William Tucker

Description

The title is taken from Balzac's 1831 story The Unknown Masterpiece, later illustrated by Picasso and celebrated by Dore Ashton in her book A Fable of Modern Art. In the novel, the painter Frenhofer has for years been engaged in secret on a work which is eventually revealed to be a confusion of colour and line with the model's foot the only recognisable element. The story is a prophetic description of the risks of public incomprehension and of doubt or self-deception on the part of the modern artist.

Tucker's Frenhofer is at first sight a formless lump, suggestive of cloud or rock formations, but which on closer inspection seems to resolve itself into a torso, either that of a pregnant woman or of a paunchy male like Rodin's Balzac studies. The possibility of many images, and the risk of none at all - of total chaos - is for Tucker a consequence of the art of modelling, with shape and surface generated by the contact of the hand with the soft material. Over the past fifteen years the process of modelling has become as much the subject of Tucker's sculpture as it is the means. Gradually he has sought a more explicit image of the body which is as much sensed internally as from the outside.

Several years ago Tucker was invited by the Henry Moore Institute to work at the studio in Dean Clough. Models and drawings were sent from Tucker's studio in the United States and a preliminary core was prepared. In the event Tucker modelled the sculpture in a brief but intense period in April 1996 in a studio at West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham, and Sculpture at Goodwood underwrote the casting in bronze. The location at Goodwood was chosen by the artist for its combination of an intimate space enclosed by trees and the possibillity of longer views.