Page 26 - Studio International - June 1967

Robert Motherwell The Joy of Living 1943
Collage, sight, 43½ x 35¼ in.
Coll: The Baltimore Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore,
Maryland (Sadie A. May Collection)
Included in the 1946 American Art exhibition at the Tate
Gallery, and thus the first New American painting seen in
England. One of Motherwell's most important early works, along
with the Modern Museum's Pancho Villa of the same year,
which was shown at the 1956 exhibition

Right Jackson Pollock Enchanted Forest 1947
84 x 44½ in. Coll: Peggy Guggenheim, Venice
The most recent picture among Peggy Guggenheim's important
group of Pollock's, the major European holding of this artist's
work. Not shown at the 1948 Biennale, but on view in the
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni from the late 1940s onwards

Subservience to Paris was the dominant characteristic of land is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the
English painting for almost a hundred years. This began French second class.'2
with Whistler's arrival in London in the 1860s, and his This was a harsh home truth to face up to, and, as
questioning of Victorian values by adhering to French Charles Harrison showed, the way out of this unfortunate
standards. It was soon evident to our painters of the next situation lay in the realization that French painting was
generation (for example, Steer and Sickert, both born in fast becoming internationalized, and that it was both
1860) that what had been happening in France was of far possible and indeed to be expected that there should be a
greater artistic consequence than any mid-nineteenth British contribution to this international scene. But up to
century English painting. The protests of French in- 1940 Paris retained its position as the capital of modern
adequacy on the part of elderly painters like Frith and art without too much difficulty, and the challenges
Holman Hunt became shrill and impossible to accept.' offered earlier by Milan, Munich and Moscow had
As the superior quality of French painting and sculpture passed by very quickly, if as much for political as for
became ever more obvious, so the confidence of British artistic reasons.
artists was sapped. The nadir was perhaps reached around The war years bred a kind of isolationism in British art,
1920, and the contemporary quotation from Clive Bell when outward looking tendencies were temporarily in
with which Charles Harrison began his article on Abstract eclipse. But the Picasso and Matisse exhibition at the
Painting in Britain in the early 1930s (Studio, April 1967) Victoria and Albert Museum in December 1945, with its
bears repeating in part : . . . 'to talk of modern English heavy concentration on recent work (particularly so in
painting as though it were the rival of modern French is Picasso's case3), more than re-established the dominance
silly.... At any given moment the best painter in Eng- of these two Parisian masters. The idea of effecting a
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