Page 52 - Studio International - February 1967

Round the corner from Gimpels, at the WOOD- Futurists. The trouble is that the sample on view Rowlandson, with none of the wildness which one
STOCK GALLERY, is a show in which I have an odd isn't really big enough to show if the idea would finds in the drawings of Fuseli or even Romney.
kind of personal interest. The artists of Group 3 work or not. It's evident (from the Russian failure But there are a few exceptions—astonishing draw-
have taken an article of mine, published last March to produce just this kind of art after the Revolu- ings made when Gillray was insane.
in The Times, as one of their stepping-off points. tion) that a good many pitfalls lie in the way of But the main interest of the show is an iconogra-
What I then called for was an art without originals. such a development—and not the least of the snags phical one—Gillray was extraordinarily fecund in
I suggested that, in an age of mass-production, the is the question of engagement. Group 3 are all for satirical imagery. Many of the images are cloacal
`original' was, in any case, a kind of paradox. In the `de-personalized'-but in what sense? I'd accept or sexual—`The Kettle Hooting the Porridge-Pot'
an egalitarian society the possession of works of art the word (and perhaps I myself have used it in is especially outrageous, only equalled by the
by some, and not by others, was sooner or later just such a context) if it refers to the machine- famous 'Fashionable Contrasts'. What Gillray
going to seem an injustice, especially if we con- making of the work. But such art, to retain its brings us, in fact, is not the robustness of the eigh-
tinued to educate people towards art in the way quality as art, must be the subtlest kind of psycho- teenth century, but its neurosis, its perpetual
that we have already started to do. One solution, I logical engineering, must encourage within us the anxieties.
thought, was the work of art designed from the very kind of subtlety and complexity of response which There's a curious kind of surrealism before the
beginning to be made in any quantity required. we give to works of art but refuse to mere products. event in many of these prints which suggests the
Now I have been taken at my word, and a modest At the ARTS COUNCIL there is a reminder of a attraction of satire to our ancestors. It was here,
beginning has been made. The results go to show, wholly different age, an exhibition of work by under the guise of allegory, that irrational fears
as one might have suspected, that it is the rather Gillray, the great eighteenth-century caricaturist. and fantasies could be given their embodiment. I
clinical which works best in this context— a kind As the drawings show, Gillray wasn't much of an should very much like to see some of these prints
of art whose ancestry runs back through Ben innovator from the technical point of view. These hung side by side with some of the collages
Nicholson and even Mondrian to the Russian are quiet, charming pen-sketches in the manner of Max Ernst has done. q

Left
Group 3 permutations 'where
thousands know the best for
one, the best for all. One picture
must be fifty pictures to satisfy
tomorrow's demands.
De-personalized art is
immaculate, reproducable,
gratifying and impecunious.'
Below left
James Gillray
The Giant-Factotum amusing
himself 1797
Pitt lording it over Parliament,
with Canning kneeling to kiss
his shoe.

Below right, a Victor Passmore
screen print, one of more than 1(
works contributed by artists to
the exhibition in support of
medical aid to Vietnam, at the
Exhibition Hall, Camden
Studios, Camden Street,
N.W.1—until February 18. In his
catalogue note John Russell
writes: 'It is a rule of life that in
times of trouble artists often
reveal themselves as the
staunchest, most imaginative,
most generous of friends. This
applies among individuals, above
all, but it also applies
collectively. Where the rest of
us stop to measure the cost, the
instinct of the artist is to give of
himself without restriction. This
is what has happened in the
case of the present exhibition.
The artists concerned are not
of any one generation. In the
kinds of work that they do, and
in their political beliefs, they
differ as widely as is well
possible. What they have in
common is the wish to relieve
others' pain. The fact that the
"others" in question are many
thousand miles away does not
make that pain any the less
urgent; but it does call for a
particular kind of imaginative
effort.'