Page 50 - Studio International - October 1969

London `BIG PAINTINGS FOR PUBLIC PLACES', AT THE
commentary ROYAL ACADEMY; 'WHEN ATTITUDES BECOME
FORM' AT THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY
ARTS
JOHN MILNE'S SCULPTURE AT THE MARJORIE
PARR GALLERY FROM 2 TO 25 OCTOBER
130
Two recent London shows, running concur-
rently, one at the ROYAL ACADEMY and one at
the INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS, if seen
on the same day, could have given rise to
useful reflection on the cultural place painting
now occupies and the relationship, if any
meaningful one exists, between it and the
latest manifestations of Modern Art. It will,
no doubt, have provided an occasion for many
critics to emphasise what they have been saying
for some time, that painting, with its forma-
list preoccupations and geographical confines,
is an obsolete and dying medium, pointing to
the radical activities of mixed-mediaticians
and object-makers as being the place where it
is currently at. What I would like to do here is
to briefly outline the historical circumstances
which have put painting where it is and, as an
exhibitor in the Academy show, to defend the
inevitably conservative stance taken by us
painters against the attack on our medium
implied in the ICA exhibition.
The conservative position of the medium is a
direct result of the completion of processes
which have taken place in the art of the last
fifty years that sought to define the 'area of
competence' in which painting alone could
profitably operate. The search for that irredu-
cible entity, proper only to painting, provided
the prime dynamic for art-makers working in
the formalist mainstream, from Mondrian to
Newman and the main agents of definition
they employed were reductive and rejective
procedures. With the ultimate paintings of Ad
Reinhardt, the final contribution of this rejec-
tive tradition has been made and the irreduc-
ible essence, namely the equivocal nature of
confronted two-dimensional surface, has been
finally established. With this modernist pain-
ting reached an important linear objective, an
objective which had provided the progressive
impetus for generations of formalist art makers
and an objective to which both the Royal