Page 50 - Studio International - August 1965

Visiting fire-eaters

London Commentary by G. S. Whittet

Summer months in England bring a spate of visitors
and this year seems a bright one for welcoming from
abroad memorable exhibitions by artists of esteem.
They ranged from Tapies, now seen here for the first
time in sufficient numbers to enable us to enjoy at
first hand the reasons of his reputation beyond the
proofs of his influence we see everywhere in painting
exhibitions. The I.C.A. put on what was in effect a
retrospective, mostly of smallish paintings dated from
1946 to 1964. They vary between the unmarked
surfaces of pure sand-coloured areas that echo to
sounds beyond our vision to the more frenetic happen­
ings in graffiti. collage and occasionally paint itself .
Sam Francis gouaches at Tooth's Gallery bring us face
to face with a virtuoso-on white grounds he assembles
and splashes bright colours of therapeutically high­
keyed colour in contrasts of area and mass that
stimulate the optic nerve in pleasurable animation. Sam
Francis has spent a great deal of time in recent years in
Japan where a museum to be devoted to his work is
being built. But restlessness rather than the quiet
contemplative spirit of the Orient is the keynote of most
of the gouaches shown here; he is in fact taking
something to the East rather than away from it.
Jean le Moal is a French artist who (incredibly) was
holding his first one-man exhibition in London. The
Molton Gallery hung about thirty works, most of them
oils and their visual music created an unusually
harmonious orchestration on the walls of this gallery.
Although untitled, the paints have their immediate
suggestion of Monet's Nympheas in their floating and
superimposed leaf-like shapes though their colours
are richer in reds, greens. blues and purples. Light re­
flects from the interior of the picture and the total
effect of the show was subtly and suggestively' natural'.
Ceri Richards, having a large retrospective exhibition
at the Marlborough New Landon Gallery is a Welshman
above all in the sense that a music and a fluency
informs all that he expresses. Even in the early reliefs
such as The Sculptor and his Model 1936 and The
Variable Costerwoman 1938 we follow a witty line
that defines the figures with bold sweeping arabesques.
The affinity with music is clearly evident in such
subtly majestic canvases as Interior with Music by
Albeniz of 1 949 where varied tints of red are run in
complementary balance over the whole surface,
establishing a dominant colour mood that is the setting
Sam Francis Red Black Blue 1965 Watercolour 35½ x 24!/- in. Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd. for the assorted graphic motives of flowers, dancing
Lygia Clark Inside is Outside 1964 Aluminium Signals Gallery
nude figures, sheet music and piano keyboard.
In the latest works we find ourselves confronted with
a simplification and force of symbols that are associated
in a celebrative fashion with growth and nature. In the
Cycle of Nature Arabesques the range of a colour is
run through a scale of ascending intensity and warmth
and cold are set in tension as are the relative areas of
brightness and drabness. In the painting I reproduce
the darker areas can be read as a changing brown in a
minor key with the central motives in yellow, green,
blue and orange conveying emblems of flowers,
foliage, seeds and eggs. To create the visual equivalent
of music is impossible but Ceri Richards comes as near
as anyone can to imparting the colourful imagery of
music-inspired reflections of life and its landscapes.
Lygia Clark, the Brazilian artist exhibiting at Signals
Gallery, combines in her exhibition the two chief
interests of the gallery: kinetic art and the work of
South American artists. She has an uncompromising
attitude towards her purpose that develops the idea of
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