Page 47 - Studio International - October 1966

Palmer's influence, one is aware that Sutherland picked
his master well—that there really is an affinity of tempera-
ment. A good Sutherland watercolour is a kind of shared
dream between artist and spectator. In the big pictures,
and especially the more recent ones, the intensity seems
to vanish, and the mannerisms obtrude. Sutherland is
like one of those lieder singers who are apt to be disastrous
in grand opera.
It now occurs to me that, after all, there is a kind of
theoretical link between a number of recent events.
Watercolours are peculiarly private as works of art, if
only because their sensitivity to light makes them diffi-
cult to show in a museum. A thing like the Henry Moore
sketchbook ought really to be held in the hand, to be
studied at close quarters, page by page and in the original
sequence—which is one reason why the projected fac-
simile is welcome. An enterprise of this kind is just one
small aspect of a general democratization of the arts, a
greater regard for the mass-public and a greater care for
presentation. Recent visitors to the TATE will have noticed
the new hang in the block of rooms on the right devoted
to modern painting. This seems to me one of the best
things of its kind that I have seen in an English museum.
The room devoted to kinetic and Op paintings— a kind
of vestibule which leads one forward to the rest, is
particularly interesting: there are a number of Vasarelys,
a very beautiful Heinz Mack of turning, rippling discs,
and a work by Julio le Parc. This last is stunningly
Keith Potts
Plastic construction 1966 shown. Strings of small square reflectors hang on fine
18 in. square threads in front of a white background. Spotlights are

A slide sequence from Mark Boyle's
Queensgate 'event' of 1964.
The slide was projected on to a screen;
the screen was ripped away and a match was
put to the slide, which was by then projected
on to a girl. It burned in a few seconds.