Page 59 - Studio International - September 1973

RECENT bummer. However, one can't quarrel
depends on being polished is a
too much with the fact that this is a
LONDON famous work, even if certainly not a
major one, and that it 'fills a gap' in
the collection. When a collection
SHOWS becomes wide enough for the notion
of gaps to be relevant, then you're
right into art history. I wish the
Summer Show at the Marlborough, Marlborough were more sensitive
London, 16 June-7 September towards their presentation of the
The Marlborough Summer Shows are history, for the pictures deserve it.
so famous, and so regal in atmosphere, The purchase for £3.50 of the
that one feels a faint obligation to catalogue will help you keep the
curtsey. Every year the newspaper wolf from getting out. In reality it is a
critics (fools) dutifully do so, and say souvenir. Every work is reproduced in
that the experience is like being colour but the cataloguing is
in the Tate. They mean this as an desultory in the extreme. I don't
accolade. But that's just what the suppose they care. But by terrorism
trouble is. As with some sales, these if necessary, the Enemies of
summer events force upon one the Inscrutability must prevail. I laugh
reflection that we are bedevilled by when I read in the papers of certain
the loose idea of 'museum quality' in Marlborough works as being of 'more Fernand Leger L'Aviateur 1920
the kind of individual pictures one than mere art-historical interest'.
gets at the Marlborough. The phrase Nature of laughter : mirthless. This
is unacceptable either as a median year's Signac of the Port of St Tropez Studio) is not Matisse at his utmost Magritte's oeuvre in that it contains no
(what would 'above museum might not quite attain that ineffable best during the years in Nice, but is a enigma or pun. Beneath a tree full of
quality' mean ?) or as an ideal. It is a category. It is an attempt to combine marvellously complicated work. The birds a young woman devours one
function of museums to buy relatively neo-impressionism with a good lower third is a table, with an urgently she has just caught. It has hardly
bad paintings (the Tate's poverty has old-fashioned luminism. It's from striped cloth on it, the striations stopped fluttering, blood is
made them all too skilful at this), and 1898, and Signac was still suffering going in different planar directions : everywhere. It is a painting that
there are, in this exhibition, paintings from a craze for Ruskin and Turner at on that is the still life ; above and would grace the home of a certain
which are no good but will doubtless that time. The foreground props are behind are two wallpaper patterns, a British artist known for his peculiar
go to institutions : the Munch, for more Turnerian than Claudeian, and carpet pattern, a gramophone, a eating habits. I can think of no other
instance. What is needling in these so is the attempt at a rush of pink-to- windowscape, a curtain, and a mirror use for it, though perhaps it shows
exhibitions is the way in which they madder cirrus. I called for madder in which can be seen the reflection of that the young Magritte felt that his
dramatize what a gap there is between cirrus, stronger wine. A central pool the artist above a bunch of flowers. art had to be asserted by extreme
the superlative, like this year's of light like this is extremely rare in It's a cornucopia of Matisseisms, rather than paradoxical subject matter,
Cezanne, and the merely expensive. neo-impressionist seascape and brilliant and thrilling, but perhaps too and that the surrealist climate
Since the Marlborough has no landscape, and perhaps was not much a cornucopia. The riviera is not encouraged this.
aesthetic intention apart from that workable in terms of the style, which what it was, and when it was it wasn't
determined by the market one finds would need to be careful of a then either. This thought is prompted Max Ernst's painting Pieta ou la
here a peculiar mixture of quality, of centralized iridescence. The ground by the provenance of the huge Picasso Revolution /a Nuit has more of
art-historical curiosity, and rubbish. in neo-impressionist seascapes is of 1918, Homme Accoudé sur un the signs of an artist who had been
usually inserted from the side in an Table, which belonged to Madame painting independently for some
The Tate has bought Brancusi's off-balanced way. Little wonder that Errazuriz : she was the woman who fifteen years and who, pictorially and
Maiastra from this year's exhibition. Signac so appreciated Luxe, Calme introduced Picasso to the high life of culturally, was always more clever
It is a quite rivetingly unappealing et Volupté, which Matisse began when Biarritz just after the Kaiser's war. One and inventive with his clichés. Behind
piece when you come to look at it. staying with him at St Tropez three would like to have seen this work in the picture may be Philippe Ernst's
It's often been made to appear better years later. But if Matisse saw this Dr Golding's Leger and Purism Portrait of his Son Max as the Christ
by low-angled photography which picture then, he would have felt how exhibition ; it's a high point of late Child (1896), since in Ernst the
stresses spurious reasons for it was mistaken. The 1924 Matisse at synthetic cubism. It's hardly readable mock-religious is generally doubled
appreciating it : all the soaring and the Marlborough (catalogued without as figurative, and feels more like a with his own parental/filial hang-ups.
aspirational connotations. It is of a provenance and with a different still-life made grand by engineering. There were good things by Bonnard.
course one of the deep and immutable title from the one we are used to from In subsequent years, I fancy, Braque, Gris and Schwitters ;
laws of art that any sculpture which Barr's monograph, Still Life in the Picasso was in trouble with still-lifes pleasant things by Boudin, Klee,
because he could not, as Leger could, Berthe, Morisot and Nicolson ; and
make an olympian and classical art bad things by Bacon, Chagall,
without recourse to the ennoblement Giacometti, Kitaj, Munch, Picasso,
of the human figure. One of the Rouault, Sutherland, Utrillo. It is
colossal maternities of those years is distressing for the visitor, and one
catalogued but was not in the show trusts embarrassing for the artist, to
shortly after the opening. Leger hang certain works by living British
appears well, with a significant version members of the Marlborough stable
of L'Aviateur and a good big still-life on the same walls as the Cezanne and
of 1937 whose components are not the Monet. Their only recourse — in
particularisable, though they are itself a constant component of the
recognized as coming from the sea. Marlborough's vulgarity — is to plump
That starfish shape is a good one for out into a plushy grandeur. The
shape historians: it's here, it's in one gallery is altogether too bland in
of the preliminary drawings for mixing a taste for pomp with real
Guernica, and it's in Gottleib, Baziotes, quality. One suspects that they feel
Pollock. It's odd how much art got they are putting the art before the
from Europe to America in a submarine. coarse, and that's that, while
potential purchasers are a different
Two surrealist pictures are of interest. matter. I can see that this is a fact of
Margritte's Le Plaisir is of 1926, thus commercial life, but it doesn't make
a very early painting, before his first for a good exhibition. Good
exhibition in Brussels (but was it paintings are facts of a quite different
shown there, cataloguer?), before he type of life. q
Paul Signac, Le Port de St Tropez 1901 visited Paris. It is exceptional in TIM HILTON
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