Contemporary Arts
Crystals of Sculpture
HERBERT 4AD'S novel The Green Child ends with a description of an imaginary country, some of whose inhabitants spend their lives either in the making of crystals—as perfect revelations of a natural order—or in the con- templation of them, Many works of modern non-figurative art might at first sight seem to offer just such a focus of earnest meditation, but in fact some of the apparently obvious candidates for the job would not sufficiently quieten and purify the consciousness. The paintings of Mondriaan or the constructions of Gabo arc, in the original sense of the word, too exciting to suit this requirement. Perhaps the most appropriate artist for the role would be Barbara Hepworth, who has a show of new work at Gimpel Fits. She is a superb crafts- man whose consistent devotion to the discip- lines of carving and to a lucid simplicity of form must command respect. She might seem even more assiduously than Henry Moore to have ,respected the identity of her materials. but in fact she has subdued them with an ideal of purity and smoothness, allowing wood or stone only to wear and display the patterns of grain which their groWth or structure has delineated. She gives to irregular forms the static symmetry of a hand-made crystal. Compare her work with that of an artist not dissimilar in some respects, Brancusi: and we discover that she has not, like him, been able to create arresting and eloquent images, but simply to remind us of a natural structure or establish an allusion to some mythological object. This exhibition adds to her established range of shapes and rhythms constructions made from coiling strips of metal or plaster reminiscent of certain works by Max Bill; the finest piece in the show is related to these, a bronze—No. 12: Curved Form (Trevalgan) which has a movement, a pulse, a core of unsubdued energy, a heart indeed which has not before disturbed the suave.stolidity of her sculpture, Patrick Heron, whose excellent book The Chaneing Forms of Art was animated by his own internal debate over the value and values of non-figurative art, has, in his show at the Redfern, at last if not finally abandoned the object, although such titles in the catalogue as Greenhouse and Tulip Garden suggest that his work continues to be occasioned by natural appearances. He has turned to a kind of action painting in which the most frequent elements are long rectangles formed naturally by the drag of a loaded brush over the canvas. This conversion is not as radical as it might seem. for even when, in his earlier paintings, he was most indebted to Braque. that master's example was transformed by a free use of pigment in which that artist has seldom in- dulged and which in the hastiest, of Heron's pictures almost entirely conauered the presence of a jug or a figure. This exhibition suggests to me a dilemma unresolved, for the pulse of these pictures is intermittent and behind the exuberant handling there seems to be a' lack of confidence in his power to knit the thing together. In a review of the dc Steel exhibition 1 suggested that to admit figures or fruit into one's work does not make a non-figurative painter into a figurative one and the reverse is equally true. It will be interesting to see whether Heron's course will be to deepen and clarify those intimations of the natural world which are implied in these pictures, or whether he will try to discover within himself a gif,t for non-figurative painting. I hope he undertake the former struggle.
BASIL TAYLOR
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