Firing Line
ART THE best shows in London at the moment are divided between the Waddington galleries on each side of Cork Street : pe►e with Bonnard drawings and gouaches not previously exhibited, fits uncharacteristically surrounded with horse pictures by the Sartorius family. MA close at the end of this week. The Bonnard collection consists of small or conventionally-sized works, and the drawirigs in particular are revealing.
I've often made the point that the painter- sculptors like Degas, Renoir and Picasso can be more unpredictable and certainly nearer the mark of prevailing interest in form than the so- called pure sculptors, like Zadkine. for instance, or Lipchitz. We respond to fluidity and liveliness rather than to monolithic severity. and the same is true of drawing in the sense that drawers are preferable to draughtsmen. For example, Cezanne was not a very varied or dazzling draughtsman and certainly not a great one, but he was an enthralling and deeply satis- fying drawer in the severe probity and abstractly analytical insights he brought to bear on his subjects. A Cezanne drawing exists on two levels: as a compressed record of facts concerning the exterior existence of objects in space as well as the implications of their interior structure, and as abstract voyages of line and tone, flatness and solidity, space and substance. On both levels, a Cezanne drawing is full of surprises. Nearer home, and more modestly. Jack Smith is also an extraordinary and original drawer: fires, birds, movement of light over surfaces, rise and fall of the sea, etc. It has less to do with the expressive power of the line as representation than with the quality of the line itself, and what it is made to de in charting an independent graph as well as rounding-off a description. Wyndham Lewis summed it up when he observed that Picasso was like Paganini, a great execiftant, whereas Cezanne was the brother of Bach. Bonnard comes into this special latter category : he was a great drawer, which 'needs underlining since he is com- monly supposed to be either slight or rather fuzzy and childlike in the graphic field, apart from the inventive Japanese-influenced lithographs which are nearer paintings than drawings.
Here is the clue to his other graphic work. Bonnard forces pencil or charcoal to approximate almost to the rich orchestration of brushed oil paint, so eloquent and controlled are his appar- ently scribbly clusters of marks, so acute his seemingly vague or irresolute lines of direction. Every single fleck of tone is loaded. There are some hard, faint pencil drawings of nudes which make the equivalent activity in a Giacometti drawing look redundant or affected because of his morbid passion for attenuation, and isolation in space, which removed the subject from life and mummified it. With Bonnard, the image is caressed into being by the amplitude and sugges- tive energy of the drawing, in the way that a plant with tendrils will reach out into and embrace the enveloping air. These drawings virtually come to life, whilst a Giacometti drawing implies an arrested moment of degeneration. More Bonnard drawings, for a book, can be seen at Anthony d'Offay's gallery in Vigo Street. His graphic work demands time for proper appreciation : it is not obviously declamatory.
The same could not be said of Richard Hamil- ton's views of the main dome of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at Robert Fraser's gallery. He has repeated the same shot five times in a
set of fibre-glass reliefs in 'Spectrum, gold, black and white, Neapolitan, and metal flake.' I'll have a plain black coffee. The view itself is astute` and glamorous like any sharp architectural photography, the deadpan repetition owes every- thing to Warhol but in the confectionery of its execution misses his chief, aggressive point; the relief vehicle and synthetic medium owe their concept to other American artists, notably in fashionable Los Angeles. The show in essence is a legitimate if monumentally boring extension of- Hamilton's work as a teacher and art commenta- tor. The rage behind Warhol's early soup cans monotonously repeated without the slightest variation, and the persistent inquiry behind his filmed view from a single static shot of the Empire State building over twenty-four hours, are here reduced to vacuity. Warhol is obsessed with death, sometimes seen as expendability, often as violence, hence the images of lynchings, car sn-.ashes, suicide leaps, Liz Taylor photographed in garish make-up when dangerously ill, Jacque- line Kennedy after the assassination, and so on. His flair for colour, tactile values, and composi- tion, is prodigious. By contrast, Hamilton seems concerned only with a theoretical art dialogue. The results are snobbish and deeply pretentious. If Frank Lloyd Wright were alive he'd probably sue for royalties, though it is appropriate that Hamilton should have selected for his embalming treatment the one building in the world best cal- culated, by lighting and construction, to kill art.
Smart mindlessness is not the trouble at the New London Gallery—where Lynn Chadwick is showing new sculptures—so much as loss of direction. Some of the works look like distressed Hepworth: blocked-off pyramidical forms with two pierced holes in them, one looking up, the other suitably downcast. Other efforts include a veritable forest of spiky tent shapes in wood with modishly coloured synthetic resin. Chadwick's vocabulary was never wide, but he has made dis- tinguished sculpture in his day with its own raison dare, like the rather Assyrian triangular winged figures. I hope he finds himself soon.
Anthony Hill, at Kasmin's, seems to have found a number of repetitive answers to some fairly simple questions. A constructivist in his late thirties, Hill is not guilty of over-exposure: this is practically his first sizeable one-man show. I am at a loss. A number of immaculately executed reliefs, tactful in scale, are deployed round the walls in black, white and silver: the materials are aluminium and perspex. Basic L or bracket shapes cluster together in neat rows and are then reversed, or slant another way. Diamonds are posed against squares. The effect being so chic and trite, the trouble is possibly that Hill, a highly intelligent and dedicated worker, has re- strained what should be large and 'architectural' in scale to the dimensions of traditional easel painting. I should like to see work of this sort filling walls, animating whole facades of build- ings, but Hill's content would not stretch so far.
It is quite a treat to find good eccentric horse paintings by the Sartorius boys at the other Wad- dington gallery. German by origin, they initially brought an affectionate if sharply logical mind to bear on the illogicalities of English landscape, along with horses, dogs and grooms. The results were naively delightful. It's a pleasure also to find, 200 years later, Edward Middleditch bring- ing a commensurate warmth to bear on English landscape in his superb drawings at Roland Browse and Delbanco's, though he is less con- cerned with the scene as a picturesque whole than with cherished detail. Another lovely drawer. BRYAN ROBERTSON
Previous page
