Page 27 - Studio International - June 1967

Franz Kline Chief 1950
Oil on canvas, 58f x 74 in.
Coll: Museum of Modern Art, New York
The only painting by Kline in the 1956 Tate exhibition. Given to
the Modern Museum by Mr and Mrs David M. Solinger in 1952.
Shown again in 1959

reconciliation between them—that is, between fauve particular relevance of Bonnard and Mondrian to this
colour and cubist space—remained an artistic ambition situation.4 A spate of exhibitions in 1950-2 was intended
here, as it was on the continent. to secure the French hegemony over England—in parti-
In the decade after the war the work of Parisian genera- cular, London Paris at the I.C.A. in March 1950, the
tions younger than Matisse and Picasso was watched Royal Academy's L'Ecole de Paris of January—March
with considerable interest from London. The main issue, 1951, and the Arts Council's Young Painters of L'Ecole de
I suppose, was the validity of an abstract art, and the Paris in 1952.5 But somehow there was a certain feeling

1 For example, `...men of British blood...should not subject them- emerge), and the larger group of 'soft' abstract painters—Estève,
selves to the influence of masters alien to the sentiments and principles Bazaine, Manessier, etc. These two factions depended ultimately on
of the great English poets and thinkers'. (Holman Hunt: Preface to Mondrian and Bonnard respectively; they had their parallel in
Pre-Raphaelitism, 1905) England with Pasmore and Scott, for example.
2 Clive Bell: Since Ozanne 1922 (Phoenix edition p. 190). 5 London Paris was a small but important exhibition with an interest-
3 There were 25 paintings by Picasso, all dating from 1939 to 1945; ing catalogue: the French artists included Bazaine, Hartung, Ubac
and 30 paintings by Matisse, only 7 or 8 from the war years. This and Richier; the English—Bacon, Craxton, Freud, Lanyon, Adams,
exhibition was followed in June 1946 by a comparable Braque—Rouault Butler and McWilliam. The Academy's L'Ecole de Paris was a
exhibition at the Tate Gallery, which had an important group of late remarkably comprehensive and well-shown exhibition of 163 works
Braque interiors. painted between 1900 and 1950. It included many of the younger
4 I mention these two names because in the early 1950s the most painters who appeared in the Arts Council's much smaller exhibition
prominent groups in the Parisian avant garde were the 'hard' abstrac- (53 paintings, chosen by Frank McEwen, who was then the British
tionists showing with Denise René (out of which Vasarely was to Council's Fine Arts Officer in Paris).
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