by Wilfrid Wright, curator and art historian
Pain and suffering are inevitable for persons of broad awareness and depth of heart. The truly great are, in my view, always bound to feel a great sense of sadness during their time upon Earth.[1] – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Brian Taylor (1935-2013) could be difficult, taciturn, belligerent, pessimistic and morose. Yet his sculptures – delicately moulded portraits of friends, family and animals – testify to an altogether different side to his character: kind, compassionate, empathetic, deeply intelligent and markedly sensitive to the world around him. Technical virtuosity and a meticulous eye for detail enabled Taylor to translate complex and abstract emotional states into physical form, creating a powerful body of work that explores human and animal nature with intimacy and poise. He is perhaps best known for his later bronzes of animals like the magnificent Burano Bull, or the playful depictions of his beloved lurcher, Lily; and his affecting portraits of his wife and three children, from which it is tempting to infer that the artist’s life was an idyll of bucolic domesticity. Perhaps, latterly, it was. But many of Taylor’s lesser-known pieces reveal a darker, more complex side to his story; perhaps none more so than the series of bronzes he created between 1968 and 1971, which he collectively titled the Anguished Heads.
The nine haunting busts that make up this series are some of Taylor’s most personal works and they reveal much about their notoriously enigmatic creator. This is not least because the group includes the only known self-portrait in Taylor’s oeuvre: Anguished Head VIII (The Artist as a Boy) (c. 1968-71). This life-sized bust of his childhood self is a depiction of Taylor’s earliest memory: of clinging to his mother’s leg, feeling her blood dripping onto his face, mixing with his tears as his father struck her repeatedly in the head. It is a harrowing image which never left Taylor. He had first revisited this trauma five years earlier in a sculpture titled The Artist’s Father (1963), in which the subject is distilled to an expressionistically rendered bust projecting a single, terrifyingly oversized fist that would seem comical in any other context. Taylor could never bring himself to sculpt his mother into this horrific scene, but his self-portrait mimics the form of the father, although smaller, facing in the opposite direction and reaching back rather than thrusting forward; diminutive, pathetic, crying out in pain and terror.
It was childhood traumas that stimulated Taylor’s lifelong exploration of anguish, both as a lived emotion and a philosophical concept. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, this state of severe mental or physical suffering is the hallmark of authentic existence, the condition of our humanity. It is the fear of existential abandonment, an expression of the uncertainty and longing that defines our perception of the world. At a young age Taylor became enthralled by the work of existentialist writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Franz Kafka whom he admired for their incorporation of their own lived experiences into their work – something which Taylor would emulate throughout his career. In fact, Taylor’s childhood could almost have been lifted from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel.
Born in Cheam in 1935, he lived the first eleven years of his life in a slum on the outskirts of London. Despite the hard work and sobriety of his parents, the family was extremely poor and, having been forced into gang activity from the age of five, he stood little chance of breaking free from the working-class privation into which he was born. Taylor’s father was a skilled and respected bricklayer, but a compulsive gambler who squandered any money he earned. His mother worked as a cleaner to put food on the table and took Brian and his three elder sisters with her wherever she went. It was a harsh upbringing, overshadowed by his father’s proclivity for extreme violence.
Taylor was in almost every sense the antithesis of his father. He was a precocious child, who could read and write from the age of three; but he was also shy and reserved, naive and easily taken advantage of. When he was just thirteen, he was seduced by an older neighbour, a married woman who, after a short affair, told her husband who proceeded to attack the young boy, stopped only by his mother who then threw Taylor out of the house. Cast onto the streets, confused and alone, Taylor attempted to take his own life. Suicide was still illegal in the 1940s and he was interned in a mental asylum, where he remained for the next year-and-a-half.
The asylum was in many ways a galvanising experience. Taylor was diagnosed with a form of manic depression – what would today be referred to as bipolar disorder – and art became for him a kind of therapy, allowing him to channel his fluctuating mental health throughout his life. The doctors encouraged Taylor to draw as a means of processing his feelings. He was given a shed and materials to make sculpture and began to create detailed studies of the patients and staff, such as Old Man with a Hat (c.1951). One day, he walked into a room where another inmate had hanged himself. Taylor’s instinctive reaction was to fetch his sketchbook and draw the man suspended from the ceiling. His remarkable talent was patent, and despite his father’s desire to enrol him in his bricklaying business, his mother and several teachers at school encouraged him to pursue art and the drawings he made in the asylum earned him a place at the Sutton and Cheam School of Art in 1950, from which he progressed to study sculpture at Epsom and Ewell School of Arts and Crafts in 1953, and eventually the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1954 to 1958.
Taylor thrived at art school – one colleague called him ‘by far the most talented man at the Slade’.[2] However, he was frequently a victim of the elitist snobbery that permeated the college in the 1950s and his work received little attention until Henry Moore – then considered the father of modern British sculpture – spotted his unique talent. The two became friends and Taylor finally began to gain recognition from the faculty who awarded him numerous accolades, including the prizes for painting (1954), sculpture (1956) and composition (1958), and the prestigious Prix de Rome (1958) – a three-year scholarship to travel to the Italian capital, where Taylor resided for 5 years.[3]
Italy was a huge part of Taylor’s life. Years later he would return there and purchase a derelict house and studio on top of a hill near the town of Gubbio in Umbria, to which he would return with family, friends and students year-on-year. In the early 1960s he travelled the length and breadth of the country, visiting obscure locations, living in museums and galleries. In 1960, whilst living in Rome, he became an assistant to the sculptor Emilio Greco (1913-95), from whom he learnt a great deal about the involved technical processes of making sculpture. He never particularly admired Greco’s work, however, feeling that it moved away from humanism into a kind of brittle mannerism; style dominating subject. Yet Taylor’s sculpture nevertheless shares much in common with the accessibility and communicativeness of post-war Italian art represented by the likes of Greco and Giacomo Manzù (1908-91). However, the artist who arguably had the greatest impact on Taylor was the early pioneer of Modernism (rival to Rodin), Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), whose attempts to draw art closer to reality and ‘bring it to life’ resulted in an experimental practice that revolutionised the construction and presentation of sculpture in the 20th century. Above all, Taylor admired the movement and drama inherent in Rosso’s sculpture, which he saw as akin to that conjured in the work of his heroes of the Quattrocento such as Masaccio, Donatello and della Francesca, as well as Titian and Michelangelo (although he preferred artists who depicted ‘real’ people). Great art, he thought, should be like a piece of theatre – a partially constructed world in which the viewer can lose themselves totally through their own powers of imagination.
Taylor relished the raw drama of life. His models were often those who existed at the margins of society: the mentally ill, the homeless, people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The sculpture that won him the Prix de Rome was a life-sized nude of an Antiguan boy living in London, a sculpture which, like Rodin’s Age of Bronze (1875) was so lifelike that it was accused by many to be a life cast. Because of his own background, Taylor had a particular empathy for those in poverty and often spoke about the struggles of working-class deprivation. He would pay homeless people to sit for him, setting them up with cigarettes and a cup of tea in front of the pot-bellied stove in his studio.
Taylor’s methods were exacting. He would measure every part of the head with callipers and rulers, using straight lines to construct curves, sculpting organic forms from the standpoint of a cube. He had no desire to reproduce verbatim what he saw in front of him, however; rather, he strove to underscore the traits of a motif, accentuating them where necessary. He believed in Rodin’s mantra that ‘what one commonly calls ugliness in nature can come to have great beauty in art’, and he worked freely and expressively with clay, avoiding the stasis of much academic sculpture. For Taylor, drawing was the basis of all art. He described sculpting as like ‘drawing in 3D’ and from his accuracy and attention to detail came the intimacy that characterises his work. It allowed him to depict the minutiae of expression and posture that evoke the fleeting and the ephemeral. Although his figures are unquestionably individuals, each displays archetypal tropes, and Taylor kept the ever-present threat of sentimentality at bay through his ability to use his subject as a foil to explicate deeper, universal states of emotion.
The Anguished Heads are the most overt expression of this quest toward the expression of existential feeling. Perpetually crying out with tortured faces emitting silent screams, they represent the human creature in struggle with the rigours of life – in a sense, a collective self-portrait exploring the artist’s own psyche. The faces are modelled on those of real people, including one of Taylor’s favourite models: Lily Pier – a student at Camberwell, where Taylor taught from 1965 to 1984. She too suffered with her mental health and would vent her anguish in fits of screaming and weeping during which she would dance. She and Taylor became very close, and she modelled for him several times, including for full-sized studies of her dancing. These works and the Anguished Heads demonstrate how acutely he was able to comprehend mental distress that many would have found frightening in allegorical portraits that present heightened depictions of human emotion.
Like many figurative artists in the late 20th century, Taylor was sidelined during the abstract revolution of the late 1960s, spearheaded in Britain by artists such as Anthony Caro. ‘All art is abstract’, Taylor maintained, meaning that all art is an expression of abstract ideas. For him, the figure remained the most effective vehicle for this expression, and he continued to pursue figuration throughout his life. His oeuvre is a concise one; the majority of his early work – made largely in clay, plaster and Ciment fondu – is lost, making the Anguished Heads rare survivals. Despite his work ethic, Taylor was not prolific. His mistrust of the art world meant that he rarely exhibited in his lifetime, preferring to pour his efforts into teaching, and his works were therefore made predominantly for himself, maintaining a highly personal aspect. It is only in the 21st century that Taylor’s oeuvre has been recognised, in part due to the generation of sculptors working today who were so influenced by his teaching. His sculptures are realist, existentialist, romantic in every sense, and above all, personal; and they speak to an important period of cultural exchange between British and Italian art in the late 20th century.
[1] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (David McDuff trans.), (London, Penguin, 2003), Part 3, Chapter 5, p. 315.
[2] Richard Rogers in Brian Taylor: Sculptor : Teacher, (Salisbury, Messums Wiltshire, 2018), p. 53.
[3] David J. Glasser, A Consistent Vision: Brian Taylor FRBS FSPS 1935-2013, (London, Ben Uri, 2013), p. 110.
