Revolt Against Revolt
By SYLVIA SPRIGGE
FOR one shilling a copy of that lively French review Arts may be bought from almost any newsagent near Picca- dilly Circus. A recent number (dated September 25th) launches out in a big way against what M. Louis Pauwels calls the "blind alleys of the avant-garde artists," and against what M. Jean Bourret calls the " avalanche of conformity among the experimental artists of 1952."
It is all most lively reading. Arts has been quietly working up towards something of the kind for several months, but this is a big explosion in what is certainly one of the most important Paris art-reviews. I had bought it early last week and put it aside for reading, when another copy reached me from a friend abroad, who had marked a column of quotations from some articles I wrote recently criticising the peculiar choice of sculptures and paintings which the British Council had made for the British Pavilion in the Venice Biennale exhibition this year. But the big explosion in Arts is far more i mportant.
M. Francois Daulte, for instance, reviews the retrospective exhibition now going on in Zurich of what was known in France and Switzerland at the turn of the century as " Art Nouveau," and a little later in Germany as " Jugendstil." He likes the aims of those 1900 furniture-designers to achieve utility and beauty, to avoid imitation unless it can enhance the pleasure of a functional lamp, bed or chair; to study and enjoy their materials. He believes that the " Art Nouveau " was a point of departure, not the beginning of a decadent age. In the arts, he says, Gauguin, Lautrec, Bonnard, Rodin and the others were the masters at the turn of the century; and in the very next column M. Jean Bourret writes that " notre siecle beitard, ipuise sous le poids d'ainis trop illustres, trop grands pour lui, ipuisi par deux guerres, par une iconomie en agonie, deux systemes luttant, le capitalisme et l'autre, par une lassitude de vivre mal par suite de trop de nouveaux besoins cries . . . notre nouveau conformisme s'appelle l'art abstrait."
The decline from 1900 to 1952, from the hopes and visions of the new designers, however eccentric, to the egocentric out- pourings of abstract artists, might have been avoided, writes M. Bourret, but for an army of " sensation-mongers at all costs," and but for the fact that the customers of wealth have taken the place of the customers of taste.
" Here is the real tragedy. It does not lie in the creation of the artist, but in the market which scatters to the four winds the good and the bad in a general delirium of newness, which serves fashion rather than art." Arts is a popular and important magazine in a city which is still (and may it long remain) the Mecca of every art student. The big dealers are in Paris, and this attack on them in Paris itself is probably the beginning of a change in taste, for they are the first to sense the way the wind is blowing. For years, one might say, there has been no wind at all, only faint and isolated gusts of protest. The great dealers have had it all their own way, certainly supported by that " army of sensation- mongers " whose language has been getting more and more obscure with longer- and longer-syllabled words. But it looked well in print, and it reinforced the dealers' sales-talk when the unsuspecting investor, private or public, walked into the dealers' galleries.
As a quite contemporary example of the pass to which affairs have come, M. Bourret. prints a replica of A.R.P.'s poster for an exhibition of French sculpture (Rodin. Bourdelle, Maillol, Despiau, etc.) about to be held in Austria. It is a particularly intestinal poster, with a floating kidney and a kind of enlarged liver and ugly type-setting on it, " une affiche qul a toute la lourdeur allemande, et le manque de goat habituel aux ensembliers modernes." But A.R.P. is " avant-garde," and " France would consider herself dishonoured if she, were not avant-garde'."
M. Louis Pauwels is even more outspoken. He strikes hard at the abstract artist himself. He accuses him of " living in brackets." " A want-garde," he says, is a term which offers the only comfortable billet between the unthinkable past and a possibly catastrophic future. If the artist dropped the label, " he would, before even lifting his pen or brush, be compelled to live and reason out the present, which has really put too many essential values in jeopardy. . . . He avoids the diffi- culty of living. . . . He takes the lukewarm course which is the blind alley of the avant-garde of 1952."
The battle is on, and the writers in Arts are quite aware that the absurd accusation of " Communist " will be levelled at painting and sculpture or writing which is close to the human heart and head, and not abstract, not subtly psycho- logical, not, in a word, "avant-garde." France, of course, bears the burden of the clever Sartre " who has just written 500 pages in honour of a tedious homosexual under the title of Saint Genet," says Arts. The battle is certainly on, and in other sections of this paper there is sufficient vitality to ensure that it will be fought hard.
Mr. Bernard Berenson's classic, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, has just been reprinted by the Phaidon Press. He has written a new preface to the 1952 edition, of which the last two paragraphs bear on the subject discussed here. He writes: " We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it. If we do not succeed in loving what through the ages has been loved, it is useless to lie ourselves into believing that we do. A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life.
" No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanise us. Without art, visual, verbal and musical, our world would have remained a jungle."
These are general but incontrovertible principles. An excit- ing test of their reality just now would be a visit to the Epstein exhibition at the Tate Gallery. One of the delights here is the speed and brevity of Epstein's attack of one of the century's diseases. He caught it like measles when he associated with the prettily named " Vorticists " before the First War. But he recovered quickly. Today the view of some fifty years of his work is arresting. One continually stops; favouritism develops for this or that piece. Epstein knew the monstrous and the disproportionate; he has deliberately abandoned both, and in his art the genius then grew and flowered.
If the three-pronged attack in Arts really begins to turn the tide of taste and criticism in contemporary art, we shall begin to enjoy exhibitions (and not least Epstein's) with a new and happier vision, unafraid of those pundits who may soon become the old-fashioned—sooner than they expected.
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