Page 42 - Studio International - May 1966

eering spirit and constant activity which seem character- apathy and smug mediocrity if one did not have the
istic of certain American, English, German and Italian tremendous example of the United States. Last year the
galleries. Americans spent the equivalent of 12,000 million new
Criticism, too, has fallen behind. Critics know little francs on painting, music, and the theatre. And this figure
about activities abroad and seem most unwilling to travel. will have tripled by 1970. The Americans buy almost
In the main organs of the press and on television a few 80 per cent of all the paintings produced in the world.
unctuous pedants deliver serious dissertations on Marquet In 1945 New York had thirty-five galleries; there are
or Bonnard or else extol flashy exhibitions, for example 300 today. France's 1,000 museums have 5 million visitors
the expressionist Nanas of Niki de Saint-Phalle, the ambi- a year. America's 5,000 have 200 million. It has been
guous resurrection of the rather sad Bouguereau at calculated that in the last thirty years a museum has been
BRETEAU'S, the heteroclite collection of naturalist works opened every four days in America. At the Museum of
offered at CLAUDE BERNARD'S under the title La Main, Modern Art in New York, there are sometimes ten
and finally the drawings of that over-clever craftsman exhibitions showing simultaneously. In 1962 the chain
Szaffran (at KERCHACHE). The critic Jacques Lassaigne store group Sears, Roebuck and Co. (with 760 shops)
has just nominated Etienne Martin, Brauner and opened a 'Contemporary Masters Department' and
Right Schneider for Venice—as well as the young Martial reached in two years a turnover of 10 million new francs.
Pol Bury
66 boules et leur cylindre 1965 Raysse, for which he deserves to be congratulated; but More than one hundred firms in the United States have
571 x 24 in. x 24 in. this disproportion between old and new shows how much followed the example of the Chase Manhattan Bank and
he, too, is attached to the old 'School of Paris'. Only men hung modern works of art on their walls.
Below
Takis like Jouffroy, Restany, Otto Hahn, Gassiot-Talabot, still These are the figures. Of course, the American economic
The planet 1965 seem by the variety of their choice to understand criticism potential is a decisive factor and there can be no question
Electromagnetic sculpture in as Baudelaire or Apollinaire understood it: as a generous of competing. But there is still good reason to be surprised
random motion
Collection: Paul Keeler, discussion in the service of several great plastic ideas. at the somnolence and antiquated nature of the French
Signals, London One might become reconciled to so much pettiness, cultural system when so many small countries —Holland,