12 MARCH 1983, Page 33

Art

Night and day

John McEwen

Ager Jorn (1914 — 1973) is the most internationally renowned Danish artist since Thorwaldsen, the neoclassic sculptor. A Painter, Jorn tends to be art-historically Pigeon-holed as a member of the European `Cobra' group, founded by artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam in 1948 to promote spontaneity in art and to Challenge what they saw at that time as the artistic monopoly of Paris. But `Cobra' on- IY lasted three years, and the revelation of

the Barbican exhibition is how long after this event Jorn painted his best paintings. What is most widely considered his first masterpiece was not achieved till 1958, and some of his finest — and certainly most assured — were done in the last years of his comparatively short life, in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Jorn's bright colour and energetic handling could hardly have been more out of fashion in these later years, when the intellectual fad was for Structuralism and there was much talk in art circles that painting of any kind was dead. Now, brightly coloured, expressive and even depictive painting is all the rage, the more fast and furious the better, so it is no surprise to find Jorn's star in the ascen- dant — though whether this will prove to be the case in England is another matter. His art is very Nordic and anxiety-ridden — his paintings an ambivalent scrimmage of the figurative and abstract, consideration and spontaneity, drollery and trollery. His art was once memorably described as that of a `night person'. This 'shocked me enor- mously', he is quoted as saying, 'because my most conscious need is my longing for light'. The eclipse of the war and suffering a major illness was no doubt also part of that night. Munch was always an influence, most overtly so in the more calm and order- ly late paintings. But Jorn is never too orderly. He could not be. Disorderliness and difficulty reflect his more disorderly and difficult age. The worst European ter- rors lie beyond our national experience (though, typically enough, the greatest authority on Jorn is an Englishman, Guy Atkins) but it is therapeutic to be reminded of them.

The sculpture exhibition downstairs is, as its title suggests, much more about Rodin than his contemporaries. While he is represented by 35 sculptures and drawings, the likes of Despiau, Carpeaux and Gemito (to name three, perhaps less familiar, names) have one item apiece. The exhibition fills the space quite satisfactorily — sculp- ture stands up to the negative and sand- wiched spaces of the 'gallery' better than painting — but most tastes will surely prove too jaded for this art-historical rag-bag of an exhibition. The least familiar, most delectable, objects are to be found among the fragments and figurines, of Rodin and Maillol. But that, no doubt, is to state the obvious.

Jean Hugo, 89 this year, must be the last representative of the golden days of French 20th-century painting, and is surely the purest spirit of all its spirits. He paints with the innocence, the goodness, of the mediaevalists, and with their freedom, too. It is as if he has wandered into 20th- century art quite unsullied by history or ex- perience, including his own as a much decorated officer in the first world war. In 1964 Richard Buckle had the inspired idea of commissioning Hugo to design two parts of the huge exhibition honouring the 4th centenary of Shakespeare's birth. `Shakespeare's Cotswolds', a sequence of

11 paintings commemorating Shakespeare's walk through the Cotswolds to Oxford, is the centrepiece of the present exhibition. 'Today, I believe, Hugo's series of "Shakespeare's Cotswolds" will be recog- nised as one of the great decorative schemes conceived in our century,' writes Buckle. And yet the cycle is currently un- sold at approximately £3,000 per painting. This memorable cycle of paintings is ac- companied by a fine and varied selection of related costumes, prints, wash drawings and gouaches. It is for his miniature gouaches that Hugo is best known. Visitors to Philadelphia and the great Barnes Founda- tion collection of (predominantly) 20th- century art, will know how his miniatures shine out among the Picassos, Matisses and Cezannes. Dr Barnes would surely have snapped up 'Shakespeare's Cotswolds'. England certainly should not let it go.