6. In Search of a Forgotten Modernist

IN SEARCH OF A FORGOTTEN MODERNIST 

Let's consider this photograph…

(reproduced from Peter Davies' St Ives Revisited: innovators and followers, 1994).

taken on 30th June 1958, at the opening of the exhibition '4 Sculptors 2 Painters', at the Drian Gallery, London. 

The gallery was set up in 1957 by Lithuanian artist Halima Nalecz, to show the work of  up-and-coming artists, before more prestigious London art galleries signed them on…

This exhibition (1-9 July) included 8 works by each artist. From left to right: Roger Leigh, Bruce Taylor,  Gwen Leitch, Misomé Peile, Denis Mitchell (spectacles), Halima Nalecz (gallerist) and Brian Wall.

Echoing the aesthetic preoccupations of the day,  Alan Bowness remarked in the catalogue: 'The St Ives painter and sculptor is compelled to turn first to the fundamentals of his art — the question of colour, texture, form, space and mouvement'.

Projecting his formalist concerns onto the work of artists who pursued different artistic aims, in order to valorize their works in the context of the new 'avant garde', in the light of the rise of abstraction, Bowness played down the humanistic concerns of Taylor's works and devalued their figurative expression.

THE PROBLEM OF FORM

This emphasis on 'pure' form over 'realist' representation reflected the tension that existed between 'figuration' and 'abstraction' among St Ives artists, from the late 1940s, and that led to the schism in the St Ives Society of Artists that resulted in the creation of the Penwith Society, in 1949. 
Similar tensions did occur within the Newlyn Society of artists.

The polarisation of the debate between 'FIGURATION' / 'REPRESENTATION' and 'ABSTRACTION' / 'CONSTRUCTION' by Herbert Read, Bowness and other major critics of the day [and among American artists and critics who emphasised this dualism in an attempt to claim the aesthetic high ground], confined the debate to a simplistic aesthetic dualism that defined the new 'Avant-Garde' on the basis of arbitrary assumptions, and, in the process, impoverished the debate around representation in all fields of art.

Taylor did not conform to this dualism, neither did he follow the Nicholson-Hepworth orthodoxy, but followed his own idiosyncratic path, in preference to fashionable trends. He did so at the risk of being overlooked.
Nicholson, however, told Taylor that recognition would not come to him before the age of forty, but Taylor did not help himself when he, seemingly, refused to comply with the conditions specified by a London gallery who promised to 'turn him into a household name'.
His close friend Alan Davie once remarked to him:' I don't understand why I was picked up and you were not'.

When the wave of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM and MINIMALISM  reached Britain from the US, during the 1950s, the new brand of 'Abstraction' — with its contentious claims to be free from the School of Paris and of European avant-garde artistic traditions, 'non referential' and autonomous — was sympathetically received in Britain, where it soon became the new orthodoxy.

The uncritical acceptance of these hegemonic claims from the US, described by Serge Guibaud in his book 'How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art', led the British art establishment to accept a US version of Modernism that distorted the reality on the wider  (international) ground and constituted a canon on arbitrary grounds. Today, this canon is reflected in the official versions of post-war art history, as written and taught in the UK (aligned on US versions), and in the content and emphases of our public art exhibitions and collections.

British art historians, for instance, would do well to read David Smith's remarks* about his debt to Gonzales before erroneously casting Smith as the instigator of a new practice based on a break with the European tradition as American critics claimed.

* D. Smith, Gonzales: First Master of the Torch, in; Julio Gonzales, Tate Gallery, 1970.

BACK TO THE PHOTO…
Standing at the back, behind his snapily-dressed colleagues, Bruce Taylor, wearing a knitted (cricket) jumper over a shirt, cut the image of a quiet outsider, looking on from behind; his gaze avoiding the camera… The well-trimmed beard and the fact that he priced his works in guineas connoting a refined bohemianism.

Five of the six artists were members of the Penwith Society. Gwen Leitch (from Australia, temporary resident in St Ives) exhibited, on occasions, with them, as guest.

Among the sculptors Roger Leigh, Denis Mitchell and Brian Hall, all worked, at some time, as assistants to Barbara Hepworth during the 50s. All three achieved some public notoriety as exponents of the 'St Ives School'; helped by their association with Hepworth, who, with Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, represented British contemporary sculpture: nationally and on the international art scene, till Lynn Chadwick* was awarded first prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale and his works set new directions for British sculpture.
*Chadwick was one of four artists representing British sculpture at Documenta 2, in 1959, alongside Henry Moore, Kenneth Armitage and Reg Butter.

Instead of developing and working in a single homogeneous style, Taylor experimented both with 'MASS' (in his bronzes) and 'STRUCTURE' (in the welded steel pieces for which he was noted), producing works characterized by a  humanism that he evolved from his study of living organisms (like Wols), his experience of WWII**; and that converged with the aims of the Artists International Association, where he exhibited, in 1962*. 

[reference in exhibition catalogue (Arnolfini, 1963)]

** Taylor's experience of the war in Germany, especially his involvement in the liberation of a concentration camp, turned him into a pacifist, and informed much of his early works, which hovers between a meditation about the infinite richness of life and the impending threat of destruction by war [See the list of titles on the right].

Taylor also produced some wood carvings. One of them was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A small carving is in the collection of St Ives artist Roy Conn.

*  *  *

The 5 June 1959 issue of the St Ives Times and Echo reviewed what was described as 'the first non-state supported Open-air exhibition of sculpture held in Britain'. Set in Trewyn Gardens, the artists were Barbara Hepworth, Roger Leigh, John Hoskin, John Milne, Denis Mitchell, Barbara Tribe, Bruce Taylor and Brian Wall. 
We do not know which work/s Taylor exhibited there.

2. 'OUBLI'

Whereas works by Leigh, Mitchell and Hall were included in the 1985 Tate Gallery retrospective exhibition St Ives: 1939-64, Bruce Taylor was only mentioned incidentally in the catalogue, for his election as chair of the Penwith Society in 1957.

In St Ives Revisited  (1994) Taylor is also mentioned, in passing, for having introduced Roger Leigh to 'practical pottery'.

In After Trewyn: St Ives Sculptors since Hepworth (2001), Taylor is mentioned once for exhibiting with Brian Wall at the Drian Gallery exhibition (see photograph above).

The absence of references to Taylor's works in books and catalogues about St Ives testifies to his having been edited out of art history. 

This is surprising given the quality of his work, the active part he played in the cultural life of St Ives, and his discrete approach to drawing and sculpture, unlike that of his St Ives contemporaries. It is all the more surprising since Taylor was considered, at the time of his solo show at the Drian gallery, in 1958, as 'one of the earliest serious artists to work in this medium' (welded steel) [Drian Galleries: a short history,2009, p.12].

The suggestion, by Keith Sutton, that, at the Drian Gallery, in 1958, the exhibiting artists's 'interest in materials' was 'at the expense of content'  (After Trewyn, p. 70) echoes Alan Bowness remarks, in the catalogue, and, like him, fails to acknowledge Taylor's engagement with subject-matter and the ambiguous symbolism of his work; evident in the title of such works as 'May Bug' and 'Crucifixion' as significant or relevant.

For the critics and curators engaged in promoting 'pure' or 'total' abstraction, Taylor's early work must have seemed too grounded in figuration; too referential and symbolic. 

A look at the sculptures he produced and exhibited in St Ives shows that Taylor's work was distinctive, albeit in a non sensationalist (or opportunistic) way.

The fact that it did not fit neatly within the fashionable dualism 'figuration . abstraction', and that it retained a strong humanist concerns with political implications well after the Political Clause had been deleted in the statutes of the Artist International Association, in 1953, shows that Taylor's neglect may be linked with the prominence of unfashionable ethical concerns in his works, and by the fact that he did not chase galleries and critics, but quietly (and confidently) went on producing his works in the margins.
Taylor turned down a London gallery's offer to 'turn him into a household name' if he moved to London and focused all his attention on his art (at the expense of his family). 

The 'humanist, organic element', that gave Henry Moore's sculpture its 'vitality' [p. 68] is present in Taylor's bronzes and may well have been missed, in St Ives, where Barbara Hepworth's influence and stature was considerable.

Such works as Sentinel would have fitted better than some of the works selected by Herber Read for the Venice Bennale (1952), and promoted by the sensationalist slogan of  the 'Geometry of Fear'. 

CONTEXT: 'HOW NEW YORK STOLE THE IDEA OF MODERN ART'… 

Taylor's demise may be explained by the fact that he was born a few years too late and, due to the interruption of the war, missed the opportunity to study in time to benefit from the commissions generated by the Festival of Britain (1951), the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner  competition (1952-) , the momentous 1952 Venice Biennale and other high profile exhibitions such as the Battersea and Holland parks open air sculpture exhibitions, as well as the Sculpture in the Home exhibitions (1949, 1951-), through which young sculptors were able to launch their career in London; and, like Lynn Chadwick — who represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale and won the international prize for sculpture (against Giacometti) — internationally. 

In 1951, for instance, the Festival of Britain and the Arts Council had commissioned works from Robert Adams, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Karin Jonzen, F E McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Uli Nimptsch and Eduardo Paolozzi. Some commissioned works were sited at Battersea Park, in the open-air sculpture exhibition that ran concurrently with the Festival.

By July 1952, when Taylor (1921-1989) left Corsham, Reg Butler (1913-1981), Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003), Kenneth Armittage (1916-2002), Bernard Meadow (1915-2005), Edoardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and William Turnbull (1922-2012) had already established a reputation at the Venice biennale, as a new generation of artists who had broken away from the Moore-Hepworth-Epstein classic-modernist tradition, and were opening new avenues for sculpture. Herbert Read heralded this new wave with the sensationalist 'geometry of fear' slogan that caught the public and critics' imagination and fueled controversy. 

As Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art impacted on London galleries; many London-based artists and critics repositioned themselves somewhat opportunistically. 

In late 1959-60 Anthony Caro switched from making figurative sculptures of the human figure (with an emphasis on mass): 

Anthony Caro, Woman Body, bronze, Battersea Park,1960. Press photograph.

to making abstract geometric constructions in welded steel, after seeing the works of David Smith in the US. Thus, Caro's Midday (1960), was exhibited in Battersee Park in the 'Sculpture in the Open Air' exhibition (1963) that combined contemporary British and American works:

A. Caro, Midday, 1960. Welded steel. 

It was as if Woman Body had been replaced by the metal structure that supported it!
Caro's debt to Smith was openly acknowledged in a sculpture titled Homage to David Smith in 1966.

[Meanwhile the assimilation of Pop Art, facilitated by a series of exhibitions organized by the Independent Group as early as 1951, and prefigured by Paolozzi's ground-breaking 'BUNK' collage series, as early as the late 40s, opened a new dimension and new sets of parameters for making and for viewing sculpture].

The CIA-backed exhibition Modern Art in the United States, at the Tate Gallery, in 1956, and the 'New American Painting' contributed, with other such exhibitions to establish the cultural hegemony of American art on British art, artists, dealers, critics and curators; trying to establish it on the rest of the world, as part of a general program to promote The United States as a land of freedom and expose the repressive ideology of Communism.

TAYLOR IN ST IVES

Soon after arriving in St Ives, in 1956, Taylor established a practice that took organic life forms and life energy, as its subject-matter: in painting ('Ore Stream'), drawing, welded steel and bronze sculptures, and ceramics. 

Michael Canney's notes 'Artists in Cornwall'  lists Taylor as an exhibitor at Newlyn [but, surprisingly, not in St Ives].

The earliest record of Taylor exhibiting in Cornwall I have found is his participation, at the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, in Newlyn, in 1956, with some ceramic works. 

[100 Years in Newlyn: Diary of a Gallery, 1995, p. 108]

Like his other works in welded steel — Sentinel, War Head, Buckler, etc.— May Bug consists of forms that are not illusionistic but, like the creature in Kafka's Metamorphosis, suggests transformation in the making that resonate with symbolic meanings. 

Superficially May-bug seems to justify Sutton's remarks about the work being more about process than content (a fact confirmed by Taylor in a statement of 1963); for the sculpture emphasizes the tearing of sheet metal with the oxy-acetylene cutter; as a future director of the Courtauld Institute noted in his copy of the catalogue; a remark intended to valorize the work in a formalist key. The sculpture could, thus, be seen as a 'drawing cut into space'; however, it would be premature to read the work in purely formalist terms.

It sit in a strand alongside Sentinel (1958) and other welded steel sculptures of that period (War Head) that present the human body as an agent of resistance (against the incumbent threat of war and mass destruction by the nuclear bomb), and convey HUMANIST values akin to those promoted by the AIA before 1953.

Taylor's experience at the front and the violence he witnessed, turned him into a pacifist, and entered his work, in different guises.

Stylistically, whereas Henry Moore's Warrior with Shield (1953-54) emphasizes mass, giving his warrior the appearance of an archaeological remain — with parts of its legs and arms missing:

 — in Taylor's Sentinel, formal elements are synthesized and condensed into a hybrid semi-abstract symbol of resistance; an allegory that confers upon it the quality of a monument.

In a very different vein from the biomorphic syntheses of Moore and Hepworth, Taylor's forms express a concern with life, which he expressed through stylized representations of semi-abstract/imagined organisms whose existence seem to testify to the resilience of life in the face of impending threats.

Taylor's work contradict critics's affirmation that by the 1950s, the impact of war was no longer present in art and was replaced by a concern with abstraction. It is certainly reflected in the Artist International decision to remove the political clause out of their agenda but was not abandoned by all artists.

Whereas Moore focused on the Human figure (individuals and pairs) and Barbara Hepworth distilled forms abstracted from the landscape, Taylor developed hybrid life forms from nature which he set against an implied background of human history.         

In his bronzes Taylor's humanist values are expressed through ambiguous organic forms imbued with a secular Vitalism: hovering between celebration of life and warning against forces that threaten Life's survival.  

To Greenberg, apologist of a formalist (allegedly 'non referential') aesthetics, Taylor's works would have appeared too 'referential', too figurative and too grounded in the concrete and in the past (Rodin's tradition for his bronzes) ; too Aristotelian, and too humanistically expressive. 

However Rothko's remarks that even with works that 'have no direct association with any particular visual experience', [one should add as consciously recorded] 'in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms' (Possibilities I,1947; Chipp: 549), and Barbara Hepworth's declaration that 'In the contemplation of nature we are perpetually renewed, our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive, and rightly understood, it gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty' (A Pictorial Autobiography: 30), imply that 'non-referentiality' and the utopia of a 'pure' abstraction was a pious wish, not to say a semiotic impossibility; for the formal transformations and transmutations operated by the mind — however disconnected from life they may seem to the artist — have their origin in life experiences grounded in concrete realities. Choosing to ignore them does not not mean they are absent or inoperative in the works, as Elaine de Kooning pointed out.

The hegemonic claims made, on this contentious semiological ground, by American artists like Barnett Newman (Chipp:553) and critics like Greenberg and Rosenberg, in support of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, need to be reconsidered in the light of David Smith's acknowledgement that the new sculpture, including his own, was developed in response to (and in continuity with) the iron constructions of Picasso, Gonzales, Giacometti, Miro and Calder, and did not 'spring out of nothing' as a piecemeal rejection of (and free from) the European tradition implied.

SCULPTURE IN THE HOME EXHIBITIONS

The second Sculpture in the Home exhibition showed that by 1950-51 works by Reg Butler, Paolozzi, and William Turnbull were offering radical alternatives to the more figurative representation of the human figure by Jacob Epstein, Uli Nimptsch, Ben Franklin, E.C.N. Folkard and Keith Godwin and to its abstract stylizations by Henry  Moore, Barabara Hepworth, Bernard Meadow. 

See Paul Evans, Sculpture (1957). 

Had Taylor remained (and played the 'gallery-game') in Britain, as Ben Nicholson suggested [Nicholson told him that he would be recognized by the age of forty; i.e. around 1961) his work would have fitted well in this 'domestic' category, and in Edward Lucie-Smith's exhibition of figurative sculptures in Holland Park in 1975,where, the curator stated; 'It is the notion of transformation and transmutation that dominates the show' (Catalogue:7).

Not driven by or influenced by the fashionable new trends promoted by 'progressive' London galleries, Taylor developed his works as a series of laboratory experiments, some of which he exhibited in group (and two solo) shows (London, 1958;  Bristol, 1966], but without chasing fame in London, nor courting influential critics and curators.  His artistic ambition focused on making works that expressed his combined aesthetic and ethical concerns. 

The majority of his works collected for this exhibition is suitable for display in domestic settings; and his larger welded steel sculptures were not particularly suited for long-term display out of doors. However, he deliberately placed some around his open air studio in the Pyrénées, watching them being slowly eroded by the elements. 

Next to the increasingly larger public works produced by his contemporaries and exhibited in parks, biennales and at other spectacular venues that called for monumental works, Taylor's 'chamber' works may have been 'dwarfed' and appeared less impressive or significant.

Taylor's neglect could also be explained by the fact that he left a small oeuvre; not large enough, as it stands, to have fuelled the art-market and supplied the collections of public art museums.
His works exists mostly in private collections.

Finally, Taylor's disappearance from public consciousness may be seen as part of the large collateral losses accepted by the art world in the process of writing the history of  art. For art historians and curators (since Vasari) work to perpetuate a cult of celebrities; following on from gallerists and critics who carry out the selection process.  Accepting the canon, art historians are not inclined to challenge the 'star system' and its hierarchies. Neither do they give themselves the means to produce micro-histories that may provide more detailed, diverse and inclusive accounts of what actually happened at the time. More histories of commercial success and social ecognition than history of what really happened…

It is useful, at this point, to distinguish  between  (and not to confuse) 'Art History' as the written account of what allegedly happened at the time, and 'art history' as the sum of events that actually happened. The first belongs to the realm of discourse, the second refers to a course of events, which necessarily exceeds the scope of that (and any)  discourse.

The two, however, should never be conflated.

To overcome the limitations of these 'partial', selective versions of history, which become the norm, the 'canon', we need to cast our net further; and give ourselves the means to do so: to produce fuller and more comprehensive accounts of what happened in the field, and take into account works and experiments that may have seemed less significant (and, thus, more expendable), or simply not noticed…

Conformism or intellectual laziness?

EXHIBITING

By 1961 Taylor was seen renovating a large house at Painswick, near Stroud and two years later he acquired a house near St Ives, where he built a studio where he could cast small bronzes, by the lost wax process.

Although he went on exhibiting in St Ives with the Penwith Society, his exhibiting now shifted to Bristol and Gloucester.

In 1961, Taylor took part in a group show of St Ives artists at Arnolfini, with Barns-Graham, Michael Broido, Bob Crossley, Roger Leigh, Alexander Mackenzie, Denis Mitchell, Simon Nicholson, Tom Pearce, Jack Pender, Tony Shiels. 

He exhibited again at Arnolfini, in 1963, in'Four Sculptors': Bruce Taylor, Michael Pennie, Mark Ingram and Roger Leigh.

A solo show at Arnolfini, in 1966, is the last exhibition I have been able to trace before he left the country, around 1969, after spending two years teaching in a school, with his wife, in Grantham, Lincolnshire; to save enough money in preparation for settling abroad. 
To produce the works for this exhibition Taylor took a six month unnpaid sabbatical from the school where he taught.

[An email to the St Ives archive, from 2006, by the director of collections at the Arts Council of Wales, requesting information about Bruce Taylor confirms that Bruce Taylor had 'fallen off the map'.

The correspondance shows that soon after acquiring  'King and Queen' (from Arnolfini?), during the late 1960s, Arts Council Wales had succeeded in contacting Taylor at his home in France, and had received a reply from him in 1970. 

By 2006, no one in Britain, including the St Ives Archive, [except members of his second family] knew what had happened to Bruce Taylor, after he left St Ives; nor that he had died in 1989. His artist friend Roger Leigh and his family went on visiting him regularly in the South of France (at Mas Fourtou) on their way to Spain where they spent their annual Summer holidays.

*  *  *