center, New York City, 1964, unpaginated 11 William Turnbull, ‘Head semantics’, in Theo Crosby (ed.), Uppercase 4,
Whitefriars, London, 1960
Page 39: William Turnbull, c1952 Page 40: Turnbull, Head (1955) (detail) Page 43: Turnbull’s Mask 1-7 in the garden c1960s or 1970s. Photograph by Kim Lim
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 49) |9 Mask (1946) * bronze 39.4 × 24 × 1.6 cm (bronze) inscribed with the artist's initial, stamped with date AC from an edition of 4 plus 1 AC
(page 50) |10 Mask 1 (1953) bronze 23 × 20.5 × 7 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 1/2
(page 51) |11 Mask 2 (1953) bronze 27.3 × 24.1 × 7 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 2/2
(page 52, top) |12 Mask 3 (1953) bronze 21.6 × 21.6 × 7.6 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 2/2
(page 52, bottom) |13 Mask 4 (1953) bronze 22.9 × 26 × 6.3 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 2/2 (page 53, top) |14 Mask 5 (1953) bronze 24.2 × 24 × 7.5 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 1/2
(page 53, bottom) |15 Mask 6 (1953) bronze 22.9 × 22.9 × 4.4 cm edition of 2
(page 55) |16 Mask 7 (1953) bronze 22.9 × 21 × 7.6 cm stamped with the artist's monogram, dated and numbered 2/2
(page 57) |17 Head (1956) oil on canvas 153.7 × 112.4 cm signed and dated verso (detail page 56)
(page 59) |18 Head Relief (1955) △ bronze 52.7 × 39.4 × 1.6 cm unnumbered, from an edition of 4 plus 1 AC (page 61) |19 Head (1956) * oil and sand on canvas 76 × 63.5 cm signed and dated verso
(page 63) |20 Head (1955) * oil on canvas 76.5 × 65.4 cm signed and dated twice verso
|14 Mask 5 (1953) |15 Mask 6 (1953)
