Arts
The luxury of the real thing
Bryan Robertson
PruneIla Clough's paintings have the same distant but true relationship with urban realities as the imaginatively eccentric musings of Fabre in relation to the real life of Insects. Alternatively, the undeniable truth about, say, bird life contained in a fluttery and sharp pictogram by Klee would hardly be corroborated in prosaic detail by a visit to an aviary. Reality is continually re-defined bY Poetic truth in its celebrations of the real thing.
In his journals, Jules Renard said, I have Passion for the truth and the fictions which it.authorises', and it is precisely this double bill of factual observation and edgy intent. that PruneIla Clough has filled as an artist for the last thirty years. It is one of the purest and most authoritative achievements in I-1,glish art of this century. Some sense of its 11ePartures into visually poetic metaphor that only paint can responsively accommodate—for it is not a question of literal eMbodiment but poetic accommodation within the terms of colour and pigment— ,,w111 come from a visit to the Arts Council's 'erPentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens (before 21 November) where thirty paintings Prunella Clough fill two large rooms. It is an extraordinary event, because `lough is exceptionally self-critical, and rarelY exhibits. There was a 'work in progress' retrospective at Whitechapel in 1960 41nd one other large show at Sheffield in L.971; in between, only very small exhibi13ns, occasionally restricted to drawings. ‘1° far as the cOmmercial or exhibiting Illachinery is concerned, this is one of the Most abstemious artists in England: a purist Who would, I believe, work quite hard to ensure that her art did not appear in a TV . culture chat show or a colour supplement. ▪ Such fastidiousness is rare, but Clough's 'filledicated intransigence during the past fteeo Years is still more remarkable because • has stayed with the expanding principles 'al her visual sensibility when the whole of ert .bas been in the grip of orthodoxies almost ant,trelY in opposition to her own instincts concern. Raw flat colour, simplified moesign or joky pop-art imagery were the rder of the day: Clough is more deeply etnncerned with nuances of texture and tt)knahtY to support a personal sense of colour ‘,"at makes a clouded White seem inhabited "orf a brownish gold appear as an exact echo exPerience, her imagery a kind of laconic thetaPhysics pegged to reality but open to e,resPonsiveness of paint. n.11 he authority of her gift has ensured the ar°,rnentum of Clough's development as an feltils1, and she has a strong position among oe Ow painters who understand her inde ncleoce and sophistication in the same way that Degas understood another independent when he said of Odilon Redon : 'He is a hermit, but he knows the train schedules'. Clough has also had the good fortune to have the support of some unusually intelligent collectors, who have disrupted Sickert's otherwise accurate dictum that 'the English buy their pictures by ear rather than by eye'. But she has hardly aroused a flicker of interest among officialdom or any supportive critical attention, because of its thraldom by fashion.
Given these negative conditions, Clough's achievement seems all the more impressive. If she had been an American artist, Clough by now would have a position in art roughly equivalent to Frankenthaler, Nevelson or O'Keeffe. We must hope that the Tate will soon arrange the definitive exhibition that London needs. There are many strands in Clough's long evolution and the Serpentine show is only of recent work, severely edited by the artist.
The paintings are not easily accessible at first glance. They have a comfortable, unrhetorical, informal look to begin with, like someone talking to you with their back turned; it takes time to adjust to their precision of tone and inflection as well as the intricacy of detail in the paintings, which are intimate and domestic in substance though very grand in manner, like Phedre complaining about the servants.
Urban themes are certainly Clough's point of departure. Those alluring viewing platforms or windows in the hoardings round building sites bring this inconsequential but dramatic world of bric-a-brac home to us, but in a rather theatrically isolated and selfconscious fashion. Clough is more concerned in a properly existential way with how light hits a bit of corrugated tin roof and so changes the form, or the density and openness of a clump of wire netting, or a gap in the sequence of a picket fence, or dull rivulets of water down the side of glittering sand by a cement mixer, or debris on the floor in a printing shop. Hers is an art of close-up, rarely the long distance view, but Clough so isolates and italicises her chosen details and brings her often lumpily inelo quent material to such nervy and alert life that her best paintings have an easy, unposed monumentality. If the close-up is substituted for the scene as a whole, the close-up is then turned into another kind of panorama. The colour takes time to disclose itself.
'Inside and outside' 1970-75 is a nearly square, large grey painting in which a grey cross shape in the lower left corner against a lighter ground is offset by a dense mass of shifting grey tone across which leaf shapes appear to drift diagonally: something im permanent against something constant and absolute. It takes time to see that the mass of grey is unevenly coloured, veering from pink to green grey, and that the bands of the cross are equally contrasted through pink and brown.
Big flat triangular shapes often come from the form of roof-ends; other shapes become more ambiguous through the artist's liking for transparency—one shape seen through another—so that windows are useful to remember sometimes, with some thing smeared or stuck on the glass, or the view, say, through the rain-smeared wind screen of a car. 'Into view' 1975 has long lateral bands of ocean drifting across the centre of the canvas; but tight black vertical lines in two columns, like water coursing down a window, descend against this to pinpoint a contrary movement, speed, and optical plane.
The paintings exemplify in their opulent frugality our curiously ambivalent attitude towards luxury. We are starved of decora tion and ornament by thin-lipped architects acting out Bauhaus fantasies from which ornament is overtly banished but implicitly there, we are unconvincingly told, as part of the structure. Direct statements of luxury are not allowed, tapestries are out, follies are impossible which explains the success of that expensively licensed joker Christo, decoration is a dirty word in art, Rubens, Delacroix and Matisse notwithstanding— but so much piety leaves a sense of loss, which perhaps explains the allure of Jules Olitsky's pointillist spray-jobs which are formally vacuous but painlessly evocative of sunrises and sunsets and, in their sheer expansiveness, of luxury. The way in which Clough uses a nearly-black charcoal against a kind of tobacco brown puts memories of Jacques Fath to shame, but her work skates clear of chic because of its grittily sensuous integrity and her intellectual powers of formal concentration and refinement.
Now that Dubuffet has been into manufacture for years, with those sculptured assemblages that look like cheap nougat, and Tapies has lost himself momentarily with art brut devices filtered through Rauschenberg and Johns, there is no doubt that Clough is one of the best artists working in Europe. She is building onto and expand ing a great tradition inhabited by Cezanne, Klee, Leger and Bonnard and it is a fine sight to see in England.
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