IS BRITAIN FINISHED ?-17

Visible Export

By M. H. MIDDLETON ASOCIETY portrait painter reached the headlines just before Christmas by saying at a public luncheon that British art was being discredited in the eyes of the world. The occasion was unfortunate, because it coincided with the news that Henry Moore had won the major sculpture prize at the Sao Paolo Biennial. The truth is that during the past two decades—during the last five years even—British art has achieved standing in the world for the first time since Constable. Something so intangible as a change in artistic opinion .is hard to pin down, however real. It is something in the air, in men's minds. It is something which is revealed when one hears that a French dealer has been buying Ben Nicholsons, or when- Art d'Aujourd'hui devotes a whole issue to contem- porary British painting and sculpture. Or when, in Amsterdam, 200 assembled critics cheer the mere title of the BBC's television film on Henry Moore.

One means by which such things can be judged is the inter- national competition, or the awarding of prizes at the really important international exhibitions. Another is the extent to which foreign countries desire to receive exhibitions of British painting and sculpture, the numbers in which they turn up to see such exhibitions when they get them, and the things they say about them in their newspapers and periodicals. A third is the extent to which contemporary British work is purchased- for public and private collections abroad. No coherent picture can be attempted, but here are one or two facts and figures. First, exhibitions. Work by Henry. Moore has been shown since the war in 43 cities and 15 overseas countries (in all continents save Asia), besides numerous mixed and dealers' exhibitions. At the Muscle d'Art Moderne in Paris he drew higher attendance figures than any other living artist, including those born and resident in France like Matisse and Ldger. In Athens his exhibition was visited by 34,000 people in 18 days (the figures were in fact higher, but at peak periods the telling system collapsed). To Graham Sutherland fell the distinction of being the youngest artist ever honoured by an exhibition at the Muscle d'Art Moderne, and once again the attendants were swamped by the crowd of 1,600 at the official opening. Inevitably, as our best-known artists, Moore and Sutherland tend to dominate any such survey as this. They are but the spearhead, however, of a movement which appears steadily to be widening. No international exhibition of sculpture, it seems, can now take place without representing the British School. At Hamburg, Middelheim (Antwerp), Sonsbeek and Varese, for example, were included works by Adams, Armitage, Butler, Chadwick, Dobson, Epstein, Hepworth, McWilliam, Meadows and Paolozzi in addition to those by Moore (and indeed the very idea of the open-air sculpture exhibition which these represent was taken from Battersea). In painting the field widens to an extent which makes it almost impossible to particularise. It stretches from Nicholson in Tokyo, where a very high proportion of his work was sold, to Keith Vaughan in Buenos Aires, where nearly 5,000 people visited his exhibi- tion in two weeks. Some 100 living artists have been shown by the British Council in its exhibitions since 1951', and of the multitudinous dea!ers' shows there can be no proper record (in New York particularly the'dealers exhibit British painters and sculptors with great regularity).

As an example of the changing climate of opinion abroad let me. quote Frank Eiger, one of the most sincere, if aggressive, critics in France. In the popular weekly Candour, he wrote of a 1945. exhibition of British art: "The: work . . . floats in a halo of sentimentality, fussiness and tasteless romanticism . . . if Moore has more ' humanity' he owes it to the influence of his continental masters," In 1949, in the same paper, he wrote : " Henry Moore is without doubt the greatest sculptor of our time." Of Sutherland, R: Gindertael. wrote in Les Beaux Arts: " Sutherland's paintings . . . at Venice were among the most remarkable in this inter- national exhibition and they were also perhaps the most discussed...." Bernard Dorivalin,Arts wrote : " The first merit of his work, it seems to me, is that it is not, like so much foreign contemmorary painting, a niece pale reflection of the French school."

Second, purchases. Let me indicate the trend by three sets of figures. (a) One smallish London gallery—Gimpel Filsrhas sold 93 paintings and sculptures by 23 artists to North America during the past two years. An appreciable proportion of these were to public galleries. (b) The Women's Purchasing Com- mittee of the Toronto Art Gallery spent £2,000 on works by 16 living British artists during 1951 and1952. (c) The Museum of Modem Art in New York, in the New Yorker's phrase, " the world centre, institutionally speaking, of the modern movement," held in its permanent collections before 1940, seven works by British artists. At the end of 1953 it possessed 48, of which 25 had been acquired since 1948 (indeed eight of its 19 sculptures were purchased in 1953).

prize in Venice in 1952. Ben Nicholson gained the Carnegie first prize in Pittsburgh in 1952. All these

awards were made by international juries of high standing

(and it may be pointed out, in passing, that an Englishman was invited to sit upon all of them). Other international prizes

have gone to Robert Adams, Lynn Chadwick, Prunella Clough, Robert Colquhoun and Barbara Hepworth amongst others. We are not here discussing the quality of British art but merely the. world's estimate of it. I believe that the last international prize we won before the war was in 1924.

This remarkable state of affairs did not come about by a sort of spontaneous combustion. Before an artist can be acclaimed he must be seen, and there is no shadow of doubt that the biggest single factor in making this possible has been the work of the British Council. The extent to which its Fine

Arts alicer in Paris, for example, has the ear and the good w ill

of the highly-geared machine of the French art world is some- thing it would have been impossible to credit in 1939. In

the fine arts generally it has used its tiny resources with resolution and good sense. For those (perhaps Lord Beaver- brook amongst them ?) who did not see the letter in the Manchester Guardian some 18 months ago from the Director. of Collections, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, I re- print the following. Mr. Barr rererred to the British Pavilion at Venice as having seemed to many foreigners the most distinguished showing in the whole Biennale, and later sai& " It was astutely planned. boldly selected and installed with exceptional taste and intelligence . . . the BritiSh should be proud—as the Americans are envious—of the British Council ! "

What is so remarkable is the effect that has been produced in so short a time on a financial shoe-string. The scale on which we operate bears no relation to that of most other countries. When the Italian government brought the Scala Opera and orchestra to London for a week the cost was estimated at £40,000. But the entire annual budget of the

British Council for all the arts-2/ per cent. of its total—is in the neighbourhood of ,£60,000 and, at a guess, the Fine

Arts Department disposes of no more than one-third of this.

Of 76 exhibitions it has staged in the last few years, no fewer than 46 cost the Council less than £100, while 15 cost only

between £100 and £250 each. The fact is that other countries now want exhibitions from Britain, and will pay to get them, provided that the Council will assemble them. The measure of the Council's success is the extent to which the unofficial flow from Britain swells once the pump has been primed.

Such was the ignorance of BritiSh art overseas that much of the Council's work has been no more than bringing the

world up to date. (British Painting 1740-1840 was described by the Lisbon Press as "the greatest event of the epoch: " by the Stockholm Svenska Dagbladet as " almost as remarkable

and unique an event as when the Vienna Museum visited us with Titian and Velasquez.") We are not however, merely cashing an inheritance left too long unclaimed at the solicitor's.

Our current account is rising. Of the Moore show in Berne, Die Tat wrote: " Since the decline of England's world power a new world-power seems to be proclaiming itself in England: that of painting and sculpture."