Page 57 - Studio International - July August 1968

Natalia Gontcharova Les femmes Espagnoles 1916, 5 fold screen, oil on canvas, 96 x 30½ in. Grosvenor Gallery, London.

1916 when she was involved in theatrical design, tends to be solved with less strife, or at least with the other side, from Derain to Cremonini, from
the panels touch on areas of pure and essentially fewer hazards. The lineage out of Kandinsky's very Tchelichew to Marini, the metaphorical debate
lyric painting woven into a context of all-too- eloquent Impressionist period work, through continues in more polymorphic terms.
evident stylized formulas. The wavelength did not Moholy-Nagy and Ben Nicholson to Bridget Riley, Paul Waldo Schwartz
come through. holds up well. And then there is Schwitters antici-
In wholly non-figurative work the battle of style pating object-language in a resonant collage. On

Recent works by Kenneth Noland at 4 ft 10½ in. X 15 ft 4 in.), long thin rectangles (e.g. the activity of painting, so that the integrity and
Kasmin until July 6. 2 ft X 2 ft 11 in.) and one really large painting, intimacy of personal experience are preserved
30 x 7½ ft, which neatly fills one wall of the gallery. from preconceptions about quality. It is the parti-
In the shorter paintings in the show it is as if Noland cular contribution of the American colour painters
After waiting so long since Noland's last London were taking refuge in the horizontal from the un- that they have made colour the vehicle for intimate,
show, and after all the build-up there has been for doubted pressures to which he was subjected both personal expression without any compromise of
the new horizontal-stripe paintings, I found the from within (organization of colour) and from pictorial range. Independence of expression—
exhibition at KASMIN'S initially disappointing. without (competition from younger painters) while painting that relies on the minimum consensus of
Noland's return to the rectangle leaves his he was working with shaped canvases. This rein- experience—is almost a matter of honour with them,
canvases curiously devoid of the tensions with forces a feeling I had after Noland's last Kasmin just as independence of thought is a matter of
which the circle, chevron and diamond paintings show, that he is a remarkably uneven painter. honour for the intellectual who is politically con-
were alive. He may say that he was never interested And yet this very unevenness is inherent in scientious while he cannot feel politically aligned.
in shape, but the very discomfort apparent in some Noland's working pace. The circumstances which (For an analysis of homeless liberalism in American
of the elongated diamonds gave them excitement of allow him, together with several other American art and criticism see Barbara Rose's attack on the
a kind which is absent from most of the paintings in artists, to work fast with little regard for wastage of writing of MichaelFried, in Artforum February 1968.)
this show. There are three basic formats among the materials or for relative quality in individual Unfortunately, deprived as we are of opportunities
works at present in the Kasmin Gallery (not all paintings, must be the envy of many British artists. to watch the development of American painting
of them hanging) : large extended rectangles (e.g. Ideally this situation leads to unselfconsciousness in at first hand, we tend to confront exhibitions like