William Turnbull, Pegasus, 1954

1954

Medium

bronze

Dimensions

35 × 17 cm

Edition

numbered 2/4 from an edition of 4 plus 1 AC

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-153542

The origins of Pegasus date back to William Turnbull’s second recorded sculpture, Horse, 1946, which he made while still a student at the Slade. Amanda Davidson describes how ‘this piece forms a horse's head from a series of interlocking planes, both three-dimensional, flattened and frontal, exploring Cubist ideas of simplifying subjects to elemental shapes in a sculptural form.’ 1 At the time, Turnbull was a regular visitor to the British Museum, which was only a short walk from the art school. The strong profile and arched neck of Horse, 1946, is typical of classical Greek sculptures in the museum’s collection, such as The Horse of Selene, c.438 – 432 bc, a fragment from the Parthenon where only the horse’s head and neck have survived. Turnbull made three further works on this subject in the early 1950s: Horse, 1950 (coll. Tate Gallery), which was made in Paris and presents a standing horse, its thin, splayed legs reminiscent of a child’s toy; Horse, 1954 (coll. Tate Gallery), which again focuses on the horse's head and neck, reviving elements of his first ‘Cubist’ horse; and Pegasus, made in the same year. Pegasus continues the feeling of movement in Horse, 1950, its form built up in much the same way, with Turnbull constructing a branch-like metal armature, but this time ‘filling in’ some of the shapes to arrive at a more solid form ‘thrust into space in several directions, from a long spine.’ 2 Its open, twisting form suggests, without explicitly describing, the dynamic movement of a rearing horse and, indeed, Richard Morphet has compared this sculpture to Eugène-Louis Lequesne‘s spectacular Renown holding back Pegasus on the roof of the Opéra National de Paris. As such, it demands to be viewed in the round, unlike many of Turnbull’s later sculptures, which present flat figures with an obvious front and back view. Turnbull created this bronze’s distinctive ribbed texture by pressing corrugated paper into his still wet plaster model – an effect we see repeated across other works. Art curator Toby Treves notes that ‘while he determined where to apply the paper, the precise details of the marks were not foreseeable. The immediacy and unpredictability of this method greatly appealed to Turnbull.’ 3 Writing in 1960, Turnbull stated ‘I used texture to invoke chance, to create random discoveries, not to elaborate the surface, but to accentuate that it was a skin of bronze.’ 4