ART
Din extremes of illusionist realism and of non-figurative abstraction are to be found at Arthur Jcffress's gallery in Davies Street and, for the rest of this week, at the Redfern in
Cork Street. Oddly enough, the one no more 'about' anything than the other. The old and modern artists who painted the trompe toed pictures at the former arc so compul- sively objective, the dedicated absolutists loosely grouped around Pasmore at the latter so compulsively subjective, that in neither case is communication added to technique. For the extreme effort between these poles of emotional frigidity, you must go to the small retrospective exhibition of Francis Bacon's paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. These arc certainly about something. though it is not very pleasing.
By 1910-11 Delaunay, Kandinsk■ .1,1 Mondrian had stripped the last flesh from the image of renaissance man and revealed the bare bones underneath. It is odd to find a group of British artists still picking the skeleton forty-five years later. Too much attention, it is true, is paid to the question of influence. That a reclining figure of Henry Moore's contains echoes of the Aztec Chacmool is relatively unimportant. Great art is rich, com- posed of many strands; it can bear the weight of many tastes and centuries. An art of pure essences, however, is like a single thread, the weight on which can never be increased. You may place half a dozen rectangles of colour upon a plain ground as you will, but in the nature of things they will never look very different from the ten which Arp placed in 1916.
The artists at the Redfern are really of two kinds. One kind (Pasmore, Anthony Hill, Kenneth and Mary Martin, to some extent Adrian Heath) finds that something-bigger- than-self, which art has always sought to express, in a mathematical order and the old ideal of the Golden Mean. With calipers and tong division sums doggedly completed they construct their palaces of the intellect. The results seem to me as pleasing as, but no more so than, the visual trace of an equation pro- duced on an oscillograph, or a mathematical model produced from a scientific blueprint. The design of a chair, or a building, or a piece of typography calls for a form-sense in no way different from that of this group, with the proviso that in these cases there is always a ten,sion between the utilitarian demands made upon the designer and the abstract forms he evolves; and that it is the conscious or uncon- scious recognition of thc problem's satisfactory solution which finds favour in the eye of the beholder.
The other kind of artist at the Redfern is an individualist, abstracting according to his personal sensitivity, feeling his way in the actual process of painting. The best are Robert Adams and William Scott, who is really here by accident (in his most recent paintings he has already returned to a more figurative vision allied to that of Kenneth Armitage). The most extreme prophet of negation is Roger Hilton, whose determination to avoid communication of any sort whatsoever inevitably produces the most idiosyncratic and arbitrary result.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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