Page 47 - Studio International - November 1971

will again be well served. saddle horses. In the dead centre is a still, It is not easy for an old admirer to carry
The raciness of Yeats's art reminds one that concentrated figure crouched over a book, which conviction. Roger Hilton's recent exhibition at
for the first ten years of his career he was a I take to be the artist (a view not disputed by the WADDINGTON GALLERIES was his first proper
black and white artist. The great tradition of James White). The landscape is both the London show for many years. I found it
nineteenth-century pictorial journalism was still world at its finest and the world out of which exhilarating, masterly. Those who keep on
active in the eighties and fed the instinct which the painter creates his vision of life. We are announcing the death of painting (interesting
drew Yeats to horse-races—where he sketched familiar with stylistic references to other how other long-established media are allowed
ceaselessly on notebooks held unobtrusively periods in the work of Kokoschka: here, continuing validity) should have a look at
within the lapel of his greatcoat—pubs, however, the associations this painting has with Hilton—not merely because his work lives
theatres, circuses and boxing matches. 'I have, art of another period is part of a genuine human abundantly but because it is so essentially
if not the vulgar tongue,' he wrote later in centrality. The painting embraces the popular painting and nothing else.,
Sligo (193o), 'at least the vulgar heart. I like scenes of the real Ireland and myths which are This is rarer than you imagine. No space for
the fight.' His love for event and character still as real as the ponies : the moment in and an art history lecture here. In summary one
—reflected in The Rake (1901) and The Rogue
3
(1903) at Dublin—is centred on deeper concerns
than anecdote and picturesque types. These
London scenes were the nearest he could get
to the life of Sligo where he grew up. Like
Constable of Suffolk, Yeats might have said of
Sligo 'These scenes made me a painter'. Thus
The Man from Aranmore (1905) introduces the
independent, heroic figure so often seen in
Yeats's paintings : he stands solidly on the stone
pier-head, the firm stance firmer for the island
mass behind, and the head given the grandeur
and remoteness of the man from the sea by the
towering mountain beyond. In contrast to
Kokoschka, whose individuals are independent
of their surroundings, Yeats's figures occupy a
middle-ground of action and association. They
take their places in paintings which are now the
finest records of Ireland's painful political
history: In Memory, Bachelor's Walk (1915), On
Drumcliffe Strand (1918), The Funeral of Harry
Boland (1922), Communicating with Prisoners
(1924), Going to Wolf Tone's Funeral (1929).
Yeats's commitment survived moments of crisis.
His The Breaker Out (1925) takes a subject from
the Liffey quay-side : the heroism here is based
more subtly on the role of the man in the life
around him. The breaker-out, as Yeats said in a
1926 interview 'is the man who signals to the
crane manipulator exactly where and when to
lower the packages on to a boat "so as not to crush
everyone to death" '. There is no felt connexion out of time. might say that while painting was unchallenged
of this order in Kokoschka's work: we are given The image Yeats leaves us with is that of the in its dominance it could venture far from its
instead the close-up intense portrait of suffering self-portrait in pencil of about 1920 the erect basic concerns, enrolling all sorts of other
individuals —outside any concrete historical unhistrionically presented study of a man who media and interests on the way. Then it was
event—or we are given the excited panoramic has stood his ground, still with the concentration only the wisest (and often oldest) of painters
view from sky-scraper or mountain, the vision of a man who gathers the present and the past who were tempted to shed the inessentials
of the isolated. together in his mind to understand their —Titian (Death of Actaeon), Rembrandt,
For Yeats the isolation of the artist had a meaning. This image of a finely organized Turner. In the twentieth century there have
richer meaning. It meant a detachment from sensibility immersed in the drama of life is very been many painters who have tested their
the present in the interests of a personal vision different from the image with which we are left medium in a fundamentalist way, from
of a more complete ideal world of which he saw by Kokoschka: the youthful figure with brush Mondrian and Klee to Pollock and Poons . It
glimpses in the life around him and never emotionally raised, suggesting the personal would be enough to show Hilton's place with
despaired of seeing realized in the national life drama of the artist rather than the drama them but I want to go further and assert their
of his country. The centre of this world was of life. limitation in this particular of quintessentiality
Sligo, but the races on the sand which Yeats MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH while insisting on Hilton's unique success.
saw there in his boyhood are removed in A No two Hiltons are alike. The show varied
Race in Hy Brasil (1937) to the mythical 1 Kokoschka: Prints and Drawings from the collection dazzlingly. Outward references here and there
island lying off the Western coast of Ireland. of Rheinhold, Count Bethusy-Huc, is at the Bethnal to distinguish the paintings and possibly as
James White has suggested its relationship with Green Museum until 16 January. The catalogue, nods to sources of particular impetus —none of
with an introduction by E. H. Gombrich, is published
Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera. (As Becket by HMSO at 45p. them to any degree affecting the quality of the
said of the later Yeats, 'he gets Watteauer and 2 Jack B.Yeats: Drawings and Paintings by James painting. Pure abstracts of very different sorts.
Watteauer'). The boat is pulled up on the right, White (Secker and Warburg £6); The Collected Plays The whole gamut of possible marks and
of jack B.Yeats edited by Robin Skelton (Secker and
figures move off into the hills, begin a dance, or Warburg £5'5o). splotches, lines, colours. Only one common
195