Page 48 - Studio International - July 1965

Summer's Miscellany

London Commentary by G. S. Whittet

Victor Pasmore is that rare bird of art, an Englishman landscape painters are evident as influences that
who has created a formidable reputation principally by became confirmed in those shimmering, balanced oils
staying at home. His complete and splendid retro­ of the Thames side and Hammersmith.
spective at the Tate Gallery brought the public face to When in the late 1 940's he made a fresh start with
face with the tangible reasons for the reputation, abstraction, it was still within the easel painting frame
proving, if proof were needed, that a probing and the result was a series of paintings in which spiral
intelligence and an intellectual development of ideas motives predominated of which the best known
are not exclusively Continental attributes. From the example was the mural ceramic for the Regatta
earliest work, a little landscape painted at the age of Restaurant during the Festival of Britain 1951. Then
seventeen while he was still at Harrow, we see how came the relief constructions when as Ronald Alley
known methods of painting have been studied, describes the event in the handsome catalogue: 'He
practise::l and ultimately rejected by the artist when it believed that painting, being limited to two dimensions,
seemed as if the juice had been squeezed from them. could only represent space illusionistically and that
Impressionism, Matisse, Bonnard and the Chinese abstract art needed to create an organic spatial
.
relationship by developing into actual dimensions.'
Ignoring the obvious answer of sculpture, Pasmore
experimented with those projective reliefs and evolved
some satisfying solutions to equations of basic design
without however arriving at more impressive visual
impacts than can be derived from architectural models
and this to some extent is what they were incidentally
employed for; Pasmore while at Newcastle was
employed in designing housing projects for Peterlee
New Town.
As we saw at the last one-man exhibition by the artist
at the Marlborough New London Gallery, he has,
for the moment anyway, given up reliefs for the return
to paint. Largest work at the Tate was a mural painting
comprising a blue stipple pattern on the wall of one
of the galleries showing his work. The doorway is
integrated into the overall design in which the dazzling
white ground provided the ideal space which the blue
form and the black ones divide and make alive.
Renato Guttuso is perhaps one of the best known
figurative artists in Italy where he enjoys an enormous
success. The reason is not difficult to understand-he
represents the rejection of the academic abstraction
and, as a Communist, he sees his art as an instrument in
emphasising the human condition as Jean-Paul Sartre,
for example, used the novel form. That said, one must
qualify the criticism by remarking that the latest
exhibition of Guttuso's work at McRoberts and
Tunnard Gallery shows a greater concentration on what
might be described as the pictorial essentials. The
large Uomo Seduto of 1964, which is reproduced, was
included in the Carnegie International and its effect is
considerable. It shows above all Guttuso's masterly
skill as a draughtsman and his ability to animate a form
by plastic modelling so that what is at rest seems so
only momentarily. This tension is conveyed too in the
still life paintings and drawings. This setting up of
contrapuntal oppositions can instil a dynamic intensity
even to scenes such as the roofs of Rome.
Interiors International, as a promoter of development
in furnishing fabrics, mounted a fascinating exhibition
in their London show rooms which combined in a
sharply complementary fashion the woven forms by
v• .Sheila Hicks and her students and sculpture by Aidron
Duckworth. Planning Unit Ltd. arranged the whole
flashing mise en scene; in it Aidron Duckworth's wall
sculptures combined the appeal of painting in dull matt
monochrome colours of grey and red, bisected and
divided by diagonal struts some inches away from the
surface on which were imposed ceramic objects. Seen
as integrated parts of a room the eight panels, obvious
Monticelli (1824-1886) but not oppressive in their neutral colours, provided
Chasseur (Spadassm)
Panel effective foils for the variegated colours of the fabrics.
20 X 9 in.
Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd. Architecturally adaptable, the sculptures are of aesthetic
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