1. Bruce Taylor: A lost page of British Modernism

'Every form, even every line, represents a figure, no form is absolutely neutral'   
Mondrian, Circle, p. 42.


TACHISME & ABSTRACTION LYRIQUE IN ST IVES? 

An ink drawing on paper:

Bruce Taylor, Drawing, 1959.

signed 'Bruce Taylor' and dated '1959' in pencil.

This is very probably one of a series of 'drawings for sculpture'; in a vein that Taylor experimented with during the late 50s, soon after he moved to St Ives in 1956.

Intriguingly, the lines display a hybrid quality that combines the incisiveness of pen with the fluidity of a brush.

TAYLOR'S ORIGINALITY

1. Compared with drawings by contemporary British sculptors — by Moore, Hepworth, Chadwick, Armitage and others — Taylor's 'drawing for sculpture' is distinctive in that it does not strive to represent the outer appearance of an object (projected sculpture), but rather notates lines of energy that refer simultaneously to the subject matter (in this case, perhaps, a hybrid living organism, — abstracted and reconfigured by a secular Vitalism,  evident in the sculpture 'May bug' — and, simultaneously, to the material  processes needed to cut and release this form from sheet metal, with the oxy-acetylene cutter.

Taylor's 'drawings for sculpture' invite comparisons with the work of European artists such as Wols, Hartung, Michaux, Fiedler, Ribeyrolle (variously grouped under the labels of Abstraction Lyrique, Tachisme and Art Informel); with little or no equivalent among their British contemporaries.

Although Taylor very probably attended Herbert Read's lecture on Tachisme at the Pernwith Society in July 1957 [Review: St I. T. & E., 26 July 57], I am not  suggesting direct influences from these artists, but, rather, affinities and a convergence; evident in his development of discrete MODES of REFERENCE that embraced both figuration and Abstraction and reconciled them in his work.

[See Soulages quoted in Charbonnier, 1959: 'Cette peinture qui se passe de la figuration est cernée par le monde et lui doit son sens', p.158)].

Seen against the work of Maillol, Lipchitz, Gonzales, Giacometti and Picasso, Taylor's work appear more European than that of his St Ives contemporaries, furthermore, it does not mimic the work of neither Moore, Hepworth or Epstein. 

Working with both MASS and STRUCTURE, FIGURATION and GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION — in WELDED STEEL and in BRONZE — Taylor's works invites to be read alongside the work of his European contemporaries, and with reference to the debate that defined Abstraction not as independent from nature, but as complex transpositions and transmutations from the real, as x (?) pointed out in 1954. 

This juxtaposition casts a new light on the history of post WWII Art in Britain; where the dominance of US notions of Modernism, led to the neglect of European developments.

2. In this remarkable photomontage (below) Taylor combined a 'tachiste' drawing/painting with photography to produce a remarkable photomontage; quite unlike the work of any of his contemporaries, including the very experimental Henderson. 

This may have been an single isolated experiment (an 'idiolect', in the terminology of linguists) short-circuited by contemporary attitudes to photography that excluded  it from Art. In any case, this is the only example (perhaps one of two?) photomontage(s) that has survived, alongside a silk-screen print that, intriguingly, incorporates the same drawing, magnified. The back of the sheet onto which it was printed, however, was used for making a drawing in a different style, in 1963, whilst working for an  exhibition at Arnolfini that same year. 

There is no evidence that Taylor ever exhibited this photomontage, due to the exclusion of photographs from fine art exhibitions .

The Penwith Society of Arts, for instance, did not accept photographers as members, and a photographer with artistic ambitions, like the late Roger Mayne, had to battle (unsuccesfully) with the Art establishment to get photography established as fine Art and with Kenneth Clark to secure funding for an exhibition of photographs as Art. 

In St Ives and elsewhere in the UK photographers had to resign themselves to being called upon to photograph artists and their work, but not to exhibit as artists, alongside them. 

3. Taylor's position between (or rather within) both figuration and abstraction — at a time when artists in St Ives were pressed to situate their work either in one or the other strand — and his refusal to accept this problematic DUALISM (challenged in France by, among others, Pignon, Atlan, Picasso, and others), is interesting; for it invites us to reflect about some of the assumptions upon which this dualism rested.

4. Taylor's concerns about the threat of destruction, as the arm race escalated and the Cold War set in, were inspired by what he had seen at first hand, when his unit liberated a concentration camp in Germany (Belsen?), and soon after by the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is reflected in the titles of some of his works: War Head, Warrior, Sentinel...

Taylor's reference to and his representation-celebration of organic life, in all its forms — both vegetal, animal (insects, mammals, hybrids) and his totemic representation of man as a resisting agent (in Sentinel, Warrior, etc.) — represent a fourth key feature of his work. 

This is particularly significant at a time when an artificially-induced DUALISM was causing an arbitrary rift between the exponents of Figuration and those of Abstraction, on the basis of simplistic theoretical assumptions; as Abstraction was being claimed as the attribute of the new US-led, international 'avant garde' [See Documenta 1 (1955) and 2 (1959)].

5. Finally, it is important to note that, whether for print-making, welding, kiln-firing or bronze casting, Taylor made all his work himself; only resorting to a foundry for a few larger commissions. In this way, Taylor shared with Hans Hartung, in his early works, the desire to retain a direct link between the materiality of process and personal expression. 

These considerations have inspired this project to write Taylor back into the history of 20th century British art; for, as Peter Davies, remarked, upon seeing the works I have gathered, Taylor was undoubtedly 'the last St Ives artist of significance waiting to be re-discovered'. 

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