Arts
American styles and chic
John McEwen
History is beginning to sort out the abstract expressionists. Not all their paintings were or are big, but most of them were a lot bigger than the majority of pictures being turned out in Europe in the high-noon of the movement through the late Forties and early Fifties, and bigness — a heroic scale as it often came to be referred to— has undoubtedly been the most dramatic feature of New York painting. Its largesse was hopeful, liberated, lavish and exotic, a visual counterpart to US aid and Sugar Ray Robinson's flamingo pink cadillac, his retinue of servants, when he came to London in 1951 to fight the boy from Learnington Spa. Now we have long grown accustomed to such extravagance. Skyscrapers, shopping precincts, motorways, pylons, jet travel have subtly altered our sense of scale and any contrast we once had with America. No razzle-dazzle helps New York painting along anymore. It can now be judged solely on its merits.
Robert Motherwell (Royal Academy till 19 March) is famously one of the key figures of the abstract expressionist movement, as it has come to be categorised by the art historians, but perhaps as much for his politicising and writing as for his painting. Certainly at the Academy — and it cannot be easy shown alongside Courbet — his paintings look as forbiddingly empty as the rooms in which they are shown. Most of the pictures are large, some of them vast (the largest measures twenty feet in length) and most of them contrast some element, usually depicted in black, even on occasion collaged pieces of material, against a field of single colour enlivened by the brushy and variegated way in which it has been applied. Scale and radiance are what these paintings are about, and it is in their faulty handling of scale that many of them fail. The most monumental command the space they stand in, also quite a task at Burlington House, but repeatedly scale is confused with such bigness, and the outcome is flaccid and overblown. This is particularly true of the collages. The effect is one of straining after feeling, an effect compounded by Motherwell's plays on the styles of other painters from Picasso in the collages to Matisse and various of his New York contemporaries, notably Clifford Still and Franz Kline; and in his knowingly concerned and cultured titles — 'Elegy to the Spanish Republic', 'Beckett's Space No 2', 'A la Pintura No 12' — that are just the kind of thing one would expect of a ponderous professor of painting in a Saul Bellow novel. What saves him is that he does have a sense of colour, not so much the radiance but the Americanness of it: the tans, bleached whites and cloudless blues of protestant New England. That is something, but it cannot offset the fact that most of his output is chic Corporation decor, one ivy-leaguer from Yale fulfilling the kulchural needs of all those other ivyleaguers from the Harvard Business School.
Elsewhere in the Academy, also till 19 March, there is a somewhat educational and rather too large Arts Council exhibition of pictures of city life. 'Cityscape 1910-1939', which might have benefited had it confined itself to a view of British cities only (though it does reveal some interesting Nevinsons both of here and New York); a repeat of last year's laser exhibition, still a pickpocket's paradise despite the number of laser shows now on offer as a result of last year's success; and Leonardo's famous anatomical drawings, in many cases quite boring unless you swot up the catalogue. Looking at his resounding name emblazoned over the Academy's entrance I could not help thinking how lucky it is he was not born English and therefore called Leonard. Anyway, it would be doing him an even greater disrespect here to attempt to do more than advertise his presence.
Conroy Maddox, whose surrealist paintings are at the Camden Arts Centre (till 5 March) long ago showed his heart was in the right place, and his head coincidentally, when he refused to exhibit with the English Group at the first International Exhibition of Surrealism in England at the Burlington Gallery in 1936. And he continues to take salutary pot-shots at Read for his muddleheadedness and Moore for his sacerdotalism. His collages, which have disappointingly not developed from before the War, are better than Motherwell's and anticipate Richard Hamilton's by a generation, but his paintings are disappointing. Painting, as Maddox says, may only be a means to the surrealist end of upsetting an image of the world imposed upon man, but with his constant lack of a personal iconography it is difficult to see how this can be attained in his work. The collages are wittier and tougher. There is a so-called exhibition of international surrealists adjoining the Maddox retrospective which is best conveyed by the following telegram from the US Surrealists: 'Best wishes for scandalous success and for successful scandals on International Exhibition Surrealism unlimited 1978 100 anniversary of hysteria surrealist solidarity now and forever Long Live surrealist revolution.' Let us all raise our Pepsis to that.
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