Page 44 - Studio International - October 1967

Bryan Kneale's new work

Bryan Robertson

Bryan Kneale's A manner rapidly asserts itself as a convention which then came to be seen as the restrictive orthodoxy of the old
recent sculpture is at the becomes established as an orthodoxy. The spontaneous `truth to materials' creed, in sculpture, is now in danger of
Redfern Gallery, London, wave of a hand can be invested with the significance of a springing another trap. For new allegiances to 'the anony-
through October
blessing, or any other ritualized gesture, which eventually mous surface' of synthetic materials as well as a mistrust of
atrophies as a hieratic sign in a systematic iconography. wood, stone or bronze and the insistence on solid, non-
Art follows life and human practice in continually seeking associative colour-as-form or vice versa, are all yielding up
some form of absolute finality, or final absolution. another tyranny.' This comparatively fresh reappraisal of
Paradoxically, the quest is accompanied in art as in life by sculpture shows signs already of ossifying into a set of
an equally strong bid for maximum licence, or freedom. restrictive conventions with, inevitably, subsequent
If totalitarianism is seen as communal suicide, or at least deterioration. What will save it is what always liberates
full retreat from the decisions permitted by life, then we the fixed and static situation: a disruptive element of
still search in art for totality. The kind of art, for example, surrealism, or at least the irrational and unforseen. 2
which registers itself most forcibly on the consciousness of But in any case only weak talents were ever betrayed by
Below
the largest public is always the image of an artist who the old idea—excellent for its own purposes—of truth to
Bryan Kneale
with Galera has managed to compress his experience, ethos, and materials. Artists with strong gifts have always been far
aesthetic, into the simplest statement : Rothko, for instance. more concerned with the essential considerations of truth
Photo: Lesley Hamilton
For it is easier to recall the severe impact of an Ellsworth to medium. Their work in sculpture assumes maximum
Facing page Kelly painting, to quote another artist, than it is to retain eloquence because it could not be formulated in any
Galera 1967
in one's visual memory all the subtleties of an apparently medium other than sculpture: no drawing explains it.
aluminium and perspex
simple Matisse collage. Respectful or tactful adherence to the character and
98 x 96x 35 in.
The situation has its ironies. Emancipation from what properties of individual materials is an integral part of
Photo: Bill Williams
the older formal concept, but not the end result — unless
the underlying vision is feeble. The same principles apply
exactly to the so-called new sculpture.
Colour has always been for Calder a tonic freedom, inseparable
from his sculptural concepts; it became later, for David Smith,
a particular and isolated formal problem to be solved inter-
mittently. His use of separated areas of colour only occasionally
worked without appearing arbitrary; later Smith used colour
as an ingredient in an all-over, sustained, painted surface with
a deliberately 'painterly' character, showing brush marks etc.,
and this treatment seems, in the writer's view, a weakness.
As the evolution of coloured sculpture is already confused
by conflicting claims, it is perhaps useful to state that the first
non-referential use of colour appears in the polychromatic
sculpture of Archipenko, c. 1905; and it can be found shortly
after in the sculptures of Gabo and, most pointedly, Arp. Mird
used it also in an abstract sense at the same time as Calder's
early structures, but the latter artist developed its use more
radically than any other modern sculptor.
Hepworth restricted colour, in the 1940s, to strictly formal
devices : the illusion of piercing a solid mass, for instance. Caro's
recent sculpture has again extended the possibilities of colour;
but the subject requires clarification as a whole, especially as its
present usage varies decisively among a large number of
sculptors.
2 See also 'Dialogue with the artist' text in catalogue for the
Bryan Kneale exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Feb.
1966, p. 14; and the Preface, by Robert Melville and B. Robert-
son, to the catalogue for 'The English Eye' exhibition at the
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, Nov. 1965.