Page 51 - Studio International - February 1969

well fully enjoy the job of charging them up ally argumentative any more. The ideology Some years ago when Scarfe used the pages of
with charmingly various souls. Don't worry, is adequately worked out and he can concen- Private Eye to gain notoriety, he began to
all good souls will get along of their own trate on the mechanics of a given issue. annoy the professional cartoonists on Fleet
accord. Does this reduce painting to orna- How American these paintings seem from Street by inspiring real-life art critics to men-
ment ? If ornament is the opposite of narra- over here. I notice that some of the forms tion him in what they fondly refer to as 'their
tion, more power to it. Classicists seem to don't exactly meet as they ideally intend to, notices'. Scarfe, thought the professionals,
understand, almost from birth, something and that the pencilled compass lines are not wasn't really a cartoonist and he wasn't a
which causes romantics a great deal of only left in the interstices (none of the forms proper artist either. Apart from that he was
anxiety and which defeats them in the end, touch) but their slight imprecision means becoming too famous too soon, and if only
that a work of art is a product, not a process. that some of the painting or masking had to their editors would allow them to get away
Relax, paintings are only objects. be done by eye. I can't, for instance, conceive with that sort of lavatory smut, they too
How does the ambiguity, the apparent of the compulsive, amphetamine classicism would be talked about in the same reverential
illusionism of the overlapping bands in three of a German leaving the paintings this way.* terms. Conversations in El Vino's grew even
of these four paintings (as against the more Then there are the shapes and sub-shapes more heated when Scarfe joined the Daily
straightforwardly Pythagorean geometry of themselves, and the way they are the natural Mail as, of course, a cartoonist, and the
the earlier squares and notched triangles) accidents of intersections. Aren't they like money he was rumoured to be getting put him
affect the flat 'objecthood' of the canvas floorplans by Frank Lloyd Wright? Think of most definitely in the professional league.
surface? First, as long as there is any colour the pool in the floor of the Guggenheim Scarfe won't last, said the boys, and of course
at all in a painting you have to get some Museum—just such an elliptical losenge as they were right. Not because he was bad but
illusion of space. The question is whether the we find here, and determined in a similar way because he was, in a sense, far too good. En-
artist wants to push, reinforce, or capitalise by the intersection of two great compass arcs, raged colonels in Worthing and members of
on it, or to minimise, contradict, or ignore it. with the centre of one outside the enclosed the Primrose League cancelled their Mails for
Secondly, the kind of pattern ambiguity space. In fact, Stella's work as a whole, its ever and Scarfe left for the sake of the paper.
which is here present is like that in diagrams parallel bands and draughting-table angles, By that time he had emerged as a major
of Gestalt ambiguity in psychology books, the is Wrightean. Like Wright he has a witty and satirist and one of the most superb natural
whole fascination and irony of which rests on unpompous love of pure geometry which is draughtsmen England has seen for years.
our correct knowledge that the thing is quite distinct from the mathematical Fascism The biography is by now well known. Little
nothing more than an absolutely flat dia- of Plato and Euclid, and which, from here, schooling because of nervous asthma, the
gram. Thirdly, it is a simple art-historical looks appealingly American. You start by weeks in bed with a cough, not only gave him
fact that Stella's own painting experience in confining yourself to a piece of graph paper, time to draw but also, according to him, his
recent years has prepared him to paint with a straight edge, a 30°-60°-90° triangle, and profoundly pessimistic view of life.
increased confidence in the flatness of the a compass, but then—and this is where Wright He's almost forgotten himself now that even
plane. Having, so to speak, done setting-up left the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the whole before Private Eye he produced regular draw-
exercises in shaping a canvas and in allowing European mind behind in the dust—you just ings for Punch, partly conventional gags, but
that shape to choose its own pictorial content, tinker. If, like Wright or Stella, you tinker also horrific visions which are as tough and
and then in choosing jutting forms and allow- intelligently, you get beauty. explicit as anything he was to do later for the
ing them to determine the shape of the JOSEPH MASHECK Dark Lady of Greek Street. It's astounding to
stretched canvas as a material thing, he can, see what Bernard Hollwood, not noted for his
with great assurance, do anything he likes. If * Stella's unique painting The Marriage of Intellect boldness, let Scarfe get away with, parti-
these paintings seem at all weaker than earlier and Squalor in the Museum of Modern Art, New cularly in a series called 'Private Affluence,
York is almost a caricature of this annoying recal-
ones I suggest that it's because, like a mature Public Squalor', which gave Scarfe the chance
citrance on the part of the materials; it won't even
politician, Stella doesn't have to be theoretic- stay flat. to indulge his visions of animalized humans,
rotting and disembowelling themselves on the
mighty machine.
Private Eye gave him more freedom to expand,
of course, and its editor, Richard Ingrams,
always on Scarfe's wavelength, encouraged
him to let himself go. Suddenly political
figures were being caricatured with a bitter-
ness that England's Press had not seen since
Gilray and Hogarth. The government was
shown as pigs wallowing in their own excre-
ment; loathsome bodies were given warts,
pubic hairs and all, and likenesses were pushed
to the point where, although still recognizable,
they had also become other parts of the ana-
tomy. Scarfe groped below the belt and raised
what he got hold of above the shoulder line.
The Mail changed his style. He couldn't work
for newsprint reproduction, and constantly
against the clock, without simplifying his
ornate and highly worked line and the intro-
duction of large areas of solid black. The force
was still there, the imagery as uncompromis-
ing. Each new lie, each false compromise was
reflected in still more degeneration in the
politician's face. The bankruptcy of moral