Exhibitions
Patrick Heron: Jo Grimond Portraits and Garden Gouaches (Waddington till 28 March) Victor Newsome (Marlborough Fine Art till 28 March)
Unfamiliar ground
Giles Auty
. small group of paintings from the exhibition 'The Orientalists' at the Royal Academy a while ago sticks in my mind. The first and second were portraits by Holman Hunt and Augustus John, the third a figure painting by Matisse. Collec- tively, the juxtaposed images demonstra- ted how effective a freer, less detailed approach had been in reinvigorating the Classical tradition. Holman Hunt's 19th- Portraits of Jo Grimond 111 and IV, by Patrick Heron, oil on canvas, 1986
century work looked laboured by compari- son with John's livelier and fresher hand- ling. This, in turn, looked stiff against the sparkling freedom displayed in the Matisse. During the Twenties and Thirties the casual jauntiness of paintings by such as Dufy and Matisse whistled in as wel- come as a sea breeze in a previously stuffy room. Yet the joyous, harmonious echoes of the visible world found in the works of these two Frenchmen were all too soon to be submerged by the hegemony gained by a more tormented and inward-looking northern tradition. After the war, Matisse came to be looked on by the new avant- garde, not least in America, as too content a spirit, lacking the thunder to set off the stampede which latter-day Modernism became. Slowly, the pre-war primacy of Paris became buried beneath the post-war economic and cultural domination of New York.
The career of Patrick Heron, whose work is on show currently at Waddington
Galleries (2 Cork Street, W1) has been affected greatly by both cultural epochs. At different times his paintings have belonged, more or less completely, to both of the two fundamentally opposed tradi- tions. As theorist and critic as well as artist, Heron for a long while wore the ill-fitting mantle of the northern transcendentalist. Thus during the late Fifties his paintings, which had previously found inspiration in the modern French masters, suddenly became 'wholly' abstract — at least insofar as such a course is possible. As a critic, he preached the reductionist theory of 'pure' colour as the only course painting could henceforward follow constructively. Now, unless my eyes deceive me, the same artist is moving back steadily towards the Mediterranean classical tradition to which I, for one, believe he more naturally and comfortably belongs.
Heron's portraits of Lord Grimond were commissioned by Dr Duncan Thomson, Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, as part of a series of paintings of eminent Scotsmen. Last Christmas I wrote about another of Dr Thomson's commis- sions, the portrait of Sir Adam Thomson of British Caledonian by John Wonnacott (`Face values', 20-27 December 1986). Dr Thomson had made a number of brave and controversial choices of artist in his admir- able desire to eschew the facile flattery and lack of psychological insight of the average `boardroom' portrait. The choice of Pat- rick Heron to paint Lord Grimond might be looked on as a calculated risk but should not be condemned simply for that reason. In my Christmas article I deplored the decline in the general standards of portrait painting, not least of English Royalty, from the times of Holbein and Van Dyck to the present age. This said, I do not for a moment suggest that successful contem- porary portraits should simply be pastiches of earlier masters' work. Understandably, Dr Thomson is looking for good, all-round paintings rather than stiff likenesses.
For his part, Patrick Heron has tried to remain true to his own principles of ab- stract organisation and colour values while undertaking a portrait. His smaller studies in which the sitter's face is presented variously as blue, puce or battleship grey and his noble locks as yellow, blue or bright green are to an extent — and surprisingly — successful. I feel a number of such small studies might together sug- gest the sitter's essence, perhaps in the incomprehensible fashion that new medical machinery is able to detect and record the revealing hues of the human aura. Tradi- tionally this has been invisible to all who are not blessed with extrasensory percep- tion.
The least successful portrait is unfortu- nately the largest and the only one which incorporates an absolute minimum of col- our. By contrast the garden gouaches which make up the remainder of the exhibition show the artist blazing away with his more familiar battery of violent reds, greens and purples. Sometimes the colours merge along softened, cloudlike edges or are broken by snakelike ropes of dotted colours. Like the flowers which inspire him, the artist flourishes better in his own more familiar and fertile garden.
Victor Newsome, the other half of this week's critical twosome, is another artist with confused and confusing Modernist antecedents. His latest work at Marl- borough (6 Albemarle Street, W1) harks back to the traditions and materials of the Renaissance or earlier. Figure drawings and detail studies of ears and hands form the basis for larger, more polished paint- ings in tempera. Here oddly discordant touches,'such as nail-varnish and lipstick, and the negative passivity — as distinct from serenity — of the female bodies mark these out clearly as productions of our own sad age. Without these modern frissons, Newsome's work might be regarded by many of the influential as dangerously backward-looking, even in our present, supposedly pluralistic, artistic times. Occa• sionally I think how refreshing it might be to see work which shows complete disre- gard for what other people think important or relevant in the present age. Paintings which are never in fashion never fall out of it.
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