Page 64 - Studio International - June 1973

Review
etc.) and his way of spotlighting the effect of figurations in the inner frames. Again, the scale
fashion on words or architecture, as with the differences seem to be part of some signifying.
1972 photographs of cacti entitled Coloured As in Byzantine frescoes they seem to indicate
People. His art comments upon the ever present a hierarchy of ideas and values. The whole
superficiality that positions art genres on the effect is bizarre, a double impression of the
scale of acceptability. meaningless and meaningful, a foreign
Alan Davie has perhaps made the greatest language in which we can faintly perceive the
strides in the last two years by way of an workings of some grammar.
improved spatial organization, a kind of What Kandinsky does in these later paintings
pictorial furniture around which to arrange his with ambiguously signifying shapes he does
archetypal images. He thereby creates in each elsewhere and throughout with tones of colour,
painting an incantatory realm, an environment and with different perspectives. He plays on
for the interaction of magical images. It seems an expectation of the way a painting is to be
to have been the experience of designing a approached, and systematically violates that
Alan Davie expectation. He does this early on. Both in the
Serpent Swallows the Fairy Tree 2 1971 children's wall for Berlin that put Davie onto
painting in folding screens, the corner of a room, 1916 untitled watercolour (exhibition number
large cubes and so forth. In 1970 his 9) and in the 1918 untitled water-colour
compositions were rather like pictograms in (exhibition number I I), he manages to suggest
delicately handled with an eye to bringing out which schematic symbols, such as his favourite several perspectives at once. Extraordinarily in
textures by rubbing tools, and detail by some Egyptian ankh or scarab, the checkerboard or works of abstraction, it is as though we are
handpainting. One expects Rauschenberg to be Celtic jewel, were plastered on a flat picture looking at some image from above, as well as
more imaginative, more 'consistently inventive' surface. One's intuitive reactions were head on. The 1916 watercolour even induces a
as prophesied by Henry Geldzahler at the time hampered by the pedantic format, especially in slight vertigo. The images seem to be slipping
of the exhibition at the Whitechapel nine years the overcrowded decorative examples like off a globe, at the same time that they act upon
ago. Reports from New York on his heavyweight Sorcerer's Wall No. z (1969). a two-dimensional flatness. At once they
constructions (made of old bathtubs and chairs) Apart from a changed structure in his present a side-view and a top-view, a view from
at Leo Castelli's downtown gallery suggest painting, the works at Gimpel Fils contained outside and a view from within a bizarre
Rauschenberg wants to remind the younger less obtrusive black outlines, purer velvety gravityless world.
generation what they owe to his assemblages of colours and touches of painterly effusion (like This element of the bizarre is characteristic
the 195os. confetti-filled clouds), all of which conveyed the of Kandinsky and it is an effect he strove for
With a bit of false modesty Ed Ruscha still feeling of metamorphosis, reincarnation, and so throughout his work, hoping to recreate the
uses the subtitle 'young artist' despite the forth which Davie so eloquently communicates. mysterious and the 'spiritual' in his art. In his
enormous output and exposure over the In fact Davie's remarks at his own Whitechapel autobiographical essay 'Reminiscences',
last ten years. He has now returned to flat, show fifteen years ago about the futility of Kandinsky described a technique which he
italicized letters with exaggerated serifs but painting for the sake of producing a work of art used in three or four pictures and later
reborn in moist-looking oil paint. Once again seem worth remembering at a time when abandoned, but his description does recreate
Ruscha thinks of objectifying words by placing society equates a new twist with a new direction the experience of looking at his pictures : 'I
them against an atmospheric background; in with a genuine aesthetic breakthrough.q wished to bury in each part an "infinite"
this instance the two-tone grounds were CATHERINE LAMPERT number of initially hidden colour tones. They
divided midway by a line which bisected the had to remain completely hidden at first
letters which themselves were left in untouched (especially in the dark part), and only as time
primed canvas. In addition there occurred KANDINSKY AT THE LEFEVRE GALLERY, went on to show themselves, at first unclearly
unnerving retinal effects between the sombre 12 APRIL — 19 MAY and tentatively to the studiously attentive
highly-saturated tertiary colours which carried There have been exceptionally few exhibitions viewer, then resound more and more with an
strong associations — tomato red, chocolate to of Kandinsky in this country. The recent one increasingly "mysterious" power.'
raisin brown, dusty yellow and hospital green. I at the Lefevre Gallery was the first since his This revelatory quality which the giving way
suspect that the combination of institutional death in 1944. As with any show of his work, of one layer of imagery to another produces
hues, two-tone panels which reminded one of it was a tribute to a great artist. also provides a kind of narrative element in
office corridors and Girl Guide-sounding words The exhibition was of thirty-three works, his work. They get read, explored, experienced
like 'Purity', 'Merry' and 'Faith' belongs to a mostly water-colours, done between 1915 and in a way that is usual in music or film or
calculated forties nostalgia. 1940. They exemplify most of his post-fauvist literature, over a length of time which is
This would explain the similarity between the styles, from the earliest with its traces of bio- ensured by the structure of the paintings. They
recent catalogue of Ruscha's life and works morphism, through his constructivist phase also have a dramatic force which is
published by the Minneapolis Institute of Art to the later decorative (in a non-perjorative special to them. The colours all have their
and a typical scrapbook of a post-war adolescent. sense) and almost hieroglyphic style, of which, characters, the lines of force create a
The catalogue consists of photographs of the here, the strange, 1934 and 1943 Division-Unity situation for them to reveal these characters,
artist and his West Coast buddies followed by a are good examples. Typically, a strange the weighting and balance of the picture sets
chronological list of drawing titles which reads figuration has been set down. Like some up the scene of the drama. The characters
like beatnik poetry; everything printed on oriental ideography it suggests a definite code exist in relation one to the other, and the
schooldays manilla paper. Though one could while at the same time remaining impenetrably theatre proceeds from this. By layering his
question the psychological motivation for the foreign. The picture has, too, a decorative `characters', hiding some behind others, the
romantic self-documentation of a youngish element in the repeated primitive designs that drama progresses. Eventually it is resolved.
American artist, it sometimes leads to rather half-border the lower right hand corner and the Kandinsky spoke more clearly of this drama in
subtle and perceptive visual statements. top left. And there is evidence of Kandinsky's a musical analogy: 'The strife of colours,
Ruscha's originality lies in many directions; for Bauhaus experience in the breaking up of the the sense of balance we have lost, tottering
example, his nonplussed way of drawing with picture into frames, here used, however, to principles, unexpected assaults, great questions,
untraditional materials (ivy, gunpowder, blood, emphasize a difference in scale between the apparently useless striving, storm and tempest,
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