13 AUGUST 1983, Page 27

Arts

Moore, and more

John McEwen

This may be the holiday season but gallery activity seems unabated. All too many shows are worthy of review; 30 July marked Henry Moore's 85th birthday, an event that could not have been more widely Celebrated. His climactic retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, con- tinues till 25 September, while the tributes here are too numerous to list. The two most important in London are at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1 (till 13 August) and the Tate Gallery (till 14 August). The standard of work is higher at Marlborough because the exhibition, while biased to the later years, does cover the whole of his career. At the Tate a small room has been set aside to display recent sculptures and drawings only. These have been lent by the Henry Moore Foundation and just as his identity is now distanced by this corporate title, so his latest works seem at several inspirational removes from the kinds by which he is identified. He still labours seven hours a day seven days a week, apparently, which is hand- some proof that his extraordinary physical energy happily remains undiminished, but age has made him flirt more with invented subjects, never his strong point. Unfor- tunately the finest of his recent works, the majestic prints he made on the theme of the reclining figure, are not included in either of these surveys. The most important of the Moore tributes out of town is undoubtedly the exhibition of monumental sculptures set to and about the Great Hall and Castle at Winchester (till 16 September). Winchester has a special lace in Moore's affections because he recuperated nearby from the gassing he received at the Battle of Cam- brai.

BY contrast, only one exhibition in England — organised by Julie Lawson and sPorisored by the Elephant Trust celebrates the 90th birthday of Joan Miro, arguably the most influential and important of senior western artists. Entitled Homage to. Miro, it takes the intelligent form of a tribute in photographs by his long-time J.learl and interpreter Joaquim Gomis, himself 81 years old. The exhibition, first shown at the Riverside Studios, Ham- mersmith, has now arrived at its second enue, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford sculptures 18 September). Prints and one or two 'calPtures by Miro supplemented the Photographs at Riverside and unfortunately fit Oxford the sculptures have had to be evil.thdrawn, but more prints have been add- htkell. is compensation. Essentially, however, .u.is is a photographic exhibition — a otribute to the talent and perception of °rills, whose documentations of Miro's

studio, mixed with relevant Catalonian im- ages — cacti, streets carpeted with proces- sional flowers, etc — provide more insights for the understanding of art, and Miro's in particular, than any number of exhaustive verbal introductions.

The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain's annual exhibition has shown developments in photographic art and technique every year — with three excep- tions — since 1854. Continuing this reverend tradition, the society's 1983 ex- hibition is on holography, its rooms at The Octagon, Milsom Street, Bath (till 10 September) largely given over to Light Dimensions: the Exhibition of the Evolu- tion of Holography, organised by Eve Ritscher Associates. The exhibition explains holographic technique, shows some of the practical and commercial uses of holograms and devotes the greater part of the space to the work of the burgeoning number of in- dividuals who seek to be holographic ar- tists. This is perhaps the participants' greatest mistake, many of them appearing to think that being an artist is a simple mat- ter of sticking a hologram into a frame — as crude a denial of the spatial freedom of the medium as could be imagined. Most repro- duce images of a banality to match; but the few who show signs of analysing and re- leasing what is specific to holography, our own Margaret Benyon and Michael Waller- Bridge among them, provide hope for the future, as does the historical fact of this landmark of an exhibition.

Best-known English artists with one-man shows of new work 'in London at the mo- ment are David Hockney and Bridget Riley. At Knoedler, 22 Cork Street, WI (till 27 August) Hockney is showing photographs. Each large 'picture' is a composite of dozens of separate prints conveying a specific sense of place or space and il- lustrating the fact that our visual experience of anything is a sum of views. In his 'joiners' (his word) this works best with spatial subjects — Brooklyn Bridge — less well with evocations of ambiance — lunch with the British Ambassador in Tokyo. As usual the pictures also serve as a travelogue, the exoticism beginning to grate after a while. He trades on names — and did the Ambassador really want him to work throughout lunch? As a fancy introduction into the nature of film, photography and the cubist viewpoint in 20th-century art it is fine, but most of his fans will surely welcome the news that he is now back pain- ting (and, hopefully, drawing).

Bridget Riley has been much less distracted. Her concern is to paint colour in arrangements that, under the viewer's gaze, merge into or release other colours. This has been done with the aid of various designs over the years, but never so visually unprovocatively as in these latest straight stripe paintings at Juda Rowan, 11 Tot- tenham Mews, W1 (till 27 August). The artist-as-designer aspect is enforced by a didactic presentation, in which drawings at various stages of arrangement are displayed to show her selective procedure. The theatrical potential of her work will be tried in an interesting experiment at this year's Edinburgh Festival, when a Ballet Rambert production based on her designs has its premiere (King's Theatre, 1-3 September).