Page 82 - Studio International - January February 1975

Homer painted forests inhabited include two versions of Saved The dark, in shadow, foreground inscribed titles in French
by small boys and itinerant (The Life Line) of which the one in the series of paintings of girls in indicating states of love and
trappers. The sea became a exhibited here is the first and a garden, secures not just friendship instead of real names
recurring subject, for with its smaller version. It depicts a nearness but also the ground or values. Other works entitled
massive indifference to culture, woman grasped in the arms of a itself. Haystacks and Children is Mangiare are on an Italian theme
history and the frailty of our man suspended above a wild sea. basically tonal until the end when and represent Gastronomic
bodies, it presents nature as a A life-line traverses the etching seven or eight thick light warm Landscapes as well as paintings of
permanent undifferentiating and from its pulley hangs a cradle highlights jar with the rest of the different varieties of fruit. Other
force against which men can upon which the two bodies weigh. painting. These unexpected stamps from the fantastic
temporarily redefine themselves. The rescuer's face is covered by daubs of light from a setting sun country of `Nadorp' show early
Setting a Squirrel Trap 1855, a a blown scarf and their clothes detach themselves from their aeroplanes and Zeppelins as well
drawing with washes, is the first writhe together in the gale. The allotted places asserting as a Royal Nadorp Potato Peelers
example of Homer's work in this picture mingles a mad sea with the themselves as light and paint. Association Souvenir Sheet.
exhibition. It depicts three boys erotic. This equates extreme However, it is a prudently-made Donald Evans gives each work
on some rocks in a wood. In this sexuality with the role of the sea painting which never confuses an imaginary but suitable date.
early work the light is explained as a self discoverer. There is no the icing with the cake and saves Some stamps are cancelled or
piecemeal as if he was unaware of clear eye-level to the etching and the icing till last. obliterated with his own hand-
of the totality of the picture. the viewer too seems uncertainly Andrew Brighton carved rubber blocks while others
This is the very opposite of the suspended above the flux. are overprinted to conform to
characteristic that Henry James Under capitalism most men are DONALD EVANS the total development of the
picked out in a review of 1875, cut off from necessity. There are At the Hester van Royen Gallery original concept. The paintings
`Mr. Homer has the great merit .. vast areas of vacuous liberty in London. are literate and witty comments
that he naturally sees everything which no force forbids or December-January upon different languages; they
at one with its envelope of light demands. For the mass of men This exhibition, entitled are also autobiographical as they
and air'. This change of space was there is only fashion and `Stamps of The World', transcends show one man's refined Swiftian
necessary for Homer's subjects; meaningless work. So men dream many current movements in vision of a personal world.
it was imminent in his content. of the extreme where with contemporary painting by Evans, although born in America,
In the Civil War sketches in this `a leap and a bound' they might illustrating a fantasy world in lives and works in Amsterdam,
exhibition soldiers absorbed in be men again. Homer depicts the miniature for which the artist hence the Dutch linguistics.
actions are usually described in extremes in his paintings of sea has painted his own stamps in Other works reveal his interest
terms of light but without a and forests. But it appears from watercolours. At first sight, in early aircraft, while the French
context, without place or time. this exhibition that he never Donald Evans's Lilliputian and Italian series record visits to
After the Civil War Homer had casts off from convention. The paintings appear to be real France and Italy. The catalogue
acquired an appropriate form myth that man can make himself postage stamps which have been records the artist's total number
of plastic coherence for his outside society is one that Homer skilfully mounted and presented of 2000 stamps painted over the
content; as the drawings here evokes but does not apply to his as conceptual works of art. A last three years.
show, he places people in a art. Art itself for him is not such closer inspection then reveals Paul William White
particular place in a particular an activity. Only in a few of the that the stamps are small, highly
light. In 1866 Homer spent later works in this exhibition realistic and individual DONALD McGILL
ten months in Paris. The degree is it suggested that Homer might watercolours, expertly and At the Cartoon Originals Ltd.,
and kind of influence on Homer risk incoherence. In the meticulously painted, and London.
of Manet, Monet and Japanese watercolour The Gulf Stream the perforations around the November
prints is a question of art 1898/99, a study for the painting edges form part of a skilful If by Kitsch is meant ersatz
historical debate. It would seem of the same name, the water- illusion. high art, then this exhibition is an
more interesting to ask why, in colour itself starts to break like attempt to turn popular art into
such a comparatively short time, the sea. The white foam of the kitsch. The exhibition is of a
a provincial painter could grasp waves is given by the white left hundred and seventy of Donald
some of the essentials of models from the removal of the top skin McGill's original gouache
who many sophisticated Europeans of the paper. In Valley and Hillside designs for comic postcards and
found disordered and arbitrary. 1890/95 the central band of blue a selection of the actual postcards,
As historical and social and the orange-red distant trees Donald Evans not for sale, which are displayed
actuality killed the dream of break out of the pencilled good Nadorp 1931 Zeppelin visit to Adelshoeve in the basement of the gallery.
America as a uniquely free sense of the underlying drawing. 1979 It is not a selection of originals of
society in which Man would make Most of the watercolours in The idea of hand-painted outstanding McGills; for instance
himself, unmolested by the this exhibition are based on linear stamps - for which Evans has none of the original designs of
accretions of a feudal past, drawing and the oil paintings on a created his own postmarks, cards selected for reproduction in
America turned its democratic traditional tonality. Homer's work names for the imaginary Arthur Calder Marshall's
dream into a nostalgic myth. In a seems to develop through countries and a wide range of Wish You Were Here is in the
capitalist society the most synthesis, he does not cut himself images-seems incredible. But the exhibition. However, the excellent
powerful myths are presented off from his illustration days to artist, originally trained as an selection of postcards in the
through naturalism. Homer take up the exploratory dream of architect, has the wit, discipline basement includes many of the
found the appropriate pictorial great art. Unlike Turner, one is and subtlety to carry his original Calder Marshall selection and
space to re-represent America to always sure of one's ground, that idea to its conclusion in a many more besides. It is of some
itself. is, of the horizontal. The phenomenal way. His skill as a interest to see the originals but
Homer said of Bouguereau: conventional and the horizontal painter involves the viewer in an they are in no way superior to the
`You get composition, but you are played against in Homer's invented world which seems to cards. Indeed McGill's dull but
lose freshness,' the early wood engravings by the cross the barriers between competent outlines become
inconsequentials which it is directions of people's glances fantasy and reality, especially as sharper when reduced in size in
necessary to recall in order to across and through the picture. the miniature paintings are the postcards. His skill as a
enter the picture at all. (See The Wood Engravings of sometimes mounted on a real draughtsman lay precisely in
A little girl stares out from a hot Winslow Homer, ed. Barbara postcard or on an envelope making originals Jim reproduction.
summer's day in the 1870s in Gelman, New York, 1969.) He carrying a real Express sticker or McGill's mastery lay in the
Two Girls with Sun Bonnets. This does not give this up; rather as his painted as a sheet of stamps. The imaginative use of the conventions
photographic quality of a whole space becomes more substantial artist has in fact used a full of the postcard to thicken the
moment, like a memory that is so it becomes decisive. In the study vocabulary of philatelic methods verbal joke in the caption. Most
strong that we forget the present, for the painting The Herring Net while revealing a detailed of the cards have a framing line
gives some of the people he the axis is the bottom of the boat imaginary world to the viewer. around the picture. Sometimes
depicts a poignancy reminiscent at which the fishermen look but The images range from this is broken. In I'm Coming
of Matthew Brady's Civil War the viewer cannot see. In landscape to still life and Home by Rocket a gargantuan
photographs. But just as Brady's Mountain River the receding vista portraiture. Thirty-six identical stick of seaside rock, clasped
photographs and Homer's own of the river is partially given us by portraits of a girl are mounted between the arms and thighs of a
Civil War sketches do not explain the boy who sits in the middle of in a geometrical pattern bikinied young woman, thrusts
war, so a rustic myth diverts the picture, his back to us, revealing a spectrum in colour up out of the top of the picture
social criticism. It offers us self- seeming to stare into the distance. while each stamp's increase in and penetrates into the framing
forgetfulness, not understanding; The discovery of a space into value is sub-titled in Dutch. blue line. Alternatively the
past, not history. which one can move was central Another work, entitled Amis and configuration floats within the
Homer made eight etchings to Homer's development. His Amants, reveals small, window- line in a white or lightly coloured
between 1883 and 1889, during space, however, extends from a like views of an imaginary background, as in the card of the
the 'etching craze'. The eight firmly established foreground. archipelago of islands with generously bosomed and
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