Page 54 - Studio International - November 1966

Studying form

It usually seems to me an indication that people are not I think I would trust the 'eye' of certain experts in old
really using their eyes if they insist too much on there masters a great deal more if they also showed some
being an unbridgeable gulf between the art of the past ability to distinguish between a good abstract and a bad
and the art of the present—whether they're academics one, even if abstracts as a whole aren't their cup of tea. I
steeped in the old masters who can't see any value in an certainly welcome warmly the idea of avant-garde galleries
abstract shape, or swinging moderns who can see no occasionally re-assessing the past. Certain kinds of 'old'
relevance in Raphael. There is a gulf, undoubtedly, but art are, of course, perennially or acceptably 'modern' —

one between ends rather than means, and it's a failure in primitive art (so-called) in particular; you will always
sensibility not to be able to make the distinction. It's find some Mexican pieces, for example, on view at
rarely a failure that artists themselves—by which I mean GIMPEL'S. In December KASMIN's, that dedicated temple of
`modern' artists—are guilty of: it's more of a fault among the new, will be having a show of Indian miniatures from
the entrepreneurs of art, one result of which is a rigid the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and with
separation between galleries that deal in 'old' pictures Howard Hodgkin advising, the result should be a blend
and galleries that deal in 'new'. There must be such of the scholarly with a deliberate look at an alien idiom
things as specialization and bias of interest, inevitably. through contemporary sensibilities. Meanwhile the WAD-
But if art means anything, it's more than a matter of DINGTON GALLERY has gone even further in ignoring the
specialty-barrier and come up with an exhibition of a

J. N. Sartorius
Hare and Two Hounds 1824
Oil on canvas
16 x 202 in.