Arts
Raoul revealed
John McEwen
The programme is advertised round the battlements of the Hayward as 'Dufy/ Hockney', but in quality and size Hockney's contribution is actually of postscript significance. This is a Dufy spec- tacular, and that the contents justify such a notion is the point and success of the enter- prise. Dufy's death in 1953 was followed by the customary string of memorial exhibi- tions, but nothing of consequence in this line has been seen here since an Arts Coun- cil exhibition 30 years ago, and none of such a comprehensive sort has been attemp- ted before. It is therefore a truly historic as well as delightful exhibition, which will surely enhance Dufy's reputation as surely as did the great Picasso and Dali extra- vaganzas enhance their reputations three years ago. This is a tremendous service and achievement, for which Bryan Robertson, as prime mover and general factotum, the Arts Council, for their tireless admini- strative support, and Cognac Courvoisier, as sponsors, deserve a good few more than three cheers.
Dufy's popularity with the world at large and decided upopularity with highbrows, both largely derive from the extraordinary exposure accorded, as it turns out, only one aspect of his art: the sketchy and pretty paintings (so endlessly reproduced as prints) of flat-race meetings or boating regattas, all blue skies, bunting and graphic licence; par- ticularly chosen to brighten grim corners of English life, because many of them depict royal English occasions Henley, Ascot, the coronation of George VI. A corner or two at the Hayward take due account of this work, but that no more room has been found for it is indicative of Dufy's technical and imaginative range as an artist, which in turn is the successful revelation of the ex- hibition. And what a revelation it is, con- taining not just paintings, from every period, of much greater strength and varie- ty than the popular prints suggest, but drawings, illustrated books, mural decora- tkons, tapestries, fabrics and fabric designs (some of them exhibited in the form of Paul Poiret dresses of the pre- and post-first- world-war period), theatre designs, posters and ceramics. Not only does Dufy emerge from all this as a much more substantial painter and draughtsman than he has previously been given credit for, but as a designer of probably unique importance this century — a combination of talents that, in Bryan Robertson's surely justified opinion, makes him one of the handful of artists who have 'helped to create a modern visual sensibility and perception'.
There is a robust and a dainty side to Dufy's art. In the paintings — oil and watercolour — he is most memorable when robust; in his drawings both robust and dainty examples catch the imagination and the eye. If however, the two are mixed so that the daintiness of the drawing gets the better of the robustness of his painting — as in so many of his best-known pictures — he is at his worst. On the whole the more spare both his drawing and painting, the more beautiful (though not necessarily more in- teresting) it is. Spare paintings crop up throughout his life, but none more mem- orably than in the last years of his life. For paintings of rough complication the years just before and after the first world war prove the most productive. Both types reveal him to be a masterful translator of light, hence his success with pictures of the sea — his blackest, most diverse, work pro- viding enough stylistic food for thought in these days of the figurative backlash to make the exhibition topical as well as timely. But Dufy also shows himself to be no less a master in the pictorial interpretation of music. His father was an amateur organist, one of his brothers wrote music criticism and he himself attended concerts and con- cert rehearsals with weekly regularity all his life. Perhaps it is this knowledge of musical form and pattern which makes him surely the most inventive fabric designer of his time. His 1919/20 abstract designs in par- ticular, which proves the match of all those Russian ones in the Costakis Collection put together, startlingly prefigure the designs of some of the most famous abstract painters of the Sixties.
The exhibition is most artfully, and not always chronologically, hung to emphasise these various strengths and characteristics of the artist's work, many of which come as a complete surprise. 'Those were the days' is a lamentation frequently to be heard in the glorious textile section and, apart from a few intellectuals grimly holding to their preconceptions, surely few will come out less happy than they went in. Bryan Robert- son gracefully leaves the last word to Ger- trude Stein (Dufy's still underestimated contemporary): 'You have to really love what is to have pleasure and Dufy does real- ly love what is and we have the pleasure.' We do indeed.
The juxtaposition of Hockney's latest (on the whole) photographs on the top floor has some relevance, because Hockney is something of a disciple of Dufy — a lesser English version in a less elegant age it might even be said. It is also undeniable that, as our only artist of 'show biz' appeal, his name will undoubtedly pull crowds that Dufy's alone would not. On both counts, therefore, his selection can be applauded. The photographs themselves, however, are more open to criticism. Not for the first time he shows an artistic innocence that amounts to indifferent arrogance. His panoramas of landscape or buildings might just as well, and much more easily, be done with a fish-eye lens; and the much publicis- ed notion that he is introducing 'time' into still photography when he joins different shots of a single domestic scene to form a fractured whole, is a lot less original than he seems to think it is. So unoriginal, in fact, that one wonders with amazement how he can have let so much art pass him by. The last 20 years, in particular, have witnessed artist after artist wrestling with the problem of how to present simultaneity or sequen- tiality of action in the static forms of photography and painting; and it only adds to the insult of Hockney's apparent ig- norance that many of the most successful of them have been English. There have been, to name but two such examples, the pain- tings of Peter Phillips and the photographs of Gilbert & George, both pre-dating the Hockney format. Let us hope it will now be back to the drawing-board.
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