Page 41 - Studio International - March 1966

Peter Behan with his Michael Buhler
Homage to Peter Behan 1965 Sleeping Figure in a Landscape 1965
Oil on board Oil on canvas
48 x 48 in. 36 x 28 in.
Roland, Browse & Delbanco New Art Centre

Robert Medley be thought of as owing something to Patrick Caulfield
The Mountain 1961
Oil on canvas —there is the same interest in the banal image, bounded
44 1/2 x 38 1/2 in. by a hard, definite, challenging line. There's also some-
Leicester Gallery
thing of the nihilism of West Coast art, though Buhler
tells me he has never been to California. He admits to
a special feeling for the peeling and the shoddy—the
sleaziness of Torremolinos, or the Argentine sea-side
resort of Mar del Plata. This he distills into formal
patterns. It's a long way from belle peinture, but here
again, one finds a thread which leads back to the kind
of thing which the Russians were up to—the harsh
judgement of modern life which is yet an identification
with it.
Indeed, my fascination with Burliuk, disappointing as
the present show is, really arises from my feeling that
the Russians and not the French were the inventors of
'idea' art—the kind of painting in which the conception
counts for far more than the execution, where the
painting is really only a certificate that a certain kind
of gesture has been made. Some people may find this
a horrible notion ; it frightens me enough myself, in
certain moods. But it does seem to me part of the
generalising, abstractionising process which has been
the hallmark of art in the Twentieth Century, and which
seems to reflect a change in modern psychology or,
less pretentiously, 'in human nature'. Art is the
chronicle of such shifts in sensibility, and we must
accept the evidence. q
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