ART
THE primitive arts of the savage, of the child, of the madman, of the 'Sunday Painter' and popular (or folk) traditions are related to a degree which sometimes makes them in- distinguishable. The savage, the child, the madman and the Sunday Painter, having drawn, do not see the marks they have made, for they are looking, not at.their drawing, but at their idea. We are dealing here with the very wellsprings of man's psychic activity, the residual sediment of the hopes and fears of countless generations, with a white-hot lava in which intellect, emotion and sensation are inextricably compounded in unrepressed and integral form. It is art with the lid off.
An acute self-consciousness, fruit of the romantic conception of art as self-revela- tion, threatens totally to inhibit all but the strongest today. Current values postulate that nothing is worth doing unless it can be done better than ever before. Fear para- lyses the painter's every brushstroke—fear that the mark he makes may not show originality, sensitivity, taste, an awareness of this or that problem. Even the great and increasing army of amateurs are imprisoned by their awareness of tradition and tech- nical problems within a conception of reality that is repressed to the point of the utmost conventionality. Only the savage, the mad- man, the child and the Sunday Painter set themselves to paint as unperturbedly as the rest of us sit down to write a letter home. No wonder that the collection of pictures by Sunday Painters at the Institute of Con- temporary Arts, and the Sunday Pictorial's seventh exhibition of children's art at the Royal Institute Galleries, are refreshing to our jaded palates.
To the sophisticated eye it is the apparent (but accidental) sophistication of children's art which beguiles; the unsophistication of the Sunday Painter which charms. In both the aesthetic qualities are largely fortuitous. All primitives build up their paintings by concept—symbols drawn from the world of their imagination, from memory-traces of objects, people and scenes they have observed. Since the eye of the Sunday Painter is as untutored aesthetically as that of the child, these are remembered not in plastic, spatial and tonal relationship one to another, but as things-in-themselves. The child's is the more summary—and therefore enigmatic—expression. Logic is totally excluded, and he is altogether nearer to the magical art of the true savage. He uses the minimum of detail necessary to establish his concept—two dots for eyes, a slit for the mouth—and to him the scribble is clear and complete. The Sunday Painter, on the other hand, adult, with adult tastes and interests, with a less integral inner life, and conditioned to deal more or less logically in word-con- cepts, is usually obsessed by detail—every leaf, every brick, every strand of hair— sometimes to the point where its compulsive expression resembles the horror vacua of the insane. 'Ride the July Cockado,',` Come and See the Witch Doctor from Darkest Africa' say the notices in the fairground; Double- Fronted Houses to be Let at per 8/- per week,' says the half-postage-stamp sized poster on the standpipe, and A. and J. Hatch, late Tanton, late Collins,' the cabbie's plate, in an 1872 townscape at the ICA. The sensibility of the child is usually repressed during adolescence, to give way to the timidity of the amateur. Only it seems, where education is lacking, can it linger on, enriched by a deeper understand- ing of life, to give the truly child-like vision of the genuine Sunday Painter. Blake, as Kathleen Raine points out, was one of the first to believe that it is to 'the Child and to the Poor and to the Unlearned' that all things are clear.
The exhibition at the ICA, excellently chosen and hung by Robert Melville, tails off into the not-entirely-genuine primitive at one end, and the provincial charms of the journeyman signpainter at the other (the latter, the folk artist, is never afflicted by the timidity of the amateur). It includes delightful things by Mm. Bauchant, Bom- bois and Vivin, and Messrs. Wallis and Buckett. The show at the RI Galleries is of special interest for its two prizewinners, the results of a sketching tour in the Constable country, and the mosaics made of paper, glass and eggshell.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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