Page 34 - Studio International - December 1970

equivalent anywhere else in the world—but
this is another question) what the Americans
excel in is organizational power on an unprece-
dented scale in the sphere of cultural promotion.
What British artists are up against at this
moment is not the competition of a school of
American artists of overwhelming brilliance;
but a gang of American art promoters whose
Madison Avenue techniques of publicity,
whose ruthless cultural chauvinism and whose
positively Wall Street financial resources
combine to form a gigantic steam roller in
front of which the gentlemanly scholarship,
the fair-minded openness to persuasion and
the congenital predilection for backing foreign
products first of what we must crudely refer
to as the English critical establishment renders
British artists totally defenceless... defenceless
in all but the most important respect: that is,
the evidence of their actual work. But those
works do have to be seen, not once but many
times. Hence the crying need for all those
retrospectives. Today one notices also that
very little writing about American art, coming
from the Americans themselves, is now devoid
of promotional content. Take William S.
Rubin's catalogue for the touring Frank
Stella show: the highly ingenious arguments,
all apparently impersonal, objective, not to
say pseudo-scientific, are in reality highly
promotional, undisguisedly pompous and
fatuously over-documented; there is a
spurious weightiness about this exceedingly
elaborate production (176 pages!) put out by
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, all of
which seems to stem from a desire to suggest
to the world at large that the natural com-
parison in discussing this artist, who as I say
is still only thirty-four, would be none other
than Henri Matisse ! Amongst the endless
pages of notes one finds remarks like this:
`Motherwell's work was first drawn to Stella's
attention by Darby Bannard'. Speaking as
one who helped to draw the world's attention
to Motherwell in the mid-fifties, I can't help
wondering how the youthful Stella had failed
to notice the existence of one of America's
tiny handful of truly masterly painters with-
out the help of his friends! There have even
been certain American commentaries on
Matisse lately which rather imply that that
great painter's ascendancy is a sort of by-
product of current American thought and
practice, rather than the other way about. If
certain arguments are repeated over a suffi-
ciently wide area, and if the works of certain
artists are reproduced in thousands of publi-
cations throughout the western world (and
timing is the essence of such operations)
degree of general acceptance of both is gene-
rated with such effectiveness that, especially
in the minds of the younger generation, both
the works and the arguments simply appear
to be facts of nature; and the arguments are
there, of course, to give the verbal credentials
which insist upon the values which it is
intended we shall all attach to the works—the