Blind eye
Sir: Having just caught the British Museum's exhibition of eighteenth-century French landscapes I am still puzzled by your reviewer's denunciation of these artists for their 'complicity' (whatever that may mean) in the ancien regime: especially where he announces that 'their indifference to and alienation from the means of material production distances the majority of eighteenth-century artists from us, renders their view of the world strange and rep rehensible'. It is depressing to find this sort of thing in your magazine and in the art pages at that. Mr Maloon is clearly suffering from a nasty attack of sociology and it was not very kind of you to send him off to face the rococo before he had fully recovered.
To be charitable, he presumably meant merely to register the rather obvious fact that this school is characterised by various set pieces such as the fete galante or the antique ruin which were much in fashion amongst the aristocracy then but which are a long way from the kind of social realism which would, one supposes, have saved these artists from Mr Maloon's aesthetic tumbrils. This is hardly sufficient reason for us to turn a blind eye to those 'qualities of grace, lightness, facility charm and fantasy' which your reviewer notes in these sketches only to condemn them as failing to correspond with 'the ethic of modern art' (again, whatever that may mean).
K. Le Vay 21'Delvino Road, London SW6
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