William Turnbull, Head, 1957

During the mid-1950s the head was an important theme in Turnbull's paintings and sculptures. In both disciplines he explored the limits of the motif, often abstracting it up to the edge of legibility. Discussing his interest in the head during that period, Turnbull later divulged that the word itself had 'meant for me what I imagined the word "Landscape" had meant for some painters - a format that could carry different loadings' (1).

He continued, '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.' (2)

The highly abstracted appearance of the present work is a manifestation of this interest. An elongated oval head balances upon a barrow form which can be read as a torso. The perfect equilibrium of this arrangement lends the work a pervading sense of tranquillity and stillness. The oval shape also suggests other references – a leaf, simplified fish or archaic spearhead. Turnbull pressed corrugated paper into the wet plaster of the model to create surface texture at the extreme ends of the oval and elsewhere the surface is scored and pockmarked. These surface marks evoke hieroglyphs of an unknown primordial language. Like many of his sculptures from the period Head lacks a narrative and instead evokes the timeless or ancient. A totem that is deliberately detached from contemporary allusions, it has great physical presence and yet is emotionally understated.

In this work we can see the mainstream 20th Century Modernist theme of 'Primitivism' but simultaneously it seems to transcend time, resonating the ancient. Turnbull was interested in prehistoric art, seeking inspiration in ethnographic collections, including at the British Museum. He believed that something 3,000 years old could look more modern than something made yesterday. He also had a great respect of Modern masters such as Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. Head seems to exists in a realm beyond time, combining both the ancient and modern, and the abstract and figurative. This is true of a great deal of Turnbull’s sculpture from the period but was very unusual in British art of the mid-1950s, when Francis Bacon's expressionism vied with the social realism of the Kitchen Sink Painters and the exuberant modernism of the Independent Group.

1. William Turnbull, 'Head Semantics', Uppercase, 4, 1960, unpaginated
2. Ibid

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William Turnbull 1922-2012

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William Turnbull 1922-2012

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