Page 47 - Studio International - January 1966

'serious' pictures were probably the pointillist ones by of 'art' which it embodied certainly seemed more
Theo van Rysselberghe ; the most ridiculous (and the British than Continental.
most endearing) was certainly one entitled simply Art, Finally, the most surprising and in some ways the
by a painter called Fernand Khnopff, who was until I most enlightening show of recent weeks—the exhibition
saw it unknown to me. This shows a panther with a of calligraphy put on by the Circulation Department of
woman's head snuggling up to a rather too beautiful the Victoria and Albert in a cramped little gallery near
young man who is stripped to the waist. His eyes are the restaurant. This was notable, not for the formal
open and he looks intensely embarrassed. Her eyes, on work of some of the English calligraphers—I must
the other hand, are shut, and her whole expression confess that I've always found this kind of work rather
reflects an intense self-satisfaction. Khnopff was boring—but for the experimental work shown by one
influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones, or two German exponents of the craft. Particularly
so English painting may take a little of the credit for this exciting were the sheets by Karl-george Hoefer, which
delightful masterpiece of the absurd. The concept seemed to bring to the letter forms of the conventional
alphabet some of the wildness which we associate
with Chinese and Japanese calligraphers. Painting is
now so concerned with exploiting the shapes of words
and letters, that it was interesting to see what those who
started from a different point had made of the problem.
I realise that in writing this, the first of a number of art
commentaries in these pages, that I seem to have made
little effort to draw the threads together, to give the
reader some idea of what to expect of me. I can only
say, first, that the month's exhibitions have had very
little in the way of a pattern—they have reflected only
the chaos of modern taste and of modern standards.
But secondly, I must admit that I think that general
opinions are often less interesting than particular ones.
Perhaps I may be allowed to leave the manifestos and
the statements of intent until a trifle later? n

Alan Davie White Magician 1956
Oil on board
60 x 96 in.
Bernard Cohen Fable 1965
Acrylic paint on canvas
95 x 96 in.
The White Magician by Alan Davie and Fable by Bernard
Cohen were two of the paintings of the 1965 Peter Stuyvesant
Foundation purchases shown in December at a private interim
exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. The Foundation
is providing £20,000 a year over the next two or three years to
purchase works by British artists, and the completed collection
is likely to become a travelling exhibition of recent works by
artists ranging from established figures like Nicholson and Bacon
to the new generation whose work has been featured in
exhibitions sponsored by the Foundation at the Whitechapel Art
Gallery. The purchasing committee is composed of Alan Bowness,
Lecturer in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, University
of London; Norman Reid, Director of the Tate Gallery; and Lilian
Somerville, Director of the Fine Art Department, British Council.
'We ... agreed', wrote Alan Bowness in the catalogue, 'that any
artist included should be represented by more than one work.
This is in any such collection an essential pre-requisite for all but
the most famous, since the unfamiliar idioms of modern art
inevitably create difficulties with the general public. We hope
eventually to have three or four important paintings by each
artist; in some cases they will be close in date, in others they go
back in time a little to show how the work has developed. No
picture will be earlier than 1950 however; and only in the 1960s
will the collection have anything like a representative function.'