Page 52 - Studio International - June 1968

such as the Zoica Group and Group One Four. He and Terry Setch. He has brought in important fame has come to many of the artists he has backed.
has made theme exhibitions of various sorts, most foreigners like Stazewski, the still-working pioneer We can all be glad of the existence of this gallery
memorably the very timely 'Image in Progress' of Constructivism in Poland, and Peter Struycken that does so much to correct the cult-orientated
show of 1962 that included Boshier, Hockney, Allen the outstanding young Dutch elementarist painter. imbalance of the modern art world. I personally
Jones and Peter Phillips. He has given first or early He has shown British and foreign contemporary am grateful also for the existence of a gallery that is
one-man shows to sculptors such as William Tucker, graphics. Last year he brought over a thrilling unpretentious in manner and method and manages
Brian Wall, Victor Newsome and Ivor Abrahams, selection of avant-garde tapestries from Poland. to oppress neither the exhibits nor the visitor. Long
and to painters that have included Michael Kid- Activities such as these don't often catch the may it and its genial, puckish master thrive.
ner, Antony Benjamin, Derek Boshier, Frank international limelight. The GRABOWSKI GALLERY Norbert Lynton
Bowling, Tess Jaray, Marc Vaux, Jeffrey Steele is not a star-forming industry though international

Paintings and sculpture by Magritte
at Hanover from June 9
One of the few truly obsessive works embodying
the human form in the ICA's exhibition of 'The
Obsessive Image' was René Magritte's six-foot
bronze female torso in tripartite scale. Its impact
was all the more strong in being the first Magritte
sculpture exhibited in London. That piece and
seven other bronzes executed in the year before
Magritte's death in 1967 are exhibited at the
HANOVER GALLERY in June with a selection of his
paintings. It enables us to assess Magritte's activity
as a sculptor for the first time here; the experience
is a revelation and a joy.
Magritte's directness of imagery, witty tension
between perceptual and conceptual experience,
and sophisticated understanding of compositional
means to achieve multi-layered experiences with a
seemingly simple and naive authority, are naturally
suited to sculpture's three-dimensional material
actuality and directness of spatial confrontation
with the viewer. Many of his sculptures are three-
dimensional versions of images from earlier
paintings (like La Folie des grandeurs, Madame
Récamier de David, and Le Thérapeuthe), but they are
not just dull translations of pictorial compositions
Magritte, Above left, La /Pile des grandeurs, bronze. Above right, Le puits de vérité 1967,
into weighty bronze permanence in editions of five. bronze, Hanover Gallery, London
His use of scale, synaesthetic and tactile percep-
tions, and their resulting effect of object reality, sets as the basis of our intensely synaesthetic reaction to centralized abstract compositions concentrating
off his sculpture from its pictorial counterparts and the truncated body parts, clearly represented and conceptual allusions into single images which in-
demonstrates the artistic versatility and vital depth inhumanly hollow. vite the real spatial environment to swirl the viewer
of Magritte's last years. Magritte's tactile characterization of mass and into their dialogue.
Much of the artistic punch of Magritte's sculptu-e space is similarly sculpturally sophisticated. Dra- As objects inertly embodying multiple associa-
comes from his wittily-sophisticated scale of ordi- pery falls in soft, light-catching textures; curtains tions activated only in dialogue with a human
nary objects represented with naive directness. are pulled, and cushions squashed against the consciousness, Magritte's sculpture is curiously
The life-sized proportions of furniture and coffin `weight' of a coffin : but we know that it's all hard parallel in sensibility with the more abstract con-
in Madame Récamier de David and human parts of bronze, enabling soft curtains to stand as rigid lines temporary work of Robert Morris, Tony Smith,
Le Thérapeuthe give these works a sensuous direct- and 'rigid' coffins to sit up with human vitality. and Ron Bladen. It also accentuates the importance
ness denied to their illusory images on cabinet-sized The conceptual void of Le Thérapeuthe's torso is a of the-sculptural sensibility at work in his paintings
canvases. The super-human scale of household sensuously inviting spatial volume, articulated by and the character of his hypnotically centralized
curtains and an axe endow La Joconde and Les bird-cage wires, and the linear articulation of singular images as obsessive objects. How unfortu-
Travaux d'Alexandre with perceptual grandeur evo- spaces in and around Madame Récamier's furniture nate it is that he died just as he was allowing these
king the mythic proportions of Leonardo's is as elegant as she could have wished. Nor is the images to achieve the objecthood which they seem
personification of femininity and the departed character of Magritte's sculpture dependent on to have sought for so long; the world has lost an
Hero who built Culture by ravaging Nature. And representational play: the verticals of La ,Joconde, artist whose potential as a sculptor seems to me
directly perceived scale is the subject (verbally pyramidal form of La Folie des grandeurs, and single greater than his achievement as a painter.
punned in the title) of La Folie des grandeurs—as well columnar shape of Puits de Vérité, are effective as Barbara Reise

Salon de Ia Rose Croix at Piccadilly PICCADILLY will probably come as a surprise to César Franck, helped to revive the reputation of
until June 1 most people, just as it did to me. An agreeable Palestrina, and wrote 'pseudo-Babylonian and
surprise, nevertheless. Sophoclean tragedies' which are now remembered,
Now that the Art Nouveau revival has run its Basically, the Salon de la Rose Croix was an if at all, by the fact that the incidental music was
course and is practically old hat, it seems natural episode in the history of Symbolism. It was the written by Erik Satie. As a critic, Peladan was
that people should be looking about for other creation of the critic and novelist Joséphin Peladan, against most of the tendencies which we regard as
things to revive. This isn't entirely a bad thing— a tireless publicist and self-publicist who bears vital to nineteenth-century painting. Rule V of the
sometimes it can lead to the righting of a wrong, some resemblance to Marinetti (though Marinetti Salon de la Rose Croix puts the matter succinctly
the reversal of an injustice. The Salon de la Rose hated Symbolism and attacked it at every opportu- enough:
Croix and all that pertained to it caused a great nity). The Salon formed only part of Peladan's The Order favours first the Catholic Ideal and Mysti-
stir in the 1890s. It has now been so entirely for- activities; apart from his investigations into oc- cism. After Legend, Myth, Allegory, the Dream, the
gotten that an exhibition devoted to it at the cultism he promoted the music of Wagner and Paraphrase of great poetry and finally all Lyricism, the
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