Page 51 - Studio International - September 1966

only by a change in materials, and are confronted, too,
Above: Rene Magritte La promesse salutaire 1927-28
Oil on canvas 29 x 211 in. Hanover Gallery
Gamy The airships Parceval and Gross on manoeuvres at Cologne 1909
Coloured print 17 1/4 x 35½ in. Leicester Galleries
with the objects which are placed upon it. In the Clive
Barker these objects are 'real' also— a pipe, and an opened
packet of tobacco. In the Manzù, they are modelled—the
drapery is not cloth pure and simple, but cloth as a
sculptor uses it, coated with wax; while the leaves on the
olive-branch have an impressionist shimmer.
These physical differences are enough, slight as they are,
to mark a vast difference in purpose. The Manzù is about
warmth, humanity, inclusiveness; the Barker is cool and
hostile. One asks us to feel, the other to think. And this is
the clue to the difference between Surrealism and what
has followed it. Pop has borrowed, it is true, many of the
ideas which were once the property of the original
Surrealists (now using the term 'Surrealism' in a narrower
and more strictly historical sense). But Pop has moved
from association to dissociation.
It is surprising, when one happens to think of it, how
very little American Pop art has in fact been shown over
here. For example, the Robert Fraser Gallery exhibition
contains two of the silk-screen paintings of Flowers by
Andy Warhol which, so far as I know, have never before
been seen in London. I can't say that I think the magic
survives the voyage across the Atlantic. One can make a
comparison, here, within the exhibition itself. Warhol's
Flowers are photographs silk-screened on to canvas, with
colour applied at certain points, again by silk-screen.
Richard Hamilton's People is again an altered photo-
graph, though here the colour seems to have been put on
by hand. The photograph is a detail from a crowd scene,
figures seen from above, very blurred, in a blink of the
camera's eye. Hamilton has seen the 'abstract' quality of
these fuzzy shadows, these strange tadpole-like shapes. He
has used paint to bring out this discovery, to make the
abstractness fully apparent. The result, at first glance,
looks like an action painting. When the viewer realizes
his mistake, he is seized (or at least I was seized) with a
chilling sense of alienation. The effect is much subtler
than anything Warhol can produce. It is also, perhaps,
something very European.
But to go back to Magritte for a moment, since it is with
his work that I began. What I wanted to say was this:
that Magritte's careful, finicking technique, his stereo-
scopic trompe l'oeil compositions—these are the things which
seem to ally him to Lichtenstein, or even to an artist like
Claes Oldenburg. But the resemblance is only a super-
ficial one.
For instance, he belongs far more clearly to the kind of
world which is depicted in an exhibition at the LEICESTER
GALLERY than he does to the world we move in now. The
show at the Leicester is fascinating for all kinds of reasons.
The title is cumbersome but exact: A collection of French
colour prints 1895-1914: automobiles, aeroplanes, airships.
Here are all the weird and wonderful machines of that
golden era of mechanical things, the period immediately
before the First World War. Many of them perfectly
illustrate Marshall McLuhan's dictum that a new inven-
tion always begins by imitating the thing which it is
about to supersede—the 'horseless carriages' are still
carriages minus a horse, in many cases. The thing which
adds to the pleasure of it all is the impeccable Art
Nouveau style of the prints—the rounded borders which
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