Page 23 - Studio International - October 1966

British sculpture : the developing scene

fought by Britain's tiny avant-garde in the late l 920's and need, felt no doubt with equal power, for a more
throughout the l 930's. rigorous image, one that contained its expressiveness.
But this freedom was perhaps not so great as at first His experience of American art in 1959 convinced him
appeared. The debate of those days was taken largely in that a large change in his own methods was desirable;
terms of Moore's newly dominant system. The sheer here was the sort of freedom unknown to British art. As
quality of Moore's work, and of Hepworth's, its recently he put it, 'the tremendous freedom in knowing that your
discovered relevance to the British scene and to native only limitation in a sculpture or painting is whether it
modes of feeling, its seeming ability to generate fresh carries its intentions or not, not whether it's Art.'
images endlessly, its aesthetic intelligence-all these ele­ It is easy to understand how alternatives to a dominat­
ments inhibited as much and as often as they released. ing mode or habit of mind relative to British sculpture
The young sculptor starting out after the War had to might be found abroad or in an international system
face up to-or outface-this achievement. More often such as Constructivism. It is difficult to know how a pro­
than not, he gave in and worked inside this system he found departure in artistic sensibility takes place within
admired, though it might be uncomfortable to his the ethos.
temperament or v1SJon; or else he opposed it with a Time is certainly a factor; it subverts authority. Circum­
vehemence that destroyed his valid affinity for its stances alter with it to make new allegiances possible, to
language. introduce new concepts or refresh old ones. The genera­
There were alternatives, of course. Surrealism and tion of King and Tucker does not remember the struggles
Dada and what they suggested provided one. Paolozzi to free British art from academism; it does not remember
went to Paris for three years from 194 7 and discovered an art establishment that no longer exists, or, if it exists,
Giacometti, Klee, Tzara, Dubuffet-in brief, a world of is impotent to enforce its judgement. In the years since
allusive art that connected the private imagination and the War ( thanks to Moore and Hepworth and a few
the social myths. He escaped the British ethos and others) British art has come to be valued abroad, parti­
founded his artistic language of the l 950's upon images cularly in America; it no longer needs to fight for its
that combined the sense of growth and of building with audience; it can now be supported from America, if not
that of decay-as if civilization, indeed life itself, were at home. British artists have now the benefit of an un­
essentially the product of degenerative processes. This precedented exposure to foreign art (I am not suggesting
was to see a solution in a quasi-literary art. that they must be positively influenced by it). They have
Turnbull, too, spent a term of years in Paris. The art of a ready opportunity to travel and exhibit (Barbara
allusion he found there carried him back to the primitive, Hepworth had her first one-man show in New York­
to forms that intensify visual and spiritual experience. His drawings at that-in 1949, twenty-one years after her
alternatives to landscape-as-figure were his idols and first exhibition in England). The slow collapse of the
totems of the mid-l 950's; this work carried an emphasis class structure at home, the rise of incomes here, and
contrary to Moore's doctrine of truth to materials; the general prosperity in the Western world, have greatly
moral imperative of the work was in the creative act increased the audience for art. Artists have had more
itself. Lawrence Alloway wrote of his work in 195 7: 'The personal scope and easier success in the material sense
textures and weathered effects of the sculpture, the stains -and perhaps have been less willing to feel responsibility;
and strokes in the paintings, take on, in the context of where there is so much, the best is seldom to be seen.
the image, a symbolic meaning. His figures are like British sculpture's renewed international prestige has
schemata for man that have been personalized and ren­ something to do with the ground prepared for it by
dered unique by exposure to weather, burial, irradiation. Moore and Hepworth-by the seriousness and distinction
The history of the creative act is read as the history of they brought to the art in the post-war decade; but also it
the image, making the visible process of technique as full owes some of its interest and strength to an opposite
of character as the lines on the face.' These postures, circumstance, to its relative freedom, to its spirit of
which have an analogue in Abstract Expressionism, have inquiry, to its current state of openness.
been eliminated from his recent sculpture along with But the virtue of freedom is potentially a vice. Success
object quality; the paintings, too, are kept to the unified should always arouse the suspicion and alert the intelli­
impact of their fundamental energies. Turnbull's present gence of those who enjoy it. Genuine development in
position provides one of the fundamental alternatives in any art is difficult to come by. With the market as eager
the developing scene-in any scene, one might say, for the as it is, with the habit of a yearly London show and a
position itself has crucial implications for the interpreta­ yearly New York show, and how many commitments to
tion of experience. Experience is not disparate, but has to travelling exhibitions, museum displays, and what not,
be embraced wholly to arrive at its meaning. the sculptor runs the danger of merely varying his work
Another alternative to Moore turns up in a qualified when he cannot push it forward. There is the danger of
expressionism. This was the method pursued by Caro in the plausible image, more devastating in sculpture
the decade of the 50's, a sensuous modelling of clumsy or because sculpture is the art of the real.
simplified figures, with an emotional tension set up be­ A bad sign is the cynicism and apathy of the art students
tween surface and shape. In fact, the importance of this -or perhaps just their naivete; they have come to believe
interchange was greater than that of the figure per se; in success. Like the detractors of modern art, they sug­
toward the end of the decade, the figure began to dis­ gest that art is only manipulation.
appear. The issue for Caro then was between these duc­ Still, some are stimulated to find a personal response.
tions of surface, the sheer pleasure of it for him, and the Possibly this is the most difficult thing of all, to discover
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