Page 51 - Studio International - September 1970

loathsomeness. One recalls the types with show, but I didn't come across it until years Probably, and that seems a reasonable activity,
nostalgia, youths with cavalry twills who later, and I don't know anyone who read it in an absurd and seedy way. But there's a
belonged to tennis clubs, straight-backed old- when it appeared. It wasn't published in sense in which it appears like a puckish hobby
school gentlemen, those tall confident upper- England, and perhaps no English journal in people whose professions—all architects
class women brushing dandruff from the would have carried it at that time. There was and designers are like this—have an aura of
policeman's collar as he feebly remonstrates a hiatus, a social and pictorial vacuum, no boring social responsibility. The IG has been
about some parking offence. The awfulness of artistic climate in which any potential commonly contrasted with the goody-goody
Kingsley Amis's Ormerod was just of this modernist could breathe. It's for this reason aspects of the Hoggart-derived New Left, just
type, so preposterous that one felt almost that I'd quarrel slightly (rather than dispute) up the road in Carlisle Street. At the Partisan
genial about it, and I'm told that the father- with Alloway's account of the rise of English in those days there was indeed a lot of solemn
in-law in Look Back in Anger soon came to be Pop, in his famous essay which now has the talk about 'community', and 'lost values'. I
presented in this sort of light. That's okay. unchallenged position of the art history of was distressed at the time that their idea of an
In another way, though, cultured Tories someone who was actually there. But the artist was still based—regrettably and extra-
were so clearly superior people, and were so early history of Pop is precisely to do with the ordinarily—on that asinine deification of
clearly running the art scene, that it was fact that people weren't there, that there wasn't William Morris which has always been a
painful, having hitched down the newly- a scene (we should make this distinction) but pathetic feature of the English left. But I don't
opened Ml, to go into the West End galleries. an in-group. think the IG were really as different as all
It felt a completely different world; worse, it The in-group, of course, was the Independent that. They were already Establishment
felt as if we had no right to be there. Nor did Group within the ICA, and they look fine on figures. Quite apart from the evidence of the
the pictures feel as if they were ours, in any paper; Alloway, Reyner Banham, Paolozzi, paintings, the real birth of Pop was certainly
sense. There had not yet arisen that feeling of the Smithsons, Richard Hamilton, Theo in a younger generation from the provincial
a disaffected youthfulness in painting that was Crosby. They don't look so good on canvas, art schools who affected a liberation less by
the most encouraging feature of the mid- however, and no wonder. The only painter the standard of their work than by the evolu-
sixties. among them was Richard Hamilton. He was tion of a style that was deeply anti-paternalist.
But the Tate's large Picasso exhibition in 1960 currently concerned with those pallid Chrysler The development of a subversive art-school
necessarily shattered any residual respect, Corp paintings about girls and cars. They are ethos in these last few years has been a major
however surly, for the established. One's so tasteful that they make one long for the achievement in English Pop. It happened
disrespect then had the absolute sanction con- startling avidity of a fetishist — something quite quickly. The best painters painted their
ferred by a visible lack of quality. Guernica Hamilton could not provide, for he has never way out of the Pop style fast, but left behind
wasn't there (and how much it has contribu- been bold. The rest of the group, filled with an openness of means, the potential for any
ted to American painting just by being in architects and town planners, seemed like kind of effect, not just an arty effect. It's been
America) ; the rest of the post-cubist work was people from the Greater London Council, felt outside the canvases. Art schools are now
clearly that of an old master doing old tricks, and as if they were engaged in a dilettante the least genteel of educational establishments,
more and more slackly. Lawrence Alloway activity, not in artistic creation. Did they and this is splendid. Everyone grumbles about
wrote a splendid, knocking review of the show each other photographs of Marilyn? the courses, the organization, and about every-

Kenneth Noland
Shadow 1970
Acrylic on canvas
564 x 114 in.
Coll: The Earl of Pembroke
2
Frank Stella
Lac la Ronge II 1968
Acrylic on canvas
96 x 144 in.
Coll: Robert Hughes
3
Jules Olitski
Pearlescent Flood 1970
Sprayed acrylic on canvas
93 x 125 in.
Coll: Kasmin Gallery
Colour Courtesy Kasmin
Gallery