Page 28 - Studio International - June 1967

Willem de Kooning of unease in the British reception, as if the age of masters
Woman 1 1950-5 was past, and no messiah yet in sight. This impression is
76 x 58 in. confirmed by reading Patrick Heron's reprinted art
Coll: Museum of Modern
Art, New York. criticism, The Changing Forms of Art, published in 1955
and an invaluable document for the period 1945-55.6
Another crucial picture.
Bought by the Modern Of course the status of a few artists was recognized.
Museum in 1953, shown in Giacometti had considerable influence, both as a painter
the 1956 and 1959 Tate and a sculptor, especially in the very late 1940s. The
exhibitions
startling originality of Dubuffet (needless to say, omitted
from the above mentioned shows) was noticed by a few
in the early 1950s —most notably perhaps by E. J. Power,
who became his principal collector and supporter for a
time. And then there was the case of Nicolas de Staël.
His exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in February
1952, eloquently presented by Denys Sutton, generated
remarkable excitement—and rightly so. For a short while
afterwards his influence can be seen in many of the best
English painters, but except in a few cases this did not
survive his suicide in March 1955. By that time de
Staël's last paintings (i.e. of 1954-5) were widely regarded
as a falling-off, and whether this is true or not the White-
chapel retrospective of May 1956 had the effect of
bringing this particular chapter of British art to a close.
In any case, the de Staël Retrospective followed by a
few months an exhibition of more far-reaching conse-
quences. This was the Museum of Modern Art's touring
show, Modern Art in the United States, which was at the
Tate Gallery from January 5 to February 12, 1956. This
Sam Francis was the second major American exhibition in London
Painting, blue 1954 since the war. The first, American Painting, at the Tate
Oil on canvas
Gallery in June—July 1946, had been a large survey,
58 x 35 in.
going back to the eighteenth century, in which the best
Coll: E. J. Power, London
represented modern painters were Hopper, Ben Shahn
One of two large paintings
by Sam Francis shown by and Morris Graves. This gives us a good idea of what
the Arts Council in new American art was then thought to be. Looking at
New Trends in Painting:
the catalogue now one can pick out only two pictures
Some paintings from a private that anticipate the future—Adolph Gottlieb's Jury of
collection in 1956
Three, and, most interesting of all, Robert Motherwell's
collage, The Joy of Living of 1943.7
By the time of the second exhibition ten years later, the
situation had changed; in America itself, of course, as
much as outside. As the title suggests, this was confined to
twentieth-century American painting and sculpture, and
consisted of 127 items, mostly from the Modern Museum's
own collection. Much of the work exhibited didn't
arouse more than polite curiosity, but in the last gallery
at the Tate was the first sizeable group of abstract expres-
sionist pictures seen in England. Among them were
Pollock's Number 1 of 1948 (along with She-wolf of 1943),
Kline's Chief of 1950, Clyfford Still's Painting 1951, De
Kooning's Woman I of 1950-2 (with Painting 1948 and
Ganssvoort Street 1950-1), Motherwell's Granada of 1949,
Rothko's Number 1 of 1949 and Number 10 of 1950, and
paintings by Gorky, Guston and Tomlin. 'Are they not
shock troops in the American invasion of painting ?'
asked the then traditionally anonymous art critic of The
Times.8
The public reaction to these pictures was, at this stage,
one of total incomprehension. But the appetites of the
painters had been whetted, and now begins the period of
assimilation which culminates in the 1959 New American
Painting exhibition. It is in these years that the decisive
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