In the twenty-five years of work now being surveyed, William Turnbull has produced some of the most striking forms, images and procedures in British art of the period. But it is not to breakthroughs in style or idiom that he aspires, nor is such a standard a meaningful one by which to judge his work. Indeed Turnbull has always worked highly consciously within a broad international tradition, and his sensitivity to that tradition is a constructive feature of his work. Essentially it is thus not in forms but in his attitude, embodied in and communicated by the forms he personally evolves, that Turnbull has made a contribution to art that is extraordinarily distinct and original. Each of his works recalls and points to the interlocking implications of his oeuvre as a whole; that body of work and the attitude it expresses constitute a rich, complete and particular imaginative world which, once experienced, informs and enlarges our experience of the everyday world. 

A characteristic of all Turnbull’s works, already apparent in his first exhibition (of work done in 1949), is their unusual economy. From 1954, each presents an ‘image’ which is grasped-communicates itself in its entirety at once. The complexity of any of his works is not visual or formal, but intellectual and imaginative. Turnbull avoids sophisticated technical devices or formal structures. He also avoids fiddling or fudging in details or at points of junction. Each element within a work is cleanly articulated and distinct. 

Turnbull is obsessed by the integrity of the unit. Thus every painting or sculpture, and every canvas or other component making up a single work, communicates a strong, self-sufficient wholeness. Inseparable from this concern with the autonomous reality of the unit is Turnbull’s instinct for conceiving and organizing units in groups. Groups are sometimes specifically controlled (as, for example, in a single sculpture consisting of separate elements) but also, more generally, implied (as in the strong group relationship between all the works based on a single form or idea, or in the degree to which a personal form language, in which the limited number of components is capable of infinitive variety of expression, is common to them all). Thus in any multipart work by Turnbull, or in any group of his works, one is keenly conscious of the autonomy of each part, which is compelling in its own right, but no individual part calls attention to itself more than any other. The form of almost any of Turnbull’s works is either a single centralized shape or mass, or an -lover multiplicity of incident. ‘Composition’ is an activity alien to him, either in the making of a work or in the nature of the spectator’s perception of it; it is important to Turnbull that a work by him should not be appreciated in formal/aesthetic terms, but experienced. A further feature of the great majority of his work is its (virtual) lateral symmetry, which supports its detached, non-expressionist but highly expressive calm, ‘muteness’ and stasis. So consistent an attachment to symmetry is unusual in British art over the last twenty years but is a quality both positive and living. It is a type of symmetry manifested (as the Masks of 1953 demonstrate) by the human face; it is thought of as symmetrical, but the sides are frequently different, in a life-reflecting way, in detail. Even in Turnbull’s literally symmetrical works, the feeling of finality or rigidity is absent. 

The unusual simplicity of so many of Turnbull’s works, their stillness, lucid presentation and crisp edges, give them the quality of clean, decisive removals or cuts from the confusing abundance and diversity of form and of visual experience in life. Life is a state of flux, and is, for each person, a process leading to death. A part of the flux which is isolated by being made art is given the feeling of fresh life, and also (more especially if its own appearance is not fluid) of timelessness. Each of Turnbull’s works, especially from the late 1950s, is a decisive gesture, a slicing or stating in the middle of this flux, and the highly specific forms of Turnbull’s art make his work intensely autobiographical. The simplicity of the forms employed is reductive only in a formal sense. In content, Turnbull’s work is not only positive, as already described, and optimistic in implication, but also rich and open in the range of experience for which it is the vehicle. To this breadth of relevance, the ‘reductive’ simplicity of Turnbull’s forms is, paradoxically, the means. Just as he believes that the implication of a complementary colour in a work is best expressed by intensifying the single colour being used, and that movement is more truly suggested by a static work than by one which simulates motion, so it is by excluding specific allusions and maintaining a determined abstraction that he opens a work to the widest spectrum of reference. The forms that appear in his work have been arrived at by a process of intellectual and emotional concentration, not by one of physical refinement. They are forms which have become a part of Turnbull’s language through his direct contact with them in an artisan situation. He transposes them into his work with minimal alteration or interference because what he is communicating is a state of mind; the forms themselves, and the state of mind they articulate, need to come straight through. 

Thus though Turnbull’s work is abstract in idiom, its whole concern is with real life. In his words, ‘the real abstract artists today are figurative’. He requires of each work that it combine a vivid non-arty formal and physical reality in itself-an unrelenting factuality-with the ability to provoke and focus imaginative experience, and insight into Turnbull’s own imaginative world. This world, though intensely personal, does not employ a mysterious special language, difficult to acquire, but one available to anyone who has had ordinary experience of things and materials. To an unusual degree for such static work, his paintings and sculpture almost always speak either of actions performed by him or actions to be performed by the receiver, or both. Through the clarity with which they identify the specific nature of past actions, express the studio/workshop situation, imply or invite permutation, and assert the principles of chance and change, they habitually avoid formalism and refer to actual life. Turnbull has, indeed, always considered that if an artist’s previous work, the enclosed theme of his own development, takes over from his experience of life, then his work will be academic. He has tried to let his own art define itself, as a result of the activity (within an art context) of defining his own consciousness of the visual and material world. 

The fact that Turnbull did not have a conventional art school training till he was twenty-four, and that his previous experience enabled him to receive it with detachment when it came, may help explain the fact that his works emerge from the working process, rather than each being a realization through that process of a specific pre-existing art idea. Moreover his material is made into art by effecting in it as little art-like change as possible. In the procedural (and often the physical) sense, Turnbull’s approach is in fact in many ways more analogous to that of craftsman than of fine artist. In the art of past periods, he responds much less to large-scale romantic works in which the artist set out to make an impact, a dramatic entity, than he does to those, like Bach’s Art of Fugue, or the work of Seurat or Klee, in which the artist devoted himself to working out how to achieve a particular kind of result. Despite the absence of theatrical intention, the effect of such a work is strongly expressive; moreover the structure has evident concentration and completeness. Turnbull’s same ‘non-art’ origins may also help explain the relatively unpolemical stance of his art throughout his career. Although it has obvious links of idiom and even of temperament with some other artists’ work, it belongs to no particular camp, and proceeds not so much in reaction against other artists’ approaches as in order to do what comes naturally to him. Turnbull’s work makes a constant, very direct reference to things that he likes-that is to say to those things which, repeatedly experienced in ordinary life along with a million others, he eventually finds he cannot ignore. Casual as this process may sound, each such identification or particularization vividly expresses a personal attitude towards form, activity and behaviour. The process is at once wholly natural, and compulsive. The belief not in the necessity for a work to be painstakingly wrought or won but in the inevitability of a personal art; a relaxed art process consisting in doing the things you like doing and in interfering as little as possible with what you find; these linked attitudes identify Turnbull as a precursor, however uncalculatedly, of processes that are specially characteristic of present-day art. 

The antithesis of the exotic, eye-catching or heroic, Turnbull’s work celebrates (and concentrates, vitalizes) familiar reality. It asserts that what is everyday, perennial, tested through use, ubiquitous, is actually more interesting than what is separate, special, elaborately contrived. Even his detached /dols of 1955-7, scratched, ‘banal’ and archetypal, do not contradict this. Turnbull is among those to whom the greatest art of the past is that of which the material-to which personal vision gives special intensity is normal experience. 

Both his working procedure and the content of his work are grounded in common sense. He makes no pretence to be working in a wholly original vein. In any period the best art reveals the individual temperament in the ways in which it feeds, discriminatingly but obsessively, on past art. Faced with a vast range of interesting existing art, Turnbull has always felt that the way for an artist to produce really original and personal work-to give authentic expression to his own vision-is not to try to outflank everyone else but to go right through the middle. This century’s restless search for the original leads often to fashionable admiration for those works of a particular year which in their outward forms exhibit the most dramatic apparent inventiveness. The history of the same period has shown that it is very often in the rich content of those works of which the outward, aspect is in no way clamorous or startling that real originality is eventually discerned. In Turnbull’s work there is a steady and convincing continuity. Although at any given moment he may be involved in a particular work, the physical and intellectual context of this activity is a random accumulation of his earlier work. A new work is not program-matically directed by this existing achievement, but equally it is not embarked on as a separate new project. It emerges from a continuous making situation in which the mystique of art being produced in bursts of creative inspiration is replaced by the professional notion of regular daily working activity. 

A central theme of Turnbull’s work as a whole, and a means by which work is actually generated, is the establishment of neutral, ‘innocent’ handling and interpretation of form and shape. No association, procedure or dogma (‘truth to materials’; the ‘need’ for an artist to create new idioms: ‘colour is more important than form’; ‘x is more important than y’…) is taken for granted either in making a work or by Turnbull’s prescribing how it should be received. Where a work can be permutated or physically varied, this openness is built in to the spectator’s experience of it, but it is in any case implicit in a work’s form. Formalism is viewed as restrictive and as a vacuum, to be evaded by looking at every aspect of a work-materials, arrangement, meaning-in flexible terms of function and use. Not presented as a statement with one final meaning, each of Turnbull’s works, the more so as his career has developed, draws attention not only to the mutability of its own internal content but also to the peculiar character of each context in which it is experienced (contexts which Turnbull cannot predict). It acts outwards. To Turnbull, reinterpretability is a vital, form-giving principle of life. His work is a highly individual focusing of a process that he sees as being in operation with every artefact. ‘Each new excavation’, he wrote in 1956, ‘is another step into the future’ (Bibl. 1), adding in 1957 (Bibl. 2) ‘the artist attempts to create a new object… This object then exists in the world as a part of nature, as the person who makes it is-its qualities never absolute but changing in relation to the participation of the spectator’.