Page 20 - Studio International - July August 1971

Boston Museum Elements group show, where Blake so reviled in his annotations to Reynolds's life seems relevant today when artists are
Mr Baker encountered his work, was an Discourses. Stubbs was in no sense a looking to nature in new ways,8 and when we
unsuitable context. The whole economic revolutionary, but he transcended the conditions are coming to locate art more in the flux and
system whereby an artist's oeuvre is scattered of his patronage, and is a great experimental reflux of organized consciousness than in the
geographically is, of course, most suited to those artist. trans-substantiation of materials by genius.
artists who are devoted to the ideal of the The excellent exhibition 'Stubbs in the But science and nature have both become
masterpiece. 176os' at Agnew's last November brought enormously more complicated ideas in the last
This point can be made most clearly if we together some of his nine 'mares and foals' two centuries, and it would be hard for anyone
consider photography. People often claim that compositions and other paintings of that decade. today to recover Stubbs's simplicity while
a particular photograph is a 'masterpiece', for The catalogue introduction by Basil Taylor avoiding sentimentality. q
instance Stieglitz's The Steerage. But a single makes a convincing case that the mares and JONATHAN BENTHALL

George Stubbs
Mares and Foals by a Stream
Oil on canvas
23½ x 39½ in.
Coll: The Duke of Grafton

photograph may be 'good' by accident. foals 'express most intensely Stubbs's identity 1I discussed Sonfist's work in the March 1971 issue
Photography is essentially a cumulative art, as a painter, for the simple motif could be of Studio International (`Haacke, Sonfist and Nature').
Since then, he has been working with schooling fish,
and the great photographers are esteemed, like treated with great freedom of invention and army ants, crickets and worms; and has also made a
Bann's experimental painters, for following a design?? Taylor compares Stubbs with proposal for a model ecosystem, on the 84th-Street
`path of controlled activity'. Such a path Monet—`both artists are experimenting with side of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, that
would exhibit the conditions that existed in Central
reconstructs itself from the Museum of Modern the visual possibilities of commonplace, Park before urbanization and the landscaping of the
Art's latest photographic publication, for tractable subjects'—but is surely wrong in park.
example: a collection of poignant studies by stating that 'There is no comparable set of 2 See Dore Ashton, Studio International November
1970, on the 'Software' exhibition at the Jewish
Walker Evans of buildings, poor families, pictorial variations in English art before the Museum; and also the exhibition catalogue pp. 22-3.
commercial graphics, subway travellers.4 twentieth century, and few counterparts in Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine
Group use a colony of gerbils, as Alan Sonfist uses
Andrew Forge's remark 'Photography is European painting'. In English art there are
army ants, to symbolize human society. My point is
essentially an act of choice on the instant; not Constable's cloud studies; in Dutch that such analogy, if expressed as a scientific
the deployment of a language-like convention'5 seventeenth-century art there were many inference from animal ethology, would be trivial and
neglects the elements of cumulative experimental highly individual painters working with nature even objectionable. In the art context it functions as a
joke or poetic conceit.
enquiry in art. morte, flowers, architectural interiors, etc., in an 3For further comments, see my review, Studio
If Bann's concept of the artist's work really `experimental' vein. International, July/August 5970. The publisher is
Studio Vista.
cuts across that which has been generally Stubbs was very close to the science of his
4 Walker Evans, Museum of Modem Art, New York
accepted, as he claims, one would expect some age. In 1751, at the age of 25, he engraved 192 pp. There is a characteristically fine and
major shifts of emphasis to take place. (An embryological drawings for a book on understated introduction by John Szarkowski,
5Andrew Forge, 'Reflections on Aaron Scharf's Art
eventual crash in the odious Times/Sotheby midwifery; in 1766 he published after years of
and Photography', Studio International, May 1969.
art index is no doubt too much to hope for.) As arduous research The Anatomy of the Horse, a 6 See Sir W. Gilbey, Life of George Stubbs R.A.
soon as one begins to think of an artist like landmark in veterinary science. Basil Taylor (London 1898). There is a page on Stubbs in Francis
Stubbs as 'experimental', his centre of interest mentions that the mares and foals series aroused D. Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution.
7 Stubbs in the 176os, Thomas Agnew & Sons,
begins to shift. little contemporary interest, and that Stubbs London.
George Stubbs is a rather comical case in art drifted away from the tastes of his sporting 8Alan Sonfist writes 'My art presents nature. I isolate
history since it is impossible to dissociate his patrons. His families of mares and foals certain aspects of nature to gain emphasis, to make
clear its power to affect us and to give the viewer an
work from the English aristocracy's sensual represent a tender ideal of communal life, in awareness that can be translated into a total unravelling
passion for horses. When one thinks of Stubbs the context of which any political critique of his of the cosmos'. He distinguishes this aim from that of
`pollution artists' (e.g. those who dye large expanses
charging 100 guineas for horse-portraits—at a image of nature would seem weak. of water) or 'industrialists' (e.g. those who impose a
time when Reynolds was getting only 70 for Stubbs must have been (in the best sense of scheme of their own on mountains or canyons).
a three-quarter length human portrait6—and the word) a simple man. He is said to have gone
of the agrarian capitalists whose cleared and to Rome when he was 3o to decide if nature
walled-in estates he was glorifying in the name were superior to art, and to have left promptly
of nature, it is hard not to think of him as one on deciding that it was. His peculiarly lucid,
of the 'Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves' whom rigorous and unstylized enquiry into natural
8