Page 36 - Studio International - July August 1971

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at all relevant to his time, and it is easy to
overlook the powerful originality, obscured as it
often is by sentiment and Victorian titles. It is
sometimes difficult to recognize in paintings
called The Song from Afar, Feeling or Sacred
Hours a radically new approach to problems of
form and pattern-making.
Hodler's younger contemporaries recognized
his originality, and Hodler's influence proved
decisive for many German painters, determined
as they were to escape from the Realism and
Impressionism which, even after 1900, was
considered the height of modernism in Berlin
and elsewhere. The effect of the large Hodler
section at the Vienna Secession in 1904 was
crucial for the development of Austrian
Jugendstil painting. Hodler, almost equally
well known in Germany, also made a deep
impression on Nolde, who recognized that
Hodler's ultimate aim was the depiction of the
invisible and the description by compositional
means of what he believed to be the basic laws 4 5
governing the universe. And Nolde realized
too, that Hodler attempted this by distortion
and by departing from nature; that, unlike
Böcklin, he sought revelation, not in the
trappings of bookish allegory and eccentric
personification, but in terms of painting itself. q
FRANK WHITFORD

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The Laurens show at the Hayward is doubly
welcome, not only for the view of an important
artist whose work is not physically familiar in
this country, but also for the picture that is being
built up, I suspect more by good fortune than
design, with the recent Rodin and Gonzalez
exhibitions, and the sculpture in the Léger and
Russian shows, of the central development of
modern sculpture. What we need now from the
Tate or the Arts Council are comprehensive
exhibitions, firstly of the successors of Rodin in
the first decade of this century, and secondly, of
the sculpture of the cubist period.
Not that the gloomy mediaeval atmosphere of
the entrance halls at the Hayward does anything
for the larger Laurens bronzes displayed there.
It is only when one is confronted by the
marvellous table of small figures that one can get
any sort of feeling of the life and warmth of his
art. Yet even when allowance is made for the
wholly unsympathetic environment much of the
work remains stodgy and lifeless. I have the
feeling that Laurens's identity in sculpture lies
rather deeper than the image with which he
himself was largely satisfied in the last twenty
years of his life, and by which his achievement
has come to be registered in the history of
modern art. The disparity between the cubist
constructions and collages, the terra-cotta pieces
of the '2os, and the later bronzes; between

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