Former feasts
John McEwen
The 'Thirties — British art and design before the war' (Hayward Gallery tilt 13 January) is more of a hotch-potch than its sub-title suggests. Art, at least in the form of pictures, there is in plenty. Much of the ground-floor is devoted to it. Design, however, has inevitably proved indefinable with the result that the upstairs galleries, thanks in large part to a facetiously random display of photographs, lapse into a banal evocation of the period — superficial enough, no doubt intentionally, to amuse the most jaded child as we approach the nadir of the parents' year. Thus images have been selected which perpetuate the idea that Chamberlain was a clown, fishermen wore funny hats, heroes were stiff upperlipped and hikers a bunch of kinky infantilists. Perched outside on one of the sundecks as a climax to the whole is that monument of frivolity, Sir Malcolm Campbell's 'Bluebird' in life-sized replica. It encapsulates the prevailing spirit all too well.
In the interest of entertainment, therefore, the exhibition tends to trivialise its subject, which is a harmless enough fault and, in the circumstances, not an easy one to avoid. The arts and crafts of the time — in England — offer little visual excitement, as is made abundantly clear. The genteelly abstract carpet designs and home-baked pots in various shades of brown are 19th-century Manchester School utilitarianism finally come home to roost in Hampstead. What awful memories they stir of mad schoolmasters in dens reeking of old shag. As for the art, how many more times are we going to be beaten over the head with these same sculptures and pictures by Moore, Piper and the rest? How many more times asked to believe that the fustian of Sickert's senility is significant because it was done from snapshots? That Rodrigo Moynihan's abstract porridges were years ahead of their time, when in fact they were a century behind? That Stephen Spender once looked like Shelley and David Cecil was as langourous as a summer's day? What an academic closedshop it has become. A tenth of these old chestnuts would have been enough.
So, initially, the strains of a dance-band upstairs, the bank of 'Picture Post' covers, the Dinkies and cigarette-cards and copies of 'The Dandy' and 'Tiger Tim's Weekly' are a welcome relief. And something of this mood is sustained. The photographs may have been selected and hung with a disparaging eye for the jocular but the people in them are tougher and happier looking than their descendants today. As yet there were no commuters or computers and the BBC had not replaced the Indian Empire, but nevertheless consumerism had arrived. Most had a wireless, designed not to last more than five years, and one in 20 a car. This is adequately cOnveyed, but the Thirties as an era would have been better served seen in terms of one of the more dynamic cultures of the period, like America's.
Since the Thirties undoubtedly constitute the most popular age of the cinema, it is logical to proceed from the Hayward to 'The Art of Hollywood — Fifty Years of Art Direction' (Victoria & Albert Museum till 27 January), an exhibition sponsored by Thames Television to coincide with a 13-part series on Hollywood, now postponed till January as a result of the recent strike. Despite certain dramatic sets — a King Kong first bursting through a ceiling; a mirrored room, devoted to Fred Astaire, entered down a staircase carpeted in imitation of a keyboard — this is a show of specialised interest. True, a fair number of TV screens beam clips from famous movies from the dawn of cinema to the Fifties, btit on the whole the exhibition is cl voted to the preparatory drawings and sketches of long-forgotten art directors in ai attempt to prove that their imaginative contributions were as significant as anyone else's. Orson Welles has refused to write a foreword in praise of the particular directors chosen because he says most of them were bureaucratic functionaries who took all the prizes but did none of the work. Although this refusal does nothing for the academic credibility of the show, the organisers have bravely published the letter in facsimile and soldiered on regardless. Film buffs will no doubt find much to argue over here and revel in the demystification of such analysis in general, but the dispassionate viewer will find the drawings in themselves dully stereotyped and Hollywood, surely, best left a dream.
'The Amazing Bugattis' (Royal College of Art till 18 November) obviously forms an admirable complement to both the above. It features the furniture of Carlo Bugatti and the sculpture and cars respectively of his sons Rembrandt and Ettore, and Ettore's son Jean. Carlo's furniture of inlaid wood, repousse metal, thonged vellum and decorative tassels had some acclaim at the turn of the century and is accordingly undergoing a contemporary revaluation. It may be beautifully made, but today its Near-Eastern excesses make it look like the props from a Hollywood production of 'Cleopatra' starring Clara Bow. Rembrandt on the other hand was entirely conventional, making lifelike but rather lifeless bronzes of the inmates of Antwerp Zoo. His opposition to change lvould surely satisfy the artistic needs of the most dyspeptic MFH but these docile animals function at the RCA as nothing more than padding. The same could be said of the work of his father because, of course, it is only the cars of Ettore and Jean that continue to amaze us. Eleven are on display including an electrically driven 'Baby Type 52' that, we are told, was originally designed by Ettore for his son Roland but was 'clamoured for' to such good effect by the 'children of the well-to-do' that eventually another 80 were forthcoming. The catalogue introduction strives to fit the exhibition to its English art school setting by suggesting that all the Bugattis' work to some degree enshrines the utilitarian principles of John Ruskin. This conjures up a wonderful picture of that stern moralist being swept through the French countryside in, say, Jean's aesthetic masterpiece, the_ 'Roadster Type 55', to angry cries ot 'poule de luxe!' from the honest artisans. There is, of course, no need to justify the exhibition as art in this way. Applied art differs from fine art in intention, all" applied art the cars certainly are — the are also a feast.
Previous page
