Page 38 - Studio International - December 1970

have more 'power' than two-dimensional ones tance as a means for extending our visual con- relief map. The organization of the divisions
is the same crudeness, which we unfortunately sciousness in an age that is oppressively domi- between the colour-areas and of linear divi-
identify with America, as that which asserts nated by all-too-well-understood pseudo- sions within those colour-areas has been
that 'bigger is better'. Judd's self-propaganda scientific techniques. Although there was a adjusted by the subtlest intuition so that they
is of this order and is too muddle-headed to be short time, just before and after 1950, when balance (and it must have been unforeseeable
taken seriously. It is also exceedingly ill- American painting occupied the vanguard of until it happened in each case) in a state of
informed—wilfully, one suspects. What can pictorial discovery with the emergence of an perfect equilibrium and stillness. Equilibrium
one make of such remarks as the following: `open' and large-scale idiom in which the and stillness, it has always seemed to me, are
`The main thing wrong with painting is that radical and the inventive were still fused with prime attributes of the greatest painting
it is a rectangular plane placed flat against intuition and sensibility (and I and my friends which, for instance, always resolves signs and
the wall.' (This merely means painting is not were the first Europeans to recognize and symbols connoting literal movement and
sculpture.) Or, 'Three dimensions are real proclaim the fact) the British middle genera- thrust (for example all acute angles, such as
space. That gets rid of the problem of illusion- tion and their younger British successors long abound in Trevor Bell's work) into designs
ism and of literal space, space in and around ago took over the leading role in western pain- which are in themselves majestically motion-
marks and colours—which is riddance of one ting, leaving most of that first generation of less and flat.
of the salient and most objectionable relics of New York moderns going merely 'into produc- Another way in which Bell seems unique lies
European art'. (Chauvinism again). Or, tion' (only Newman, Motherwell and Rothko in his overcoming the very great divergence
`Abstract painting before 1946 and most sub- surviving as truly masterly painters) and the of style and feeling which would have seemed
sequent painting kept the representational younger New York generations skipping from to exist between the sharply drawn silhouettes
subordination of the whole to its parts.' gimmick to gimmick, or falling into the of the canvases and the extremely rich and
(Mondrian? Nicholson reliefs and hard-edge deadly academic colour painting which I am soft textures of the painted surfaces themselves.
abstraction of the '30s?) However, we must in part discussing in this article. Bell has always been able to handle the
still try to judge a sculptor by his sculpture— One of the most extraordinary things about painter's traditional media with an authority,
even one whose heavy verbal performances Trevor Bell's great shaped canvases at Shef- fluency, subtlety and power that the greatest
make more of a splash than his boringly 'cool' field was the way they hovered flat against the of Abstract Expressionists would have envied.
steel sculpture. I only draw attention to these wall in spite of the fact that their silhouettes He is, as they used to say, a born painter—the
aggressive writings because obsequious Eng- are apparently somewhat sculptural and are most gifted, in this sense, of his generation. It
lish critics seem totally unaware of their also almost invariably irregular and asymmet- has taken him years to achieve a personal
crudity and irrelevance; that is to say, they ric—and in spite of the fact that there was vehicle for combining what used to be called
are less relevant to art and to criticism than probably not more than one pair of right- painterliness with structural interests of the
they are, perhaps, to promotion. angles or one horizontal canvas-edge in the most radical kind. But the present series of
entire show. Obviously a shaped canvas domi- shaped canvases are the brilliantly original
One of the most important painters working nated by verticals and horizontals, among its evidence of his success in achieving this
anywhere today is Trevor Bell, and Bell's first bounding edges, will seem tied to the wall that amalgamation of apparent opposites.
experiments with what we now call shaped supports it. This sense that the plane of the The sculptural element in Bell's work is really
canvases began in the late fifties. The truly work's surface lies parallel to the wall can reduced to a matter of silhouettes— only a
remarkable canvases which floated on the walls always be partially secured by vertical and handful of the smaller works project more
of the six large rooms at the Mappin Art horizontal edges and even by such variants as than a few inches from the wall and in all the
Gallery have really been very slowly but 45-degree edges. One also knows that an larger ones, where his main achievement lies,
consistently arrived at. As far as I am con- irregular silhouette, such as a torn piece of the only literal three-dimensional reality is in
cerned they are far and away the most paper may have, can likewise be made to feel the depth of the stretcher as revealed by its
original and successful shaped canvas paint- parallel to the wall if the divisions between edges. And here also there is an innovation in
ings—which remain paintings—to have been the colour-areas upon its surface are them- certain works, the canvas edge consisting of a
produced anywhere. But the task of justifying selves rectilinear in formation, imagine a bevelled plane slanting back inwards against
this judgement and of explaining, even to tartan configuration on the torn paper. But the wall behind the canvas, this bevel being
myself, the reasons for their very great power Trevor Bell's shaped canvas not only painted a bright colour in contrast to a dark
and beauty is daunting in the extreme, because indulge in a very great variety of angles of picture surface. The bevel is therefore invisible
so much about their construction, their literal edge (including curves of all kinds and curves and one's only awareness that it is there comes
appearance and colour is unique and therefore made up of jointed straight lines) so that the from the unexpected reflected glow which it
outside existing terms of formal comparison total silhouette of a piece such as Wight 1968 casts on the wall behind and around the
and analysis. And here again one reflects that (acrylic on canvas on board, 72 x 182 in.) is painting— a faintly perceptible halo of coloured
Stella, like so many Americans, is not only not both 'organic' and extremely subtle; but the light. There are other instances of this kind of
difficult to describe in verbal terms of extreme divisions between colour-areas within the inventiveness. A sort of juggling with sil-
precision, but those terms, one feels, have total silhouette are also almost invariably in houettes takes place, for instance in, Split Jet,
actually preceded, in Stella's case, and that of the form of diagonals converging, and are 1970 (acrylic on canvas, 89 x 172 in.) where
other Americans, the painting of the works productive therefore of attenuated wedge-like a gigantic Concorde-like dart is sliced verti-
they are used to describe. American painting divisions of the surface which, as everyone cally, somewhere to the right of centre, and
seems, quite simply, to be the materialization of knows, are the strongest symbols for three- the longer nose then placed on top of the
concepts, both geometric and verbal; British dimensional perspectival realities—and as shorter tail; the line where it was cut now
painting continues a European tradition that such the sort of shapes most destructive, one continues the slightly less than vertical edge
is utterly opposed to such ratiocinative domi- would have thought, of the flatness of the which was the back of the tail. Or there is the
nation of the visual—in a word, it remains painting's surface. Yet the fact remains that great red Folded Painting 1970; (acrylic on
based in intuition and sensibility. Only none of Bell's wedges fails to lie flat. What one canvas: 67 X 214 in.) —acquired by that
through intuition can we discover those 'new can say with certainty is that had such per- enlightened establishment, the University of
unities in asymmetric and diverse complexity' spectival 'wedge-shapes' been organized sym- Stirling —where this juggling with sliced darts
to which I referred just now and which alone metrically in any way, then the surface of the is taken still further. It is as though two darts
confer on the art of painting its vast impor- canvas would- have heaved up- and down like a_ of unequal lengths were joined back to back;