Art
William Turnbull's History Lesson
Chatsworth House Trust
‘‘Horse,’’ 1999, one of several dozen William Turnbull sculptures on the grounds of England’s Chatsworth House.
By ROSLYN SULCAS
Published: June 10, 2013
Chatsworth, England — Two bright blue steel right-angles lean
negligently against one another on an expanse of lawn. Five lemon-yellow
triangles form a playful tunnel. A gleaming stainless steel column with
rippled, undulating sides stands near a stone archway. Totemic bronze
figures with superbly variegated patinas and subtle striations stand
peacefully on guard.
The pieces — some 40 of them, carefully placed on part of the 105-acre,
or 42-hectare, gardens of Chatsworth, one of the grandest of Britain’s
many grand houses — may look very different. But they are all by the
British sculptor William Turnbull, an artist whose 70-year career
encompassed the changing movements of the postwar art world, but whose
work remained resolutely personal in its pared-down essentialism and
poetic formal simplicity.
Turnbull, who died in November, aged 90, has a solid reputation in
Britain, but he has never received the international acclaim that has
greeted earlier figures like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, or
contemporaries like Anthony Caro.
But the Chatsworth display of Turnbull’s range and sculptural power (as
well as a small, but striking display of paintings), curated by Clare
Lilley and the painter’s son, Alex Turnbull, offers a chance to look
anew at his body of work.
“I think he is a distinctive voice and a major figure,” said Nicholas
Serota, the director of the Tate museums, who grew to know Turnbull
after curating an exhibition of work by the artist’s Singapore-born
wife, Kim Lim, at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1975.
“In the 1960s and 1970s he was the foremost exponent in Britain, perhaps
in Europe, of what was seen as American minimalism,” Mr. Serota said in
an interview by telephone. “In the 1980s, he began to look at Eastern
cultures and that took him into a place that was not in fashion, in the
sense that art — at least the art that was being most discussed — was of
a more conceptual character. So he began to occupy a position that was
more isolated.”
By all accounts — some of them in the 2011 documentary film, “Beyond
Time,” by Alex Turnbull and Pete Stern — Turnbull never cared about
fame. Born in 1922 in Dundee, Scotland, the son of a shipyard engineer,
he dropped out of school at 15 and worked as a laborer when his father
lost his job in the Depression. An avid drawer as a child, he began to
take art classes at night, and at 17 found a job as an illustrator for a
comic and magazine publisher.
In 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force, serving as a pilot in India and
Ceylon. That turned out to be an experience that was to greatly
influence his art.
“When you are flying in an aeroplane and you’re looking down at a
landscape, it’s nothing like the same landscape as the one Constable was
painting,” Turnbull says in “Beyond Time.” “Suddenly you looked down
and there is this endless abstraction. It was a new kind of way of
seeing the world.”
After the war, he signed up at the Slade School of Fine Art in London,
where he befriended a fellow Scot, Eduardo Paolozzi, and joined the
sculpture department. In 1948, he went to Paris, where he met, among
others, Giacometti and Brancusi. (He tells a nice story in “Beyond Time”
of sticking his foot in the reclusive Brancusi’s door, until the artist
is forced to let him in.)
The influence of both of these artists is evident in his early work; at
Chatsworth, the indoor North Sketch Gallery contains small sculptures
and a series of 1950s paintings of wiry, impressionistic heads that show
the link with Giacommetti, but also a use of color and quality of
energy that is all the artist’s own.
In “Landscape” (1957) and “15-1958,” (1958), other influences are
apparent; their connection to work by the American abstract
expressionists like Rothko and Barnett Newman (both of whom Turnbull had
on a visit to New York in 1956) is clear in their thick brushstrokes,
textural quality and glowing colors.
“I wanted to show the relationship between figurative and abstract in
the work,” said Alex Turnbull, who curated the indoor part of the
Chatsworth exhibition, and who, with his brother Johnny, grew up
“washing the sculptures for pocket money.”
Both sons, who were co-founders of the post-punk band 23 Skiddoo, now
look after their father’s affairs, and Mr. Turnbull was speaking in
their office, a clean-lined Shoreditch studio in London filled with
paintings and sculptures.
“People really struggled with the idea that you could be both a painter
and a sculptor,” he said. “But Bill never identified himself as one or
the other; he saw himself just as an artist.”
Turnbull’s equal interest in painting and sculpture may not have helped
him establish an artistic identity; neither did his austere modernity.
“I’m sure if he had been an American artist, he would have been more
celebrated,” Mr. Serota said. “His career in many ways was parallel to
Ellsworth Kelly in its enthusiasm for pure form and color. But I think
there is a natural inclination within British art to tell stories, to
have representation. It’s like the difference between George Balanchine
and Frederick Ashton in dance.”
Many admirers of Turnbull’s early work were indeed American.
“I bought my first Turnbull pieces in 1955,” said Donald Blinken, who
would later co-found the investment banking firm E.M. Warbug, Pincus
& Co. “What for me makes his work particularly wonderful to live
with is that it has a timeless quality — it doesn’t look like it comes
from 1955 or from 2013. It has a feeling of always being right. In that
sense he got much inspiration from Brancusi, whose work has that same
wonderful sense of permanency and correctness.”
Success, nonetheless, came slowly.
“The reception was impossible,” said Leslie Waddington, whose gallery
Waddington Custot has represented Turnbull since 1967. “Rauschenberg,
early Diebenkorn, Turnbull, there was no interest in that art then. The
American museums bought a bit of Bill’s early stuff. Fred Wiseman, a big
collector bought his work and you can see it in a painting Hockney did
of the Wisemans. But people didn’t like abstraction — and they still
don’t. Bill still isn’t popular in the way that certain artists are, but
he has an unassailable quality about him.”
That quality is resonant in Chatsworth’s magnificent landscaped gardens,
a serene and grandly natural context in which the large metal
sculptures, dating from 1955 to 1999, sit like benevolent monoliths.
“They seem very peaceful to me, very contemplative,” said the Duke of
Devonshire, whose family has resided at Chatsworth since 1549. Since
2006, it has been the site of contemporary art exhibitions that provide
visitors to the house (more than a million a year) with something more
than the customary stately home tour.
“It is the best fun,” said the Duke, who bought a Turnbull piece in
1991, but said that he had first thought of an exhibition at the house
after seeing a 2005 show of Turnbull’s work at the Yorkshire Sculpture
Park.
“We went to the house and met him, and had a really good chat. The most
revealing part for me was the paintings and works on paper; I had no
idea he was such a good painter, and I’m glad we show that here. I wish
he could have seen it.”
Ms. Lilley who is the director of program at Yorkshire Sculpture Park,
was a natural choice as curator for the outdoor section.
“We had far too many pieces to begin with,” she said in an interview by
telephone. “But I didn’t want a busy show. There is a degree of
choreography in the movement around the sculptures, how they punctuate
the landscape and how you move around them. I think that landscape
allows each work to have its own space, to lead you on to the next so
that you see the evolution from the 1950s figures, which have a
modernist sense about them, to the painted and stainless steel of the
1960s, and then, later, the metamorphic Venuses and the horse on a much
larger scale.”
Although the work can look dramatically varied, Turnbull’s central preoccupations are enduring, Ms. Lilley said.
“There are different voices, but the same concerns,” she said. “His love
for and interest in the ordinary things around us — tools, utensils,
bowls, things made by human hands and expressions of our humanity. There
is an ordinariness in terms of where the work comes from, but also real
timelessness and an integrity which is extraordinarily undramatic. The
work is powerful in a way that whispers.”
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