ANOTHER VOICE
It's incredibly nasty, but must we suppose that it is Art?
AUBERON WAUGH
Iam just old enough to remember the heat generated in artistic circles by Anni- goni's first portrait of the Queen, painted for the Fishmongers' Company, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1955. The Daily Express's art critic decided that it marked the revival of Real Painting, and other popular newspapers went into paroxysms of delight. Even the 'expert' critics on the respectable newspapers felt bound to be polite, since it was not done to be rude about the royal family in those pre-Murdoch days. The Royal Academy had seen nothing like it since the exhibition of Frith's 'Derby Day' in 1858. Crash barriers went up, women swooned and the public went wild. Reproductions sprouted like plaster ducks in every foreign embassy or consulate as well as in many suburban homes. Slowly, sophisticated opinion be- gan to reassert itself. School debating societies were instructed to debate along the lines of 'It's Nice but is it Art?'
Most decided that it was, indeed, art, although the art master assured them, with the help of lantern slides, that Annigoni did not paint nearly so well as Michelan- gelo or Leonardo. A painting has to belong to the age in which it appears, we, gaping but credulous schoolboys, were told. Final- ly, we were assured that disapproval of Annigoni was a clear sign of social and intellectual superiority — if not to distance us from the working man (who was then thought to have an instinctive appreciation of the arts), at least to Epater les bourgeois. Chocolate box, chocolate box, chocolate box. What started as a murmur ended as a roar, dismissing the popular mass culture, the royal family, the older generation, the Government, the Conservative Party. And so the Sixties were born, and David Hock- ney came into his own, with Saatchi and Saatchi in respectful attendance. The final result was to give the modern movement a further lease of life, or at any rate to extend its snob appeal a little longer.
After this long gap of time, it is surely reasonable to decide that if his composition owed a little to Toytown, and his portrait- ure was a trifle wooden, Annigoni, who died last week at the age of 78, was a thoroughly accomplished portrait painter who would have flourished in any age. If his best work lacks the panache of Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough, or the sweetness of Winterhalter, it is above the standard of Kneller, most of Lely, and riding well beside Ramsay and most of Lawrence. He was certainly a better pain- ter than David Hockney, if less interesting.
Such glib opinions will irritate some people, and it is not my intention to force them on anyone else, or even defend them if they are attacked. My purpose in reviv- ing that long-dead controversy is to relate it to the response of the Royal Institute of British Architects to the splendid frontal assault launched by the Prince of Wales last week. Time was, the architectural establishment could have walked over him. The objection that the Prince of Wales is a layman, a man in the street, someone who does not know what he is talking about, was unanswerable. Experts were re- spected. Those who opposed Holford's first assault on St Paul's, or Spence's repulsive British embassy in Rome, were not just labelled philistines; they were out of step with the times. But in those days architects had a good line in apologetics. They explained their eyesores with learned references to the Parthenon, the Pyramids, the great ziggurat at Ur. At least those rascals Casson and Spence were plausible. Let us examine the considered reply of Mr Max Hutchinson, president-elect of the RIBA, to the Prince's onslaught:
Architecture is a courageous art. . . . It will not abandon the strenuous pursuit of fresh ideas with the balanced sensitivity that has produced all the richness and variety in our long and distinguished architectural history.
That is Hutchinson fighting back. How many people will rally to his war cry? This is his version of the genius-takes-time-to- be-recognised argument:
The Victorians were hardly deferential when it came to building their large, domineering public buildings. Egged on by Prince Albert's enthusiasm, they swept aside much of what had been built before. They express- ed the spirit of their age in bold, uncom- promising terms which today's prince clearly admires. We now understand and admire their buildings in context.
Oh we do, do we? If Mr Hutchinson had ever attended a school debate, he would know that popular enthusiasm for contem- porary architecture was one of the great hallmarks of the 19th century. Colonel Sibthorpe may have inveighed against Pax- ton's designs for the Crystal Palace in 1851, but he was about the only person in England who did. At the time of the great competition for rebuilding the Houses of Parliament in 1840, arguments about the rival merits of the designs ended in. fisti- cuffs on every street corner. The great public buildings of the Victorian era were loved when they were built and have been loved ever since, except by a few pasty- faced and mercenary modern architects trying to sell us their rotten junk.
Architecture cannot move backwards. We have the technology, the ideas, the imagina- tion and the skill to build today the buildings which future critics will understand and respect — as much as we now love and cherish those of the past.
These rousing words of Mr Hutchinson rather ignore that buildings being put uP today are not expected to last more than 40 years. He agrees that the Sixties produced nothing but horror. We hated them then and we hate them now. Why should anyone grow to like the next generation of monstrosities? In fact, architecture has regularly moved backwards. The Romans discovered Athenian architecture, the Re- naissance revived both classical and Byzan- tine forms, the 18th century went back to Greece and Rome, the 19th revived Tudor, Gothic and classical forms.
But for the true, the blushful voice of the blimp we must go to Sir Philip Powell, 67, Royal Gold Medal Winner, designer of the Skylon at the Festival of Britain in 1951: The Prince's views on architecture are just those of an ordinary citizen. It was wrong of the BBC to have offered him this platform, and wrong of him to have taken advantage of their offer.
It is a wonderful thing to hear these modernist orthodoxies defended with ev- ery bit as much heavy-handedness as was used to defend chocolate box against ab- stract art in the Sixties. The great differ- ence is that whereas in the Sixties anybody as stupid or as stick-in-the-mud as Sir Philip Powell would have been rolled on the ground, jumped upon and turned inside out by a disrespectful younger gen- eration, nowadays our flaccid, deferential, incurious and ignorant younger generation listens to him respectfully, supposing he might have something useful to teach them — even that he represents the liberated, progressive faction. Perhaps it is better for this new generation to be placed in con- crete shelves where the rest of us can forget about them.
Previous page
