A central figure of British post-war sculpture, William Turnbull’s oeuvre is defined by a profound dialogue between modern abstraction and antiquity. His work frequently looks back to ancient Greek, Roman, Cycladic and prehistoric art, in pursuit of a sense of ‘timelessness’ (Davidson, 2005: 28). Turnbull was also inspired by the ethnographic collection of the British Museum, being a regular visitor. Tragic Mask is indicative of this combination, as its title alludes to Greek theatre masks, while its linear markings reference those seen in African art. Turnbull believed that something 3,000 years old could look as modern as something made yesterday. He was particularly impressed by a marble Cycladic head from the island of Keros (c.2500 BC) in the Louvre, admiring its ability to be “more like a head than a portrait could be” (Davidson, 2005: 69, fn. 17), which, through its radical simplification, achieves a universality suggestive of “every face imaginable” (ibid., p. 69). Turnbull also regarded masks as intriguing attempts to fix the transient expression of the face – something which is “continuously fleeting and mobile” (ibid.,). The permanent arrest of such, within a single, solid object, charges Turnbull’s mask sculptures with a tension that constitutes a great source of their power. Along with ‘the standing figure’ and ‘the horse’, he regarded ‘the head’ as an archetypal image that has remained eternally relevant and constantly represented until the present day.

An earlier example of Turnbull’s Tragic Mask, dated 1979, is held in the collection of the Tate, London (T03272).