Obituary: William Turnbull, artist

BORN: 11 January, 1922, in Dundee. Died: 15 November, 2012, in London, aged 90.

One of the giants of 20th-century sculpture, William Turnbull, has died at the age of 90. A major figure in the art world for more than 60 years, Turnbull rose to prominence in 1950 when he featured in a joint exhibition with Eduardo Paolozzi at the Hanover Gallery in London.

In the early 1950s, he was included in era-defining exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and at the Venice Biennale. He was one of the few artists to enjoy two solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery: in 1973 and again at Tate Britain in 2006.

Turnbull was born in January 1922 in Dundee, where his father was an engineer in the shipyards. He left school at 15, but attended art classes in the evening. One of his teachers spotted his talent and invited him to work as an illustrator for the Dundee-based newspaper and magazine group DC Thompson. He joined the RAF in 1941, training in Canada and flying in India and Ceylon.

He later recalled how the experience of flying over vast tracts of unspoilt land inspired his monochromatic, minimalist paintings. Turning down an invitation to become a full-time pilot, in 1946 he enrolled in the painting department at the Slade School in London.

After a few weeks, he moved to the sculpture department where he met Eduardo ­Paolozzi who, although two years younger, was in his third and final year. The fellow Scots, who shared an interest in the popular imagery of comic books, struck up a close friendship.

In 1948, Turnbull moved to Paris, where Paolozzi was already living. There he met ­Constantin Brancusi and ­Alberto Giacometti, who ­exerted a major influence on him. Living in a tiny hotel, he would smuggle bags of plaster past the landlady and make extraordinary stick-like figures and mobiles upstairs in his room.

The critic David Sylvester, who also lived in Paris, organised a joint show of sculpture by Paolozzi and Turnbull at Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery in 1950 (she was also the dealer for Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud).

Turnbull settled in London later that year and became involved with the recently-formed Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was one of a number of young artists, including Richard Hamilton and the photographer Nigel Henderson, who formed a splinter group, The Independent Group, which is often seen as the starting point of Pop Art. But what really singled Turnbull out was his interest in and reinterpretation of the powerful, simplified forms of ancient and non-Western art.

His international reputation was made when he featured in the show New Aspects of British Sculpture, held in the British ­Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Selected by Herbert Read, it included work by Paolozzi, Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and others, whose rough, spiky bronzes seemed to encapsulate the angst of the post-war, nuclear age.

That same year he had his first solo exhibition, at the Hanover Gallery. In the mid-1950s, Turnbull established contacts with American artists and collectors; friends included Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Alongside his sculpture, Turnbull always painted, though the paintings remain surprisingly little-known. His white-on-white paintings actually pre-date the more celebrated works of the American minimalist Robert Ryman. In the 1950s, he favoured bronze, and in the early 1960s made a number of works composed of bronze and carved wood, sometimes in stacked units, but always treated with minimal intervention, as if – to use a phrase common at the time – he wanted to make the materials “speak for themselves”. In the mid-1960s, that same approach was brought to other pre-manufactured materials including steel, Perspex and fibreglass.

In both personality and appearance, Turnbull was the embodiment of his art: elegant, understated, authoritative and exuding integrity. He spoke with the same measured control that he applied to his sculpture, never using more detail than was necessary. He married his second wife, the sculptor and printmaker Kim Lim, in 1960 and was clearly devastated when she died in 1997, at the age of 59.

Thereafter, he seldom went out, preferring the company of family and close friends. Unusually among artists of his standing, he was diffident when talking about himself, but was genuinely interested in the lives of others. He would not indulge in gossip, sales talk or self-
promotion, and if invited to do so would deftly steer the conversation in another direction.

His austere, single-minded dedication to his work inspired awe among the younger generation. When his son, Alex, made a film about his father, he had no trouble getting Jude Law to narrate it, Antony Gormley and ­Nicholas Serota to appear in it and Kate Moss to attend the sell-out first screening.

Actually, the idea of Turnbull as an ascetic, monk-like figure has been exaggerated and a bit of opening-night glamour would have appealed to him. His works – almost all of them pared down figures or heads – may have more in common with Neolithic works shown at the British Museum than with young British artist (YBA) work shown at the Tate, but his eyes were always open to the modern world.

His sons were champion surfers and skateboarders and the forms of their skateboards inspired a series of grave, figurative works. One famous sculpture was inspired by a chocolate-bar vending machine seen in the London underground; another was inspired by a grandfather clock. A series of works entitled “Idols” have the severe look of ancient, primitive objects of worship, yet they were partly inspired by Hollywood screen idols, such as Marilyn Monroe. Similarly, his vast, severe, monochromatic paintings were partly inspired by watching cinemascope films from the front row.

From the early 1980s, Turnbull returned to the material that was his abiding love, bronze, producing works which, more than ever, connected with ancient pre-classical sculpture.

An exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1995, selected by David Sylvester, put Turnbull firmly back on the map. During the preliminary group discussions for the show, at Turnbull’s handsome north-London home, Sylvester – a big man in every sense – jumped up and down with rage at some minor issue, making the furniture bounce up and down with him. Mumbled explanations from the organisers could not quell his fury. Turnbull – self-contained and restrained, but filled like a black hole with latent energy – fixed Sylvester with a quizzical look and raised an eyebrow slightly. Silence was immediately restored and the meeting continued as normal.

A major retrospective exhibition took place at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2005, followed by an exhibition in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in 2006. An exhibition will take place at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire next March.

William Turnbull died peacefully at home on 15 November. He is survived by his first wife, the classical pianist Katharina Wolpe, from whom he was divorced; and by two sons from his second marriage to Kim Lim, who predeceased him.