Page 18 - Studio International - January 1967

In other publications Talabot says, 'The last six years have been extremely An exhibition on behalf of medical aid to Vietnam
rich', instancing the influence of Raysse, and the work opens on February 1 at the Exhibition Hall, Camden
Aujourd' hui
of Rancillac, Cheval-Bertrand, Arnal, Aillaud, Tis- Studios, Camden Street, London, N.W.1. The exhibi-
No. 54 carries an article giving the views of eleven serand and Bettencourt. Two of the, critics note the tion is organized by Keith Grant, and will include
critics on the worth or otherwise of young French great influence of Yves Klein on the younger genera- works by many artists, among them André Bicat,
artists. Most are cautious or pessimistic: 'Why talk of tion. Two also comment on the 'revival . . . coming R. B. Kitaj, John Piper, Patrick Heron, Bernard Cohen,
youth in painting, since the very virtues of youth find from America'. Carel Weight, Derek Boshier, and Sir Hugh Casson.
no use there, especially in France where genius is
reserved for critics and maturity? Julien Bende said Form Jean Tinguely is designing the scenery for Paradise
'youth is a value in sport, in love, in war, but not in Published in mid-December, the third issue of Form Lost, Roland Petit's new ballet, which opens at
art'. This is more true today since artistic production contains a long article by Charles Biederman, in part Covent Garden in February.
Is In the hands of business. Styles become fashions an edited version of previously-published material, in
and new artists are presented like any commercial part new material, together with an appreciation by Moscow's Pushkin Museum recently mounted an
object (critics help in this) . . (André Fermigier); Victor Pasmore. Among other articles are an illus- exhibition of 200 Picasso drawings-the first Picasso
'I know of no young painters worthy of interest . . trated piece by Lissitzky on his 'Electrical-Mechanical exhibition to be held in the Soviet capital for ten years.
(Denise Breteau); 'The youngsters-where are they? Spectacle', and reprinted work by van Doesburg, Mies
They have to be sought out in their miserable garrets, van der Rohe and Schwitters. (Obtainable from 8 Duck Correspondence
big art dealers ignore them, small ones flee them' End, Girton, Cambridge, U.K., price 3s 6d).
(J.-A. Franca). On the other hand Gerald Gassiot- Ritual prostration before New York
Prints in museums Sir,
I think Patrick Heron's wholesale dismissal of 'open-
In Julian Trevelyan's article on the Printmakers' ness' in recent American painting as 'a vast academic
Council in the December issue of Studio Inter- cult' is exaggerated [The Ascendancy of London in the
73 years ago national it was stated that 'no museum, either national Sixties-December 1966 issue], but his alarm at the
or regional, concerns itself with making a compre- ritual prostration before New York which is now
hensive collection of modern prints'. Mr Trevelyan thought proper in Great Britain is thoroughly justified,
writes: 'It has been pointed out that in fact this is just and I share it. What Is envied is not always a specific
what certain museums are at present doing. We are work of art, but 'the situation' in New York; and this
particularly glad to note this new activity.' 'situation' is, essentially, one within which works of
art come to be instruments of criticism. Any new pic-
Tate acquisitions ture is expected to have a role in defining art history;
whole traditions are invented (e.g., the one which
Recent acquisitions at the Tate range from a pair of reputedly joins Matisse and Kenneth Noland) to
Lelys painted in the 1640's to a portrait painted in demonstrate that, given premises X and Y, new
1966 by Francis Bacon. The Return of Ulysses, 1913, painting could not be otherwise. In this atmosphere,
one of William Roberts' smaller, but dramatic water- murky with fatuous categorical imperatives, it is not
colours, adds to the Gallery's already large Vorticist surprising that conceptual art should be so over-
representation. The Hon. Ivor Montagu has presented valued. What depresses me, as I gather it does Heron,
a fine Magritte, Maternity, painted during the 1930's about (say) Frank Stella's paintings, is their absolute
and typically disconcerting. Among recent works is blandness, their lack of visual content. Their one
a large colour painting by John Hoyland, 28.5.66, and conceivable interest is as a comment on the history
Bacon's Portrait of Isobel Rawsthorne, the Gallery's of style: in them, a proposition (the pragmatic state-
first close-up portrait by this artist. ment that there's nothing in a painting except what
List of subjects precluded from exhibition at the you can actually see on the surface) is isolated, and
Church-supported Salon of the Rose and Croix, Paris: Obituary elaborated into epigrammatic form. This is literary
I Historical and prosaic subjects, and all rep- Dr Anton Ehrenzweig, who died on December 5, had painting of the baldest sort, inflated and repeated on-
resentations of manual labour. at various times taught at the Central School for Arts to use one of the favourite terms from New York's
II Patriotic and military subjects. and Crafts, Ravensbourn College of Art, and Gold- lexicon of self-congratulation-a 'heroic' scale.
III Every representation of modern life, whether smiths' College. He made a notable contribution to Heroism without heroes, indeed; but meanwhile,
public or private. art theory, and of his The Psycho-analysis of Artistic the English have received such a barrage of propa-
IV Portraits, save for the spiritual dignity of the Vision and Hearing, published in 1953, Sir Herbert ganda about the 'revolutionary' character of the last
sitter. Read has said that it 'established the importance of decade of American art that, not surprisingly, they
V All rustic scenes. the interplay that takes place between our conscious have felt their own artists are outside history because
VI All landscapes, save those in the style of Poussin. and formal creation of images and our undisciplined they are not present on this battleground. What seems
VII Seamen and all objects connected with the sea. perceptive imagination. . . . It has had a great in- revolutionary, however, may be more a squabble
VIII All comic subjects. fluence in the explanation and justification of the within a junta than a serious conflict of schemata.
IX All Oriental subjects that are merely picturesque. extreme types of modern art' Change, the legend goes, Is made in New York and
X All domestic animals, and all those connected echoed in London. I doubt if this simplicistic view
with sport. Poussin and de Staël would survive a complete exposition of 'Post Painterly
XI Flowers, fruit, pothouse paraphernalia, acces- The books referred to in John Berger's article in this Abstraction', cool art and American Pop. The extent
sories, and other subjects which painters com- issue are: to which American painting has become inbred and
monly have the impertinence to exhibit. Poussin by Walter Friedlaender (Thames and Hud- conceptualized would, I suspect, then become evi-
Quoted by Aymer Vallance when reviewing the Salon, son, 1966, 6 gns); Nicolas de Stab! by Douglas Cooper dent. Obviously this conceptualization might then be
(which he described as 'little better than a fiasco'), (W. W. Norton & Co, New York, n.d., £1 10s in the rejected for the wrong reasons-pseudo-romantic
July, 1893. U.K.); Nicolas de. Stab! by Denys Sutton (Weidenfeld nostalgia, for instance. But the trouble with the con-
and Nicholson, 1962, £1 10s). ceptualization of American painting is not, simply,
that the pictures have become illustrations of con-
In the February issue In brief cepts, or only (as Heron points out) that their 'unity'
The I.C.A. plans to hold an exhibition on the theme of and symmetry is sometimes a dead thing, but that the
The February issue of Studio International will include computer art and the role of the computer in the arts concepts themselves tend to be of little intellectual
articles on kinetics by Frank Popper, George Rickey, -entitled Cybernetic Serendipity-in January 1968. and no social importance.
Stephen Bann, Jean Clay and Cyril Barrett, and state- Many of the exhibits will come from the U.S., but the Sincerely,
ments by kinetic artists, among them Soto, Takis, and idea of the exhibition originated with Professor Max Robert Hughes
Kenneth Martin. Bense of Stuttgart. London, S.W.7