Exhibitions
Sidney Nolan (Waddington Galleries, till 25 February) Edith Granger-Taylor (Gillian Jason Gallery, till 3 March) Sadiq (New Art Centre, till 11 February)
Fame and fortuity
Giles Auty
In Munich last week, one of the more Misguided assumptions affecting our con- temporary culture was brought home to me forcibly when talking with a German artist. Simply because this retiring, erudite and religious man paints his still-lifes, portraits and figure studies in a traditional, realistic manner, he has been characterised by one of the more influential figures in German art as a dangerous promoter of neo-Nazi values. The warped logic behind this unjus- tified assumption may be unfamiliar to You, although I have met it before. Its backbone runs thus: realistic = reactionary "---, right-wing = neo-Nazi.
Forty-four years after the event there remains an extreme and justified sensitivity in Western Germany about the history of their culture under Hitler's rule. But this does not begin to justify the kind of finger-pointing I have mentioned, which reflects no credit on what purports to be a civilised country. Since the time of West Germany's economic boom in the late fifties, that nation has led Europe in the Promotion and consumption of avant- garde art, laying claim to many hectares of Moral high ground in the process. Not surprisingly a great deal of extreme and vacuous art has been encouraged by these hothouse conditions. Periodically we get a backwash from this in Britain. No one denies that Hitler favoured his strange brand of neo-classical realism in art and architecture but so, it might be argued, did the leaders of the French Revolution. The experience I have quoted of the German artist suggests to me that Western art has become increasingly dominated today by those steeped from birth in a thoughtless
rhetoric of radicalism. The glazed eyes and intolerant attitudes of some of West Ger- many's new artistic liberals seem oddly reminiscent of those witnessed formerly at the Nuremberg rallies.
I have prefaced this week's reviews in this manner to prompt a little thought about the often unreasonable way vari- ables of where and when can affect an artist's hopes of exposure or acclaim. While an artist of talent may be suppressed or overlooked in one country, another profits from popping up seemingly at just the right time and place. For instance, would Sidney Nolan have become an inter- national artist of acclaim if he had been born in some country other than Australia? I do not seek to disparage an agreeable and talented man by asking this, but cannot help thinking how well the brash informal- ity of Nolan's post-war style suited the subject matter that made him famous: the Australian outback and the beatification of Australia's archetypal rebel, folk hero and pommy-basher, Ned Kelly. The current exhibitions of oil paintings and graphics at Waddington Galleries (2 & 34 Cork Street, W1) suggest that Nolan becomes less assured when removed from his familiar Antipodean terrain; an African landscape of 1962 is resolved much less successfully than one from Tasmania in 1975. The access to European art enjoyed by young Australian artists before, during and im- mediately after the second world war was limited at best. This, more than anything, explains why an art of such distinctive national character emerged there, rather than more of the half-baked pastiches of Picasso which flourished more or less everywhere else. Being born in a particular time and place, even more than innate ability, assisted Nolan's rise to internation- al stardom.
While the phenomenon of quite a num- ber of Australian artists who seem to me to have been promoted beyond their abilities illustrates one of the parts played by accidents of birth, there is almost equal fascination in the role of fate in artistic occlusion, or even in total neglect. I do not propose Edith Granger-Taylor (1887-1958) as an artist of first-rank importance, but she was certainly a gifted and highly individual practitioner and ought not to be forgotten. Yet the present exhibition at Gillian Jason Gallery (42 Inverness Street, NW1) is the first time her idiosyncratic pastels and paintings have been seen in public since the time of her death 31 years ago. The artist studied at a number of art schools including the Slade, where Tonks complimented her on her skills with pastel. This ability is demonstrated fully in a most remarkable self-portrait, but the more typical works are allegorical figure studies, including a nine-foot-high painting which was hung as the centrepiece of the National Society of Painters and Sculptors exhibi- tion in 1935. The artist was an early campaigner for greater recognition of the rights of women artists, a cause she pro- moted largely through humour and irony — in marked contrast to her counterparts of today.
A fortnight ago I was asked to make a short comment on television about Sadiq, an unusual sculptor from the Indian sub- continent. In 1982 the artist won a scho- larship for post-graduate study at the 'Romantic Landscape', c. 1939, by Edith Granger-Taylor Slade. He has battled away since then, with rare perseverance, to make bronze castings of animals more familiar in Eastern ico- nography than in our own. An elephant decorated with moons is one of the artist's wonderful emblems for the oneness of the universe. Sadiq is virtually unknown here, yet the serenity and kindness which in- forms his work distinguishes it immediately from most of today's occidental sculpture. In Britain, the work hits one like a gust of fresh air, yet within his own culture it would probably be perceived as blasphe- mous. Although the show ends officially this week, the New Art Centre (41 Sloane Street, SW1) intends to retain samples of the work on the premises.
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