Page 47 - Studio International - September 1971

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large, and they are set out like the precious
items of a museum. At Annely Juda they are
small and hung like casually stacked documents
from floor to ceiling. This isn't fortuitous, and
it makes sense: 'non-objective' art (to accept
Malevich's phrase as a rag-bag) needs to be well
understood, and its objects are often best taken
as the evidence of residue of experimental ideas
and processes, whereas—at any rate relatively
speaking—any ignorant viewer can get
everything he ought to need from a Klee or a
Modigliani or a Rothko simply by looking at it.
Or so runs the conventional wisdom. What
isn't clear is the extent to which the background
of ideas and theories and artistic purposes
behind the works of the Marlborough 'masters'
is invisible only because it is familiar and tacit
(thus do pro-South Africans plead with anti-
apartheid demonstrators to keep politics out of
6 sport). In any case, it would be a courageous and
independent connoisseur who preferred his
Munari or Berlewi or Kassak to his Lipchitz or
his Soutine or Pollock.
And of course the two strands overlap
wherever a non-figurative artist has become
sufficiently famous : in Arp, for example, and
Gabo, Hepworth, Klee, Mondrian, Moore,
Nicholson, Pevsner and Schwitters. Is it
obvious, then, that artists achieve fame by
virtue of their absolute excellence, and that
they do not come to seem admirable because
they have been much celebrated ? A noticeable
feature of the London scene, particularly in
relation to current and very recent art, is the
intimacy of the received connection between
celebrity and presumptions of worth. It is
assumed (and ambitious artists go along) that
all the best art will be found in and around Bond
Street, and that occasional, inevitable, errors or
oversights of judgment will correct themselves
in time through the natural operation of a
market regulated by the shrewd dealer and the
incorruptible critic.
Misgivings about all this are reflected in the
agonizingly slow growth of off-Bond Street
exhibiting situations bestowing a prestige that
is not scored for cash register. I am thinking of
galleries like the Whitechapel and, more
recently, the Serpentine and the Hayward
(although the last two can easily be seen as
relating aspirants and graduates respectively to
the Bond Street Standard). Better examples,
perhaps—although their prestige is
correspondingly uncertain—are the ad hoc ones
like the S.P.A.C.E. artists, recently displaced
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