Page 18 - Studio International - January February 1975

Beatle salutes Harold Wilson and for the Glories of Greece and reading, although he never fails, in my
Equally it is no good muttering in the Rome." opinion, to dissipate the impact of his
corner, complaining of not being wanted Within that spirit, the Royal Academy own arguments by combining such a
any more. Nor retiring wilfully into self- was founded. Reynolds, in his first body of separated issues that each has the
pity, storing up our gifts in heaven. The discourse, outlined its aims : 'To bring effect of neutralizing the other. Perhaps I
moral : Beware of the past breathing down our country into glorious pre-eminence should say here that I have never been
our necks. Be wary of the present. And amongst the great civilized nations of the an admirer of that kind of English art
be aware of the future life of art. The world, to foster a breed of giants .. . and that hovers uncertainly between
demands it makes of ourselves and our so to act upon the genius of the nation naturalism and abstraction. Is it a girl's
resources not to be compromised or that the present age may vie in arts with thigh or a hillside in St Ives ? A head or
contained. To live our inner life that of Leo the Tenth." an interior ? Now you see it-now you
outwardly, not with solitude and stealth, A lofty tone, whose folie de grandeur don't. With a touch from here and a
but fully - in the midst of life where art matched the imperious mood of the touch from there; the bric-a-brac of no-
belongs. state. When the Royal Academy was man's-land, rendered with such fluency in
founded we were still an agricultural English art, has always rather endeared
The idea that there is not a natural nation. Through the industrial itself to the English art establishment.
place for art within our culture is not a revolution, and all that followed - from Its soul, it is thought, reposes there.
new one in this country. It lies deep the rural community to the urban society Heron's appeal is for wider recognition
within the instincts of the state, and has - its function as an instrument of the of one aspect of that particular
done so for a hundred and fifty years. One state remained. So that, even now, a English achievement, backed up by
writer says of England in the eighteenth major political policy statement can be claims that much that happened in New
century that there was strangely no delivered at its annual dinner by the York first happened in St Ives. A kind of
development, no burgeoning of a culture Prime Minister of the day. The pursuit of argument that can go on for ever, and one
which could compare with France, cultural aggrandizement embodied in its that seldom rouses me. But Heron's
Holland and Italy. 'Certainly', he says, founding finds, in our our time, an echo. pieces do contain gems of insight and
`the aristocracy had little confidence in Not here, but in New York. recall for those who care to find them.
their country's culture. They bought the And I have always admired his vigilance
majority of their pictures in Italy and This brings us briefly but unavoidably and consistency in fighting the good
France . . . Their furniture was French, to what might be called the Greenberg fight, with eloquence and dash, against
their houses designed according to the syndrome and the Heron effect. At the what he calls a kind of cultural
principles of Italian masters, their climax of the recent general election, for imperialism practised on the other side of
decoration largely the work of foreign three successive days in The Guardian the Atlantic. And the arch-villain of its
artists. The eighteenth-century Patrick Heron pronounced upon the propagation - the critic Clement
Englishman', he adds, 'possessed little relative condition of art here and in Greenberg.
faith in the artistic achievements of his New York." For a nation that traditionally yields
own country, cherishing an excessive Patrick Heron's public such a swift turnover of political
respect for the art of France and Italy, pronouncements are always worth leadership, the Greenberg ethic has
8