Page 16 - Studio International - December1996

The ascendancy of London in the sixties

Patrick Heron discusses the response of British artists to the American
'first generation'-and American criticism of the British scene

As one of the first Europeans to have per- England. In addition, the British public has made simply mixing together Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard,
ceived the great importance of American an enthusiastic response to the most important Braque, Miro, and others—and if anything doing it
painting (and to have recorded this enthusi- American artists, more than in America. I think slightly less 'pertly than the British 'middle-
that in many cases, certainly in those of Pollock, generation', despite the fact that we had been
asm in print at an early stage) I feel it is
Rothko, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns (perhaps prevented by wartime restrictions from making a
somehow incumbent upon me, now, to speak
not Jasper so much because he did have a good firm start on our careers as painters until 1946,
out in condemnation of two things which
response here), it was after the London exhibitions or thereabouts). But by 1950 these Americans
characterize the present situation on both
that Americans snapped to and said, "Well, we've had all arrived (possibly a little too suddenly, it
sides of the Atlantic: first, the intense artistic
really got something here and we'd better start may seem, in retrospect) at the large-scale, empty,
chauvinism which rages now in New York;
studying it and thinking about it and doing some- shallow-space format by which the world knows
second, the sheer gutless obsequiousness to thing about it." ' them: and this precisely was the revolution which
the Americans which prevails amongst so we hailed; because it showed the way out of the
many British critics and art pundits generally. I am not so concerned to point to the value of the claustrophobic post—cubist idioms of postwar
It is the second of these two related pheno- help which British enthusiasm rendered to the French painting and led to new concepts of
mena which most infuriates British painters, careers of Rauschenberg and Johns: these artists pictorial space. It is precisely because (unlike the
because we know perfectly well that London do not greatly interest me, and in any case by the French) we British openly availed ourselves of the
time they came on the scene here it was already American discoveries, making them to some extent
leads New York now in so many ways, even
fashionable to accord the loudest praise to our own new point of departure, that we have
if our own critics can't see it. I have neither
American artists. But the extremely enthusiastic been able now to advance far beyond the American
the time nor the impulse to argue the entire
welcome extended to the work of Pollock, Rothko, positions of 1950—whereas the French, pretending
case in print, but I will say this : in Britain
de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell, Newman, Still, that nothing had happened in New York, success-
today there are not one but three generations and Gottlieb, in the early and middle 1950's—not by fully cut themselves off from contact with the
of painters. whose vitality, persistent energy, `the British public' (O'Hara himself is guilty of an pictorial revolution which was at the centre of
inventiveness and sheer sensibility is not injustice here), but by a very small group of western painting for the decade 1950-60, and are
equalled anywhere else in the world. Further- `middle generation' British painters, of whom I was still doomed, as a result, to pursue 'a merely
more, these three generations are linked in an one—this was a historic development of the utmost circular development, or redevelopment, of the
organic historical relationship-from Nichol- importance. merely decorative consequences of Cubism', as I
son down through the so-called 'middle If the eight 'first generation' New York painters said in a letter to The Times in June, 1963, on this
I have just named became the first American subject.
generation' to a positive crowd of younger
painters to exercise great influence on the inter- Unfortunately those eight 'first generation' New
painters, many only in their early thirties.
national scene, it was our tiny group of 'middle York painters have never really advanced beyond
The recent development of major painting in
generation' painters in Britain who gave them the formats which each had arrived at by 1950:
Britain has not, as in New York, suffered from
their first foreign approval—their first invaluable instead, they seem to have 'gone into production',
those horizontal fractures of total reaction, as bridgehead of approval outside the United States. repeating the results of their discoveries instead of
between one generation and the next: there is Furthermore, and in sharp contrast to the cagey, going forward to new ones. Perhaps this absence
far more sense of continuity here-and this tight-lipped players of the 'who-influenced-who' of development was inevitable, given the special
comparative absence of a hysterically violent game of today, I feel that we 'middle generation' nature of their revolutionary style: their great in-
rejection by each age-group of its immediate painters were peculiarly open, frank and generous novations were, after all, connected with a sweep-
predecessors is an absolutely essential condi- in our applause for our American friends: not ing away of detail and of all complex divisions of
tion for the emergence of major painting in only were we in varying degrees influenced by the picture-surface—that is to say, their discoveries
them at that time (the supreme compliment as involved a systematic advance towards the
any country.
between painters), but we openly proclaimed that extremes of flatness, emptiness and bigness. Since
In view of all this I was extremely interested
this was what was happening. I have always had they achieved these extremes, almost at a bound,
in the remarks about the Anglo-American
the feeling, when in New York, that that genera- and since they were unwilling to reverse engines
relationship made by an American expert, the
tion of New York painters recognize all this and and go in the only direction left open to them (i.e.
late Frank O'Hara, in an interview with
feel a certain gratitude; and I hope that none of towards some sort of re-complication of the picture-
Edward Lucie-Smith, which Studio International my friends among them will imagine, from what I surface), they have had to stand still.
published in September. O'Hara is reported am having to say here, that we in any way regret, It fell to us British to begin the trek back into
as saying: or would like to go back on, the admiration that pictorial complexity and away from that arid
'I think there are a lot of injustices going on, we all expressed in the early and middle 'fifties. 'openness' which, in two generations of Americans
personally. One is that the Pop Art thing in Nevertheless it has to be admitted that it was the —the 'first generation' I've been speaking of, and
America has been almost universally presumed to works these eight Americans painted between 1948 (far more so) the so-called Post-Painterly Abstrac-
be American, which it isn't, since if I remember and 1952 that we were enthusiastic about. Before tionists—has become at last an academic emptiness.
correctly as early as about 1952 or 1953 Pop Art 1948 their paintings, like our own, were small in But those of us here who have seen that this re-
as we know it today had already been done in scale and eclectic in content (i.e. they, too, were complication was in fact the only way forward have