Page 38 - Studio International - December 1965

No more an island

London Commentary by G. S. Whittet
After almost twenty years of visiting the changing
exhibitions in London's galleries, I find the previous
insularity completely disappeared and instead a
growing number of exhibitions by foreign artists who
are as yet not even of great repute in their own
countries. So great is the hunger of dealers for pictures
and sculptures that trips abroad result in their directors
returning with promises of forthcoming works from
Germany, from France, from Austria, even from America.
Gustav Klimt at the Marlborough recalled the last
year's show of work by his pupil and rival Egon Schiele.
Certainly the older man could demonstrate in his later
work a greater richness of pattern and colour that
savoured much of the Jugendstil; in his drawings,
however, we see little of the erotic fire that distinguished
Schiele. But such is the popularity of the Viennese
artist's work now it is only the pencil drawings that
were for sale. Forty-seven years after his death Klimt's
fame is secured far beyond his native Austria.
Used as we are to the cannibalism from machinery
that sculptors adapt to form their images, it was a
surprise to encounter the delicacy of a young German
artist, Gunter Haese working in wire-mesh, showing
later at the Marlborough. He studied under Ewald
Matare at Ousseldorf after abandoning painting and he
found his interest aroused by the forms he discovered
on dismantling a clock. But it was not the mechanical
movement of the parts that entranced him so much as
the elegant and even unsubstantial forms that they
suggested. From the incorporation of cogs and wheels
into standing artifacts he became obsessed with the
wire-gauze that he used first to cage the tiny creations
and then to model shapes in the gauze itself. Tiny
springs that dance to the slightest vibration animate
these lightweight fantasies-constructions seems too
heavy a word to describe them-and the brass metal
they are formed with gives a bright reflection to their
intricacies. Icons, toys, symbols of satire-his House of
Lords is as witty a paraphrase of that institution as
could be conceived-it scarcely matters how we label
them. Their identity is sharply defined as three­
dimensional comment on life by analogy.
Another German artist Gerhart Bergmann from Berlin
brought some three dozen of his paintings to the
Grabowski Gallery where their impact was immediate
and strong for all the indefinition of their motives. This
painter uses the terms of figurative art to present scenes
{which for want of a better word we must call them)
where the motives are unidentifiable. Here and there
it seems we are allowed to recognise a form that could
be a bird, at least in part, and there are others which
might be human. This evanescent half-world resembles
the drama of a dream where bodies are sensed to
contain life without immediate classification. Two
statements in the catalogue note really sum up what
we feel in Bergmann: one is Goethe's phrase 'Colours
are actions and sufferings of light' and the second is
'Bergmann's way of forming colours into pictures (is)
specifically Central European'.
Pieter Kliesch yet another German was showing his
small and broadly vivacious little paintings with an
ambivalent carnival effect at the Brook Street Gallery
where upstairs John Paul Jones isolated his standing
and seated men and women in pastels that recalled
Odilon Redon in their fragile colours though having
their own characteristics of almost surreal undertones.
Clelia Lotterio Thomas is an Italian woman who reads
a great deal and who has a warm affection for English
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