Page 45 - Studio International - January 1973

I felt instantly uncomfortable walking into the something perhaps which he owes to
`40s Decade' show at the WHITECHAPEL, as Surrealism. Certainly, the painting shares this
though entering a room of embarrassed courage — as it shares certain formal elements —
strangers for whom the war years had acted as a with the devastated landscapes of Max Ernst's
siren, forcing them together for no other purpose wartime paintings. William Roberts is another
than shelter, and catching them in various stages painter who can accept and depict the ominous.
of dress, some of them pretty shabby, and many His painting The Control Room makes a strong
evidently waiting to return to Paris for a look at statement here, since he deals directly with the
the newer styles. There is a kind of gravy- anxiety which seems to bounce off elsewhere in
stained drabness about the paintings en masse, this exhibition as if by accident, the result of
which individually presented they probably some general incontinence. Roberts, on the other
wouldn't have. Even the Bacons which, to my hand, is able to use this dread deliberately in his
mind, are the strongest paintings in the image of operators of a communications sytem
exhibition are affected by the company they which has broken down, and of machines that
keep. They look a lot less good than at last year's give messages of recent deaths or orders for
Paris retrospective, for example, and I would destruction. The figures are in control in name
guess that many of the other works here suffer only, and Roberts, ex-vorticist, makes in this
similarly. picture an eloquent answer to the futurist vision
Even so, it must be said that there are some of the machine age.
pretty dreadful things in this exhibition, among Of the other 'war-artists' in this exhibition I
them Kenneth Martin's Composition a dark, liked very much Eric Ravillious's View From the
skill-less abstract painted with cheap oils and Cockpit of a Moth, the only one of his pictures
giving off an aura of rationing and gloom, and shown and the only genuinely cheerful one in
Barbara Hepworth's faintly repulsive studies of the gallery. He would have made a good
nurses, the over-all colour of which is a sort of futurist, he seems to have enjoyed the war.
yellowed flesh-tone, the figures standing about There is real delight in his picture of a speeding
like some idealization of the new National plane, whirring propeller pushing upwards
Health Service. In some cases hindsight is Michael Ayrton through perfect clouds, the frames of the plane
destructive, as for Michael Ayrton's Roman Roman Window 1949 gleaming in sunshine. One happy pilot alone
Window, the flabby-realist style of which has 5r x 3o in. with his noisy engine, and nothing but blue
been used for many years for different purposes Coll: Borough of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery skies.
in Mad magazine. Equally, it can't be helpful and he deals with it in a way which neither Down on the ground things seem a lot less
that both Harrods and the Bayswater Road ignores its scale nor imposes any kind of healthy. What can one say about those
have caught up with the aesthetic of Jankel Adler, prettiness on the horror. Equally, he resists the horrifying enormous canvases of Burra and
Joseph Herman, John Minton, Peter Lanyon, temptation to dramatize the subject. He has Spencer ? The obscenity and damage of their
to name, really, but a few. made a forceful image of death in the broken experience seems to have dragged them over
What contributes to the sense of shoddiness wings of the planes lit by a pale moon, and their own paintings, displaying their war-
in this exhibition is the feeling that so much of of ominousness in the image of quietly rolling wounds, showing them spluttering with rage.
what is happening to British painting in the mechanical debris on a sick-green sea. It is a They lose from this closeness the kind of
forties is due to a retreat from the experience of powerful painting partly because Nash is so control and articulateness which, for example,
war and an unwillingness to acknowledge the obviously not flinching from the unknown. He Bacon's horror pieces have. The feelings behind
epic in any form. The retreat shows itself not has a special ability to look at it full face, the paintings were never harnessed in the
only in the paintings of neo-romantics like
Craxton and Minton whose return to fairy tales
and Samuel Palmer seems coy and facile, but
also in those calm solid paintings of Coldstream
and Gowing, which seem to assert that they
know where their values lie, but which, in the
context of an exhibition dominated by a sense
of the common terror and deprivation of the
war years, seem curiously evasive. Even Piper's
scenes of war-damaged buildings have a fey
quality which seems to insist that it isn't really
happening, but even if it is there's really no
reason not to set up one's easel and paint it
nicely. Like his stage designs they seem to
indulge a taste for high tragedy, for the 'bare
ruin'd choirs', a taste which depends very much
on its all being make-believe.
This is not the case with Totes Meer, Paul
Nash's superb painting of German aeroplanes
wrecked in the Channel. Nash has found a way of
accepting war as something huge and terrifying,

Barbara Hepworth
The Hands 1948
x 2i f in.
Coll: City Art Gallery, Bristol
35