Page 41 - Studio International - February 1966

Kasimir Malevich These are not the sternly intellectual tones of the public
Suprematist Composition 1915
Gouache and pencil statement, or even of a consciously public kind of art—
in.
7 x but it seems to me that we ought to allow room for this
Marlborough Fine Art
too, whatever image we choose to make of the function
of the visual arts as a whole within our society. It may
seem trifling to mention that Miss Blow has a stove in
her studio with a rather marked elbow joint in its
chimney, and that this chimney seems to have sug-
gested some of the forms she is now using—but, as
Leonardo remarks in his instructions to painters, it is
just these accidents which the painter ought to seize
upon.
But I am growing a little too hot in an argument where
I find myself on both sides of the case. The advent of a
new wave of constructionism in England, a new con-
cern among artists for art as something public—these
things are basically healthy. Yet there's still a certain
irony involved : the sort of irony which a man like Eco
is quick to point out. Sir Hugh Casson reminded us, in a
rather chaotic television programme at the beginning of
last month, that architecture is at the moment the only avant-garde art and the mass public will succeed. In the
art which the public can't avoid ; the only art which, world of modern art, many experiments are still waiting
willy-nilly, is still bound up with people's daily lives. to ripen. The Marlborough Gallery has been showing, as
This is true and sad enough, though I didn't care for the part of a mixed exhibition, a number of small Supre-
implication which I seemed to detect—that architecture matist compositions by Malevich. They are now
is now the only art worth bothering about. fifty years old, but how advanced they look ! How
To return to my main theme: I can only express the daring ! Art ought not, in a very real sense, to keep
hope that any new attempt at a reconciliation between its youth for so long. q

Part of the Art Now in India exhibition—the first comprehensive Durham, who opened it, 'is in the Indian kind of art-language. It
exhibition of contemporary Indian art to be shown in Britain— is meant to show this Indian art-language as a whole. To do this
which was held recently at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, it has to show the language in all its aspects—its poetry, its
under the sponsorship of the North Eastern Association for the prose, and its popular slang . . . (It) has been arranged so as to
Arts. The exhibits were assembled in India over a two-year period group the works of sophisticated modern artists alongside the
by Mr. George Butcher, the art critic, and included works by both works of traditional artists to which they are related both in
painters and folk-artists. 'This whole exhibition', said Mr. Philip S. conception and method.' The exhibition is to be shown at the
Rawson, director of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art at City Art Gallery at Ghent and in Holland and Germany.