Painting
REALISM AND ABSTRACTION
Two important exhibitions have brought into view the Scylla and Charybdis of present art criticism—Tour French Realists' at the Tate, and a retrospective show devoted to that most self-denying of abstract painters, Piet Mon- driaan, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In two connected articles I want to consider not just the work in question but the current argu- ments about Realism and Abstraction. I make no ,excuse for following this course in a country where the word is liable to be more influential than the picture.
Realism has once had a meaning, if a limited meaning, in the history of art — as Courbet used it in the 1850s; now it is nothing but a catchword, a banner, and the addition of New or Noo- does not make it any clearer. The most that can be said of these so-called Realists in France or England is that their work is not abstract, nor do they use any of the various mutations of Cubism. The word is particularly employed by Marxist critics and by those who have never been happy with the distinctive art of the past fifty years, who would have preferred a continued prolonga- tion of the aims and methods of the nineteenth century. The use of the word has reached its latest absurdity in a publisher's advertise- ment referring to Sr. Annigoni as the leader of a return to Realism. John Berger has recently identified a threefold hierarchy. It descends from SOCIALIST REALISM ('the artist must be militantly aware of the social im- plications of what he is doing . . . ideas of striving and achievement will be stressed in his work') through Social Realism (which has clear 'social implications') to Realism, which means that artists should 'feel deeply about what they observe in the actual world, but never let their feelings about what they would like to see obliterate what they know to be true . . . in their selection of what they choose to describe about one case, they try to discover those facts which are typical of many others.' For such a definition to'have any significance or clarity there must obviously be a general agreement, voluntary or enforced, about what is known to be true; otherwise all one is describing is the difference between work which represents the artist's serious con- victions and that which does not. Indeed, the most important dilemma for the Marxist artist or critic living in societies which do not have to submit to a totalitarian control over ideas is just the freedom to disagree about reality. Mr. Berger finds that for the painters he admires here and calls Realists — Jack Smith, for example, Greaves or Middleditch- 'militancy is outside their experience.' Is it not possible that it may indeed be within their experience, but that they have chosen to reject it?
Quentin Bell, who has been responsible for selecting the work on view at the Tate, is clearly pleased that the pictures do not display the horror, squalor and violence of Mr. Berger's proteges, and he writes of M. Andre Minaux's earlier pictures of butchers'-shop themes as avoiding 'the beastliness of the scene,' as having a 'wise and affectionate understanding of forms.' He would, I imagine, pr4er to dissociate Realism altogether from political theory. Having called these four French artists Realists—the others are Ginette Rapp, Roger Montane and Jean Vinay—he spends the first page of his catalogue intro- duction hedging us about with qualifications and ambiguities. It is 'convenient, but not strictly accurate, to call these painters Realists. They have sometimes called themselves Ex- pressionists.' (Could that mean that they have let their feelings about what they see obliter- ate what they know the objects not to be in physical structure? In so doing, are they ceasing to be good painters, or are they merely ceasing to be Realists in Mr. Berger's defini- tion of the word?) They are representative of a tendency amongst the younger French painters to return to nature and to a much more rigorous acceptance of her disciplines. We are back among the high - sounding phrases. What is meant by a return to nature? Is it a study' of nature?—and one may, like Klee, study nature before embarking upon work which is wholly symbolic. Or is it the representation of nature according to a par- ticular pictorial language? And should one study nature with the scientific, anatomising eye and hand of a Leonardo or a Stubbs, or with the different inquisitiveness of a Cezanne, with the humility we find in Corot or the romantic energy of a Turner? And what are the disciplines of nature?
The pictures at the Tate do, some of them, conform to the qualities identified by John Berger as being characteristic of their English contemporaries. Some of them are defiantly large. They are neither murals nor are they suited to the houses.of any but the rich. They are museum pieces, and in that they resemble Gefricault's Raft of the Medusa or Courbet's Burial at Ornans, which more than a century ago asserted that modern subjects might be treated on a monumental scale. And it seems worth remembering that no amount of good intentions will make the value of a painting dppend more upon the size of the canvas than upon the quality of the performance. The paint is put on with a defiant roughness which does not alter much with the scale of the picture, and which is just as liable to be an obstacle to the realisation of objects as paint which is assertively 'sensitive.' Ginette Rapp has taken over from Courbet rather too uncritically that painter's very personal method of knife-painting in the treatment of rocks and vegetation, so that while the underlying structure of her landscape has some existence of her own seeing and forming, the surface of things seems false. Roger Montane disposes giant figures in picturesque townscapes; they are reminiscent of certain swollen sculptures of the Twenties, and the conventions are sometimes cheap, sometimes sentimental. Jean Vinay is the least ambitious and defiant of these artists. He has, eve are told, been encouraged by Marquet, and his paintings of Paris streets and waterways are laid out with the deliberate simplicity of that painter. The textures of his paint are more flexible, reminis- cent of Utrillo, whose calm appreciation of empty vistas and architectural surfaces he repeats. His work is marked by those artifices, such as his habit of tilting horizontal, receding planes towards the spectator, which enable a slender but charming talent to give his paint- ing a certain firmness and eloquence. But Minaux is outstandingly the most impressive painter of the four, and his large picture, Dans mon Jardin, is undeniably a serious and successful achievement. In this large picture the objects in the landscape and his own essential talents seem to have broken through the over-calculated clumsiness and gaucherie of the rest. Here he seems to be painting naturally, without making a demonstration of that Brando - like sullenness and toughness which appears to infect the medley of painters, here and in France, who suffer under the uncertain label of Realism.
BASIL TAYLOR
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