Juvenile leads ARTS
PAUL GRINKE
Most exhibitions one sees in the course of the year induce a complacent glow of reassurance. Old friends are predictably acclaimed, new talents flower or wither away, the illusion of a pleasantly hedonistic and unassailably sophisti- cated society devoted to the arts hovers over Bond Street like a summer cloud. The White- chapel Gallery's exhibition of British art from the Leicestershire Education Authority's col- lection is thus doubly valuable, as an irritant conscience and as a goad to urge our elephan- tine educational system towards new fields.
The exhibition holds no pictorial surprises, though one or two of the earlier works, especi- ally the portraits by Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Wood and William Scott's Girl at a table, are new to me and well worth a second look. What is amazing is that such a collection could have been assembled at all, and been so usefully deployed around the county for some twenty years. Its visit to London is an unabashed attempt to publicise the need for similar collections all over England. The idea of a decentralised art col- lection may seem' strange—one thinks of the misplaced idealism of Arts Council caravans eagerly touring the country lanes—but for schools an interchangeable and widely distri- buted collection is an urgent necessity.
The one man who has worked ceaselessly for this aim in Leicestershire is Mr Stewart Mason, Director of Education for the county and co- pilot of the present exhibition with Bryan Robertson. Mr Mason—an undeniably charis- matic figure and, one assumes, of necessity a skilled wheedler of funds and an Alexander with red tape—was initially fired by the ex- ample of Henry Morris, a Cambridge luminary of the 'thirties who had very clear ideas of the importance of art in schools and deserves universal applause for securing a building com- mission for Walter Gropius. Mr Mason came to art the long way round, through its edu- cational possibilities, making the same voyage of discovery as his pupils, and thus avoided the snare of bringing a set of preconceived values to the selection of paintings for children. Once begun, the process of selection and in- volvement with the works themselves has ob- viously gripped him and he admits that his own taste, starting with purely representational painting, has moved apace with abstraction. Fortunately he has managed to draw the purse strings with him.
One slight danger, suggested by the exhi- bition, is the growing awareness that the Leicestershire collection is of more than merely parochial interest. In fact it would not disgrace a major municipal art gallery as a summary of British painting over the last thirty years: the exceptions, such as the Francis Bacon, which Mr Mason ruefully rejected many years ago as incompatible with school requirements, serve to remind us that it is not intended to compete with museum collections. But one has the feeling that some conscious attempt has been made to form a representative albeit censored collection of British art. The em- phasis in any school collection must surely be environmental rather than didactic, and the choice of works demands immense care as the child's ability to consider and reject visual in- formation of this sort is an unpractised and still largely unmeasured skill. Adult enthusi- asm in the formation of such a collection, especially one as large and well considered as that of the Leicestershire Education Authority, can easily get carried away from the initial purpose.
A further problem is the range of ages in- volved, from five to eighteen. A teaching collec- tion is obviously misplaced in the primary school but could be useful in an older age group. I for one would cheerfully extend the role of the collection beyond the present limit to what Sir Cyril Burt, categorising the child's own attempts to draw, has eloquently dubbed the scribble stage, with its elementary attempts to describe the human figure. From five to nine children's art is logical rather than visual, recording what the child knows rather than what he sees, and from nine to eleven he draws from nature rather than memory. After that the rot sets in until the mid-teens. Skilful matching of a loan collection with the child's own artistic endeavours could have possi- bilities. It is a pity we could not have had some comments by the children on the paintings and sculpture, particularly since the handful of photographs of the works in situ were not very illuminating.
The mechanics of the collection are not without interest. The education authority has evidently managed to mobilise county and national resources denied to the municipality. The Ministry of Education has allowed education authorities to spend up to half of 1 per cent, hardly largesse com- pared with other countries but still not despicable, of the capital cost of school build- ing on what are portentously known as `em- bellishments.' The county collection spends in the region of £1,000 a year on new works, which is a feasible sum though not allowing a great margin of error. Unfortunately the University Grants Committee does not recognise the embellishments clause, and uni- versity art collections outside the museums are in a parlous state of neglect. Junior common rooms levy a token sum from their members which adds up to about one painting a year, usually greeted with ridicule and often, especi- ally at our older universities, with physical violence. The ground work of the education authorities should help enormously to acclima- tise students to abstract art and may even spur university authorities to take a realistic look at their own collections.
As to the exhibition itself, I missed the first instalment, which included all the sculpture,
and appears from the catalogue to have been a remarkably varied selection- within the im- posed financial limits. The sculpture collection is a relatively recent project and I suspect that works by Caro and Paolozzi, to select two notable omissions, were already too expensive when they began. The painting collection is a mixed bag, with the accent on young painters since Bryan Robertson took a hand in the selection, and they have, perhaps wisely, eschewed the majority of pop painters as Pop is an adult diversion. Altogether an impressive catch, although I see no real reason why they should confine themselves to British painting and sculpture. Children are not bothered by national boundaries so why should we be?
Two other London shows can hardly be passed by without comment. At the Marl- borough New London Gallery, Jack Smith shows a large group of recent paintings intri- cately marked with the strange hieroglyphic sign language he has evolved. He is an inter- esting painter working on a completely differ- ent tack from most of his contemporaries and his new work deserves a long look. Fighting my way through the crowds at Kasmin's it looks as if David Hockney has pulled off an- other coup. The half-dozen paintings of domestic interiors and west coast suburbia are the clearest statements yet of his crisp vision of Utopia. The jokes have been played down but are still lurking in the wings to reward an acute eye.
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