Page 44 - Studio International - March 1966

magazine illustrations, too, and has the technique down
perfectly. He is a first-class illustrator by any standard.
But he is not content to show his prowess as a
technician and works toward some remote poetry of
disjuncture by isolating his images in what Alloway
calls 'clusters.' Thus, we have dogs and eyes, arrayed
on a glistening white canvas in no readable syntax, or
Hand, Mountain, Rope, Lipstick, which, of all the
paintings, is the most arresting for its use of space, but
does not appreciably add to the very clever attention-
getting compositional techniques already present in the
magazine which he rifles for his imagery.
Enough has been said about Robert Rauschenberg's
celebrated use of the silkscreen image, which I think is
the most effective 'fusion' in the exhibition. Rauschen-
berg sustains continuity in his paintings by means of a
painter's judgments of space and hue and composition.
The photographic image is incidental to a whole, and
may be taken as an element just as a stroke or a symbol
is an element.
In Andy Warhol's work, on the other hand, the
photographic image is obtrusive, and the very substance
of his painting. Here Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth
Taylor are doctored aesthetically, but remain essentially
photographic. The series in Orange Disaster (electric
chair repeated from frame to frame) is not much more
compelling than the series in Jackie Kennedy. My
objection to Warhol's paintings is not based on his use
of the photographic image, but on his softening
aestheticism.
Finally, there is one painting by Lynn Foulkes which,
Joe Raffaele Hand, Mountain, Rope, Lipstick 1988 Oil on canvas 49 x 48 in.
Lent to the Exhibition The Photographic Image by the Stable Gallery together with Rauschenberg's work, stands out.
Foulkes' double-focus image of a canyon with its
stereoscopic overtones is influenced by photography,
and plastic imitations of black-and-white photographic but not dependent on it. The romantic message
blow-ups quickly exhaust themselves. His subjects are of isolation comes through regardless of the means.
scenes and buildings that appear in news photos. They If the photographic image is regarded as an instrument,
are stated flatly. They loom up in cold, filtered grey capable of expanding the imaginative parturition of a
renderings that never vary in technique. Since the painting, then it is a relatively ineffectual instrument in
technique never varies, and the subjects are of little most of these instances. If it is regarded as an element,
interest, there remains only his polemic to be read, and then it depends on context, talent, originality and a host
that can be read quickly. of other intangibles which make the judgment of
Suzi Gablik on the other hand combines colour painting so difficult. In these terms, the majority of
photographs with painting in a system of sly juxta- artists in the Guggenheim exhibition fall short.
positions that remind me very much of their origins in
Max Ernst.The ardour of her fusions of tropical plants and At the Andre Emmerich Gallery, Theodoros Stamos
fruits into exotic images is touching, but her paintings exhibits recent paintings in which the reductions are
have something of the quaintness and awkwardness of striking. Stamos was always a lyrical abstract painter
the primitive. The photograph, for her, is merely a whose images rose to the surface with nervous,
stimulant to her imagination which functions in the old fluttery arabesques and whose motifs were generally
orthodox surrealist tradition. drawn from nature.
Malcolm Morley, whom Alloway compares extrav- His new paintings are far more abstract. He is seeking
agantly with Canaletto, paints imitations of colour photo- an equilibrium between the caprice of observed nature
graphs of such inspiring subjects as steamships in the and the fixity of her laws, it seems. His forms are
harbour, railway-carriage interiors and ships' de luxe reduced to the simple rectangle, placed variously on an
cabins. They are rendered in the straightfaced manner atmospherically-shifting matrix. Light is his primary
of the magazine illustrator. Where they diverge, ever so concern (his paintings bear titles relating to the sun).
slightly, from the illustrator's convention, they conjure In order to achieve a soft luminosity, he softens the
a faint humour, but that is perhaps illusory. The bald- edges of the rectangles. His old preoccupation with
ness of Morley's statement can only be enjoyed by those subtle movements within nature is still there, but it is
whose jaded palates positively reject serious painting. clarified and made more subtle in this, his best exhibi-
Joseph Raffaele is a shade more clever. He imitates tion of recent years.