Page 39 - Studio International - September 1974

REFLECTIONS ON

CAROS ENGLISHNESS

JOSEPH MASHECK

That the most important trans-Atlantic artist England in 1844' (1845). Unhappily, much British sculpture, even before investigating
has for several years been an Englishman reflects English art criticism even now draws on more extrapolated parallels. To look, for
on the paled significance of Paris and raises sources contaminated by racism and class instance, art the lower part of Rysbrack's
questions of national identity. The fine arts have exploitation when it seeks to interpret advanced portrait statuette of Sir Anthony Van Dyck
social, but also national, connexions that are art to the visually illiterate gentry—even resorting (Victoria and Albert Museum) is to find
perhaps more urgent and inescapable than those to descriptions of the county where an artist was peculiarly similar concerns. Compare the
of literature. The question of whether Anthony born: Bryan Robertson is an unusually literate angling of the represented pedestal on the
Caro's art is specifically English has more to do offender. Englishness is not a question of blood actual base, the light but firm touch of toe to
with the substance and shape of the work itself revealed by dialect and accent; it is only real palette, the lean of the palette against a tube,
than it does for even Auden or T. S. Eliot. They, and only linguistic to the extent that it consists and the downward hang of a medallion against
of course, shared a common language, yet that of a shared body of tendencies in the noticing the incorporated base in the Rysbrack piece
situation itself is not as simple as it might seem. and description and arranging and making of (after a model of c. 1743). Such parallels can be

For the concept of national schools in art (Left) Rysbrack Sir Anthony van Dyck c.1743 found even outside sculpture and in work that
derives from a nineteenth-century nationalism Bronze, h.23+ in. is even more definitively English than this.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
that was highly racial and strongly attached to It would be possible to say that something
(Above) Caro LXI 1968
philological studies, beginning with Jakob and Steel painted brown, 23 x 45½ x 14 in. was 'as English as Hogarth'. Meier-Graefe, in
Wilhelm Grimm. The notion that a painting Private collection his 'Die grossen Englander' (1908) liked the way
was substantially and characteristically of the Photo: John Webb Hogarth's kindness modified his fully typical
`French School' derived from political things that otherwise would have been done Bulldoggenhaftigkeit. In Hogarth the narrative
geography via the concept of a racial Volk differently. bias that motivates the literariness of the
traceable by its language. In Italy and Germany The fine arts in this context behave British is met by a sense that a work of visual
philological nationalism served practical somewhat differently from literature, partly art is an enduring brevity. The literary element
political ends. The argument of cultural because they seem super-linguistic — an idea is so obviously strong in Hogarth's work that
(mostly literary) continuity between England with a history of its own that begins in artistic values often seem submerged beneath
and America tends to be political : in the United Romanticism. British art itself has not often it, so much so that to a foreigner an English
States it was always used by people who wanted been in a position to afford chauvinism, yet there defence of the art part only emphasizes this
to keep America exclusively white, Anglo- are peaks in the range of British art history, and further. Hogarth's plastic qualities took a long
Saxon and Protestant. features of Caro's work seem to me to relate time to strike me. Once they did, I still didn't
The emergence of socialism in the middle of significantly enough to some of them to like the implication that they might be playing
the last century helped to attract positive and establish that it is in itself English and not second fiddle to a vulgar, quasi-temporal
negative attention to the bourgeois exploitation Anglo-American or somehow nondescript. `interestingness' — in complexities that seem to
of national feeling as a decoy for class Take for example the steel table piece from take narrative time in the unravelling. Perhaps,
consciousness. It is significant, in this light, 1968 numbered LXI. Its approach to the oddly, it was Caro's work that opened Hogarth
that Engels praised British workers for their corners and surfaces of the supporting table — its to me as a skilled plastic composer.
lack of chauvinism in the preface, titled 'To the extension over and below and its grazing of them Hogarth's Shortly After the Marriage, in the
Working Classes of Great-Britain', of his book and its accommodation of sculptural construction National Gallery, belongs to the series
`The Condition of the Working Class in to their prosaic reality — can be found in earlier Marriage a la Mode (c.1743). In this picture I am

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