Seeing the Cyclades: William Turnbull’s Female Figures
By Kasia Middleton
William Turnbull, War Goddess, 1956. Bronze, 151.3 x 48.3 z 40.6 cm. McManus Gallery, Dundee.
Image courtesy of Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council).
The goddess is geometric. Her head is a triangle, her torso a rectangle. Her knees are layered squares, and her breasts and hips are simple circles. Her eyes and arms are left to the imagination. Her femininity is heaved from the depths of our most basic abilities to recognise a pattern. She is bronze. A prehistoric Greek idol if ever you saw one. Her maker, we assume, is a Cycladic craftsman, a participant in a ritual older than the written word as we know it. We are wrong.
The responsible party is, in fact, William Turnbull (1922-2012), a Dundonian artist, and this goddess of his creation is comparatively youthful. She was made in 1956, though you would be forgiven for placing her much earlier in the art historical canon. The experienced eye might immediately note the influence of Modernism, Minimalism, and the Primitivist movement of the early twentieth century on this work, but it was surely the artist’s intention to invite comparison with totemic figurines of ancient cultures.
William Turnbull did not grow up intending to be an artist, though he liked to draw. He found work painting film posters as a teenager when his father lost his job, and eventually attended art classes at Dundee University. During the Second World War, he served as an RAF pilot and was later formally educated at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Perhaps his introduction to the world of art through necessity led to his disillusionment with this institution, prompting a move to Paris before his return to London in 1950. Turnbull was a contemporary and colleague of Giacometti and Paolozzi, working with the latter as part of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. From this point in his career onwards, he forged his artistic identity—one which celebrates primitivism, minimalism, and tensions between life and the stillness of sculpture. He also rejected Classicism in the traditional sense, but still made use of ancient references in a subversive way.
The Keros Hoard, a collection of ritually broken figurines from the Early Cycladic II period (2700-2300 BCE).
Image courtesy of the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens.
This has a personal resonance. Over summer, I was lucky enough to participate in the Keros Project, a Cycladic archaeological programme on the island of Keros, near Naxos. I find that when you tell people you’ve been digging in Greece, they imagine sumptuous statues of Aphrodite and Corinthian capitals. Of course, understandably so. The Classical period is what you tend to think of when you hear ‘Ancient Greece’, but in fact, Keros is a site from Greece’s prehistory, and it is famous for its immense hoard of ritually broken Cycladic figurines. These come in many different ‘types’, and appear all across the Bronze Age Cyclades. One such subcategory is the early, schematic, ‘violin-shaped’ figurine. Compare it to our goddess. Ancient Greek art, so often lauded in the Winckelmannian approach to art history as inimitable, finds its way thus into the Primitivist movements of the twentieth century. A happy alumna of the Keros Project Field School, I am pleased to see the variety of Greece’s ancient artistic culture recognised.
Schematic violin-shaped figurine, ECI (c. 3000-2800 BCE). White marble, h. 18.4 cm. Musée Barbier-Mueller.
Image courtesy of Studio Ferrazzini Bouchet.
Though Cycladic figurines were not an exclusive inspiration for Turnbull, operating alongside anthropological artefacts from numerous other cultures and continents, they appear with an astonishing clarity in his art. He noted ‘how something could be so simple and be more like a head than a portrait could be’, demonstrating the schematic appeal of the Cycladic figurine to a minimalist. A run of bronze works from the 1980s bear remarkable similarities to these prehistoric totems, notably Metamorphic Venus 3 (1982), Mask (1982), and Large Siren (1986). This resemblance, as well as Classical allusions in their names—tongue-in-cheek plays on outdated Classicism, much like those made by contemporary Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay—indicate Turnbull’s studied awareness of the Cycladic figurine.
Leftmost Image: William Turnbull, Metamorphic Venus 3, 1982. Bronze with York stone base, 62.9 x 40.6 x 1.9 cm (bronze). Private Collection, USA. Image courtesy of Offer Waterman.
Centre Image: William Turnbull, Mask, 1984. Bronze on a stone base, 45.7 x 31.3 x 9.5 cm. Estate of the artist. Image courtesy of Offer Waterman.
Rightmost Image: William Turnbull, Large Siren, 1986. Bronze with patina, York stone base, H 161.9 cm (excluding base). Private collection, USA. Image courtesy of Offer Waterman.
In 2022, the work which inspired this article, War Goddess, was displayed at Turnbull’s centenary exhibition in London. This was a comprehensive event which spanned six floors and celebrated his sculpture and paintings alike. It demonstrated the many other inspirations behind Turnbull’s art, such as the aerial views afforded him in his days as a pilot, and his encounters with contemporary artistic giants like Rothko. War Goddess was displayed alongside other female figures, giving the viewer a diachronic perspective on Turnbull’s move away from the blocky rigidity of this first figurine, which characterised the feminine figures he made in the 50s, towards the smooth contours of his later sculptures in the 80s, when he returned to the female form. Perhaps this reflects the ebbing intensity of Post-War movements and their influence on Turnbull’s work.
Leftmost Image: Roman copy of Praxiteles' 4th century Greek original Knidian Aphrodite. Marble. Ludovisi Museum. Image courtesy of Marie-Lan Nguyen.
Rightmost Image: William Turnbull, Aphrodite, 1958. Bronze with patina, 187.96 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of MutualArt.
The figurines which resemble those of the Cyclades are anonymous, but Turnbull also tried his hand at named goddesses. Since the Knidian Aphrodite, she and her Roman counterpart Venus had traditionally been the measuring stick by which sculptors and other artists defined their greatness. For the Classicist, who believed in the paradigmatic nature of Greek sculpture, it was a mission to represent her in a realistic form, to the extent that real men fell in love with her. Not so for the minimalists of the twentieth century. Turnbull’s Aphrodite (1958) is little more than an evocative cylinder atop a pillar, with incised lines perhaps evoking Classical fluting or drapery. The title, however, is what imbues it with a femininity it may not otherwise have. As Patrick Elliott points out, Turnbull is unconcerned with the variable viewpoint so important to his contemporary Henry Moore, and instead opts for ‘an arresting, frontal image.’ In this way, unlike Praxiteles’ famous Aphrodite, the viewer is not asked to analyse the contrapposto of the goddess of sex from every sensuous angle, but rather to feel the power of her presence as an almost incorporeal being, half formed and imposing, barely curved, and only as feminine or erotic as a viewer allows her to be. There is something more divine in this than in Classical Realism. Perhaps the Bronze Age population of the Cyclades felt this transcendence of form too, fragmenting their miniature feminine forms and depositing their unrelated body parts on Keros. The powerful sense of life in their rigid stone limbs found a modern home in Turnbull’s studio, as he wrote: ‘Sculpture = totemic object. […] Ultimate motion is ultimate rest’ Simplicity gave his divinities life, and the viewer’s imagination gives them power. Our geometric goddess becomes flesh.
Bibliography
Bhullar, Dilpreet. “William Turnbull’s retrospective exhibition celebrates the centenary of the artist’s birth.” July 20, 2022. https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-william-turnbull-s-retrospective-exhibition-celebrates-the-centenary-of-the-artist-s-birth
Davidson, Amanda. The Sculpture of William Turnbull. Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2005.
Offer Waterman. “William Turnbull.” Accessed September 13, 2025. https://www.waterman.co.uk/artists/185-william-turnbull/
Sylvester, David, William Turnbull, Patrick Elliott, and Serpentine Gallery. William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings. Merrell Holberton in association with Serpentine Gallery, 1995.
Waddington Custot. “William Turnbull.” Accessed September 13, 2025. https://www.waddingtoncustot.com/artists/40-william-turnbull/