Page 35 - Studio International - September 1972

ideology as scholasticism, Constructivism with (Left)
all its antecedents and all its subsidiaries offered William Scott
encouragement to the uptight and security to Yellow Dark and Light 1971
Oil on canvas, 4 ft x 4 ft
the romantic. Stemming indeed from what is The Tate Gallery
basically a nineteenth-century passion for (Centre)
scientific idealism, the non-objective world is Ed Moses
meant for, and created by one of the basic Ill. 151 Hegeman 1971
human types—call it introverted, intellectual, Canvas and resin, 7 ft x 9 ft
Felicity Samuel Gallery
academic, classical—what you will : it has its
demerits, the discipline of the machine is not (Bottom)
Patrick Heron
easily convertible into the discipline of what are Complicated Green and Violet 1972
essentially hand-made objets de luxe, but in the Oil on canvas, 72 x 120 in
long run it is still an essential part of the human Photo: John Webb
Whitechapel Art Gallery
condition.
Another, less absolute concern with the
translation of mechanical experience into
fleshy terms appears in the works of Richard
Lindner whose robotized figures, though
deriving in some sense from the formal
preoccupations of Léger and his like, reflect
much more vividly the sinister anxieties of
metropolitan man. His Couple, with its
undercurrents of Surrealism, and even, in a
way, of Pop, is one of the pieces which made
the opening exhibition of the new FISCHER
GALLERY in Duke Street so rewarding, for it
could be seen in the context of a whole gamut
of painterly icons, ranging from the romantic
sensibilities of Corot and Courbet, through the
self-indulgent hedonism of the Impressionists
to the rhythmical configurations of Moore, the
anxious hysteria of Bacon, and the
self-answering enigmas of Magritte. An
analogous, and coincidental exhibition at
MARLBOROUGH FINE ART explored similar fields,
though with varying emphases. Moreau,
Sisley and Signac were amongst the remoter
forbears, and within more recent times there
were interesting things by Kurt Schwitters,
and Franz Kline whose Rain of Blood
Dropping into Japanese Waters Located in an
Austrian Garden combined in an extraordinary
way abstract tensions, and emotive colouring
within a framework which clearly echoed
Klimt.
Richard Smith has always tended to
combine in his works a problem-solving
structure, with an emotionally dense
picture-surface. He is not really concerned
with systems as such, but tends to invent one
for each new work. At the last Biennale in
Venice he was involved in so shaping his
canvases that they brought into emphasis the
nature of space, and by being bisected, turned
outwards, or curved into shapes, invaded the
area outside of the theoretical picture-frame.
Now he has discovered a new type of formal
device for achieving a similar end, and his
latest exhibition at the (soon alas to close)
KASMIN GALLERY showed him using strings and
tapes to define the externalization of his inner
pictorial areas. The emotive quality of the
surface still remains, muted and private though
it is, but while I admire the persistent ingenuity
of his explorations, I find them basically
unmoving. q
BERNARD DENVIR
85