Forty-four works by the Modern British artist William Turnbull, none previously seen at auction, come to market in an online sale titled William Turnbull: The Eternal Now, open for bidding from 10 to 17 June. The works are drawn from the artist’s estate and offered in collaboration with Offer Waterman, which represents the estate.
Turnbull is best known for his sculpture, but the sale sets out to show that painting and drawing were central to his practice as well, in bronze and wood, oil and acrylic, and across etching, lithography and linocut. The selection spans graphic work from the early 1950s through abstract paintings, works on paper and lithographs from the 1980s and 1990s, alongside three of his signature sculptures.
Born in Dundee in 1922, Turnbull learned to draw as a child by copying magazine illustrations. He served as a pilot in the RAF during the Second World War and, on his return, was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art in 1946.
The sale traces his path from Paris in 1948, where he encountered Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi and Paul Klee, to his showing at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and his engagement with Abstract Expressionism after meeting Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman in New York later in the decade. His sculptures appear in David Hockney’s 1960s paintings of California art collectors, most famously the Art Institute of Chicago’s American Collectors (Fred & Marcia Weisman).
Among the highlights are Mask, 1955, a gouache on paper estimated at £8,000 to 12,000; Venus, a 1980 bronze estimated at £30,000 to 50,000; and Blade Venus I, a 1989 bronze estimated at £60,000 to 80,000. Works on paper and prints, including Yellow Leaf Form, 1967, and Walking Figures 2, 1953, carry estimates from £700 to 1,000.
(Press Release)
