Page 50 - Studio International - November 1972

he was so nice) with which one considers his syntheticist Pont-Aven period, which may be handling of the pleasant impressionist cliché
paintings. Perhaps there is a moral there. The conveniently taken as occupying the decade scene (Monet, Manet, that dreadful early
Sisleys are okay. There are only six of them. between 1886 and Gauguin's final hobbling Munch, Bonnard and so on) where you get
The seven Cézannes have no specific place in departure for the South Seas, is introduced right above a street and look down into it with
his work and are all brilliant, though not special. here by a most diplomatic account of the as risky a tilt (without too much help from
And there remains Renoir, who takes this relationship between the master and Emile either the ironwork of your balcony or the
opportunity of reminding us of something that Bernard, an account somewhat muted in its horizon) as you can manage. And so on. After
serious people all too easily forget or ignore, artistic implications because of the author's lack much of this kind of brilliance the work that
that he was a fine artist. Renoir came late to of interest in Gauguin's earlier period, or indeed slots into what we know of Picasso in his first
engraving, producing his first work in the in late nineteenth-century painting as a whole. phases as a modernist seems to be duller only
medium in 1889. Some of the ease and confidence Everything seems to be both self-contained because it's less surprising, There are things
about his plates might have to do with the fact and watered-down, even if we do leap straight that look useful, for instance; so one can get
that engraving by that date was considered a into the tremendous metaphysics of The Vision further into the Casagemas picture by looking
more normal activity for an artist than when after the Sermon and the hideous personal at these sketches of the funeral. Or so one can
Manet started to do it. Very like Manet is politics of the bande a Gauguin, Seguin forced to trace preliminary ideas for La Vie which might
Renoir's first essai, a masterly frontispiece to paint in pure colours at pistol point, make it seem less vacuous. More quidnunque
Mallarmé's Pages. Actually it's not like Manet Schuffenecker abused and bled of his money, are some early self-portraits and a very early
himself but like his little vignettes to L' Apres- de Haan caricatured to the point of torture. (1900) Mask which the artist calls `the bride of
Midi d'un Faune, and I guess that Renoir No flower is so easily blighted as artistic El Greco'. This provokes some thoughts about
looked at that especially to get onto the camaraderie, one feels. There was the stream of the relationship of portraiture to autodramatic
Mallarmé wavelength, since they wouldn't have letters and canvases exchanged between disguise (which I suppose first comes out fully in
had more than the odd bonjour to say to each Brittany and van Gogh in Arles. How many the 1907 self-portrait, with its van Gogh
other in the normal course of events. The mutual portraits there are at this time, how overtones), but it doesn't really help much. It's
appropriately aesthetic and lapidary quality of many pictures inscribed 'A son copain .'! just interesting. One blue-period picture of
this etching was not developed, since Renoir And while van Gogh, away from it all, dreamt 1901 and some drawings seem to prove the
was more interested in the effects to be gained of ideal artistic communities, Gauguin was Munch connection, which Picasso experts have
by soft-ground etching and drypoint. If running one, not a utopia but a messy reality been shy about on the whole. It initially seems
Manet's graphics seem in bulk as a part of the where he was the boss. The minor figures of the reminiscent of Munch's puberty paintings.
nervous discontinuity of his career, Renoir's fit school are all here, and are made to look minor But when you check the dates it seems that
beautifully and naturally into the more relaxed indeed, while there is never quite enough good Picasso was first, and made up this naked girl.
of his classical moods after the trip to Italy. argument about the art to demonstrate the The way she's open and not hunched (rare for
By their nature they don't get messed around, major importance of Gauguin himself. the blue period anyway) pushes one on to think
like some of the paintings of that period, by too A persistent leitmotif in many modern art of the mad beggar figure who often turns up in
hot colour and a strained monumentality. Thus movements which balance primitivism and 1904, and more of that unexamined post-rose
we have works like the Chapeau épinglé, with sophistication is all that business about period phase in Picasso's art in which naked
those plump and summery girls, in hats that one `painting like a child'. Gauguin and Sérusier adolescents, with a marvellous repertoire of
could eat. The point is, however, that it would not seldom went in for such talk, though they primordially meaningful gestures, indicate
not have come out looking like that had not must have known how different the truth is. On that they have always known more than any
Renoir looked very carefully at Raphael. And those occasions when one is forced to look at a older spectator. q
who but Renoir could make Raphael into load of naive expressionism accompanied by TIM HILTON
something so gorgeous ? Such a combination of crappy Quaker theory, or the dreary
volupté and connaissance is so unforced and subservience of time-serving academic Slick it to me
masterly that it might not seem to have the precocity, all sensible people — despite the fact Polaroid Portraits, Vol 1, published in Germany
official credentials of great art. But that's what it that they will be branded as monsters if they say by hansjorg mayer, Stuttgart, and in London by
is. The book carries a useful catalogue, and so — find children's art loathsome. One is Mathews Miller Dunbar Ltd, and distributed
Leymarie's informative introduction is therefore relieved to open Picasso: Birth of a by Idea Books, l8 Endell Street, London WC2.
exceptionally well translated, except that there Genius and find that he never produced any. As Hardback £2.50.
should now be a ban on the phrase 'capture the one would expect, given all those stories of his
fleeting moment'. childhood, producing the marvellous and the Polaroid Portraits, Richard. Hamilton's first use
From Renoir's fetes champêtres to the unexpected like conjuring tricks. This book is of the book as an art form, consists of a
saltpetrous explosion at the fateful meeting of the catalogue of the donation made to the city of Polaroid self-portrait and thirty-two
Gauguin and van Gogh seems a journey into a Barcelona. It consists of a thousand or so Polaroid photographs of the artist, taken for
different world, though it happened at the same works done before he took up permanent the most part at his own request with a fully
time. It is surely tight corrivalship which makes residence in Paris. Only a very few of them have automatic Polaroid camera bought specially for
for the remoteness — how different it all was been published before. The earlier ones, given the purpose. The photographs are works by
from the impressionist life at the Café Guerbois, their competence and brilliance, seem to belong artists and one poet, all friends or acquaintances
where Anti-Dreyfusards, boulevardiers, and to some art-historical limbo, though Señor of Hamilton's. They form by implication an
anarchist socialists could shelve their Cirlot relates them to Spanish art of the autobiography of the artist over a four-year
differences in talk. The temptation to relate eighties and nineties in a more thorough way period, and imply an aesthetic context in which
Gauguin's art in terms of his life is irresistible, than has been done heretofore. Some of the the artist functions, referring in particular to a
and perhaps should not be resisted. things are of such quality that one would realize span of contemporary art.
Dr Jaworska, however, is very politely that a major artist must have painted them, Besides their references and allusions, the
interested in the rows, as if he were trying to get yet could not make any attribution. This is photographs have palpable and distinct
all the people concerned to speak to each other especially so of a Rembrandtesque portrait, of a qualities and properties. The contributions of,
again, and his book, though painstaking in stunningly roughly-brushed nude, of some for example, Francis Bacon, Cartier-Bresson,
research and presentation, is short on `near-abstract' fields and trees, of an El Greco Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Brigid Polk,
stylistic and aesthetic analysis. The figure, of an outrageously super-confident Man Ray, James Rosenquist, Dieter Rot,

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