Exhibitions 2
British Impressionism (Phillips till 31 August) 56 Group Wales (Swiss Cottage Library till 23 September)
Dry season
Giles Auty
Most days of the year, the heavy thud of my morning post as it hits the floor provides me with a useful time check. But by mid-August the usual flood of invita- tions, press releases and catalogues has dried up to a trickle. Some galleries close and many others simply mark time until their fresh season starts in September. Most regular patrons are abroad but many of the press remain, not least because next week sees the start of the Edinburgh Festival. Perhaps prominent galleries could try out the young or undiscovered in August. How refreshing it would be to see some wonderful paintings by an artist one has never heard of. But clearly good, let alone great art does not happen by acci- dent. We may choose to call current productions important or even great simply to reassure ourselves that our time is as good as any other; but words alone cannot make it so.
I believe more artists than we imagine achieve exactly what they set out to do. By this I mean that very few even begin with an important vision in their minds, let alone manage to sustain this through all the thousands of hours of loneliness they will spend in their studios. The temptation, for all but the most singular artists, is to concentrate simply on money and fame, because these are attributes the rest of the world — especially parents-in-law understands and approves. In a word, the brittle, prevalently shallow nature of our age is unlikely to encourage the kind of philosophy necessary to produce lasting works of art. Nor are the prospects more promising, largely because of the fashion- obsessed nature of most art criticism. But were times ever more propitious for artists?
A walk round British Impressionism at Phillips (101 New Bond Street, W1) might suggest that they were. The term is not one I care for as a collective title since more British artists were influenced by Bastien- Lepage and plein-air realism during the period in question than by Monet or Renoir. Of the artists on view in this scaled-down version of the earlier, Nor- wich Castle show, Sickert touched fingers included in 'British John Lavery, 'Woman on a Safety Tricycle, 1885,' Watercolour, Impressionism' at Phillips.
with greatness but failed to hang on. Among the others, who lacked some vital fire perhaps, levels of production were consistently high, nevertheless. Once, for a happy couple of years, I worked in Stanhope Forbes's old studio at the top of the hill at Newlyn. Forbes was capable of great things and was undervalued, without doubt, in the years following his death in 1947. Latterly the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Very high prices paid for works by Forbes and Lavery, who is also represented in this show, look increasingly unrealistic when compared with those paid for paintings by Stanley Spencer, one of the rare artists of genius this country has produced during the past century. There is a wonderful portrait by George Clausen, whose extraordinary skills in this direction are seldom remarked on, and fine works also by La Thangue, Wilson Steer, Tuke, Jackson et al. I was staying in West Cornwall last week, only a mile or two from where Thomas Cooper Gotch's beautiful tonal study of Newlyn and Penz- ance, 'The Silver Hour', was painted. I have seen the same evanescent effects of light myself scores of times, but few have ever painted them successfully.
56 Group Wales, who show at Swiss Cottage Library, was founded in that year to combat the hogging of the limelight by metropolitan artists. The principle is noble but the only cohesive factor of the current group seems to be one of Welshness, a quality difficult to demonstrate in visual form, though one could probably hum it. Most artists involved imagine they have progressed away from anything -as simple as coming to terms visually with their environment. Few artists should be let loose with ideas. The journeymen of For- bes's day left us humbler but more lasting fare, largely because they never thought of themselves as intellectuals.
Previous page
