9. Towards an Exhibition

'TIME CAPSULE'

The works featured in the planned exhibition will consist of some of the works that Bruce Taylor took with him, when he moved to France, and kept in his successive homes and studios, till he died in 1989. This confers upon them the quality of a 'time capsule' and of a personal collection.  
Combined with works to be borrowed from relatives, private collectors and family friends, it will show the variety of works produced by Taylor and to situate him in the St Ives art scene during the 1950s and early 1960s. 
Presenting his work alongside — in dialogue with — works by continental artists will provide an alternative perspective to that adopted in official accounts of the 'St Ives School'.

The wide range of media explored by Taylor — painting, drawing, welded steel, bronze, photography (to represent his sculpture), photomontage — and the nature of his works (studies, models, finished and unfinished pieces) will give visitors a sense of stepping into the artist studio and witness 'work in progress'…

The exhibition will challenge — as Taylor did in his work — the dualism Figuration . Abstraction that resulted in an artificial separation between the two strands, and in the sectarian promotion of Abstraction as the only way forward, and as expressing the true avant-garde.

Comparisons with graphic works by continental artists — Braque, Lipchitz, Picasso, Giacometti, Richier, Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux, Riopelle, Rebeyrolle, Pignon, etc. — will help us situate Taylor's work against a range of practices that transcended the artificial dualism 'Abstraction . Figuration'; promoted by some American artists and critics, in an attempt to 'steal the idea of modern art' from Europe, and usurp the place of Paris as international centre of the 'avant garde'.

The exhibition will show how Taylor resolved, in his life and in his work, what Herbert Read, president of the Penwith Society, termed 'the antithesis of organic and constructive' . 

Reference to Bergson's 'force vitale' invites us to consider how it may have informed Taylor's approach; enabling him to move between geometric and a figurative abstraction that retained links with the (organic) world. 
The list of sculptures included in his solo exhibition at the Drian Gallery, in 1958 , shows the wide range of his references: from the cosmic to the concrete; with a strong humanist undertone: Firmament, Ascending forms; Satellite; Convexity; Sea form;; Sentinel; War head; May-bug; Sea-horse; Oracle; Crucifixion…

Beyond dualisms. Unlike some of his contemporaries who settled in entrenched, sectarian positions, Taylor reconciled figuration and abstraction, by engaging with 'Life forms', which he transmuted through different techniques and media: plaster, clay, wax, welded steel, etc. He also used painting and drawing to explore ideas for sculptures, and carried some of his motifs into ceramics (St Ives Dish, 1957). 

Acknowledging that there is no 'pure' abstract art and realizing that 'non-referentiality' was a  semiotic impossibility/absurdity, Taylor created works that explore and celebrate the creative energy of life forms between the organic, the man-made and the mineral. 

With only six aphorisms remaining, it is difficult to figure out the ideas, theories or philosophy that informed his work. A secular version of Vitalism seems to have informed his work.  

By positing an 'élan vital' that animated all life forms, Bergson offered artists conceptual avenues for exploring the organic world in non-literal ways; as Germaine Richier did, in France and Francis Ponge acknowledged. Herbert Read's remarks that 'It is the business of art … to strip forms of their casual excrescences, to reveal the forms which the spirit might evolve if its aims were disinterested' (The Philosophy of Modern Art (p. 203), may have resonated with him, too; as may also have D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form.

Zen buddhism may have resonated deeper, however, according to the reminiscences of those who knew him.

Even when, in some of his works, naturalistic references are no longer apparent, a closer look reveal some links with the organic world; till he began making his abstract geometric relief.

Whether in welded steel pieces like Sentinel 
or in the 'cire perdue' Sea Horse bronze, Taylor created hybrid organic forms in which geometry still plays a part. In one example, reminiscent of the Chinese meditation stones, a new hybrid life form arises — hovering between the organic and the mineral — echo of Calvino's Cosmicomiche.

Statements about Art
The following aphorisms, included in the catalogue of his solo Arnolfini exhibition in 1966, are all that remains in print of his views about art:

1. The space created between and displaced by the form is more important than the form.

2. The relationship of surface to surface, angle to curve, smooth to jagged, produces energy.

3. The act of creating the image is more important than the object created.

4.  The object created only signposts the direction taken by the artist.

5. There exist the complete Warrior, the absolute King and Queen, without any one physical manifestation of their existence.

6. The distance between love and hate is reality.

7. The absolute statement cannot be made, the non-absolute ones only can be eliminated; leaving the space in between, which is the truth.

Unlike other St Ives sculptors Denis Mitchell, John Milne, Roger Leigh and Keith Leonard (with whom he often exhibited), some of whom  emulated Hepworth by making works with highly finished surfaces, which conferred upon them a precious and more abstract quality — Taylor's choice of welded steel as his chief medium —  conferred upon his works  a raw materiality that deviated from the style promoted by Hepworth, in St Ives. 
Nationally, Taylor was eclipsed by artists who produced more monumental works that were emphatically displayed in parks and in the halls of biennales.
The main disadvantage for him was to have had his artistic training delayed by the war years and not to have been able to benefit from the commissions and exhibiting possibilities offered by the Festival of Britain, the Venice Biennale, the Sculpture in the Park and Sculpture in the Home exhibitions, etc. By the time he appeared on the scene the sculpture scene was already well represented by Chadwick, Armitage,.... on the back of the ground-breaking 1952 'Geometry of Fear' exhibition at the Venice Biennale.  

By remaining outside the orbit of Hepworth, Gabo and Nicholson, and not espousing the notion of 'pure abstraction', and by avoiding the aesthetic conflicts among the artistic community of St Ives, Taylor defined for himself a discrete position which transcended the opposition between the 'organic' and the 'constructive'  (the latter used by Herbert Read to define modern sculpture): at the juncture where STRUCTURE, was displacing MASS, and ABSTRACTION was replacing FIGURATION at the new vanguard position; thus, making his work seem less pure.