Mad dogs and Englishmen ARTS
PAUL GRINKE
There is no need for the moment to go out in the midday sun to capture the distinctive flavour of the Englishman abroad, as the Vic- toria and Albert Museum has organised a large and splendid exhibition, called 'Englishmen in Italy,' which will run until the autumn. It is almost entirely a pictorial feast, and the ex- hibits have been left to speak for themselves with neither catalogue notes nor introduction. A few cases of books give some indication of the vast range of travel literature produced, for the edification of Grand Tourists, but the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are poorly represented and the lack of explanatory notes makes the literary background of the exhibition into a rather trivial sideshow.
What the exhibition does suggest, and I think brilliantly, is the tremendous impact of Italy on the English watercolour school, and also the curious regional preferences shown by artists at different times. In the eighteenth cen- tury Rome was the undoubted Mecca of the travelling artist. It offered a reasonable chance of employment by one of the many rich amateurs passing through on their way to examine the ruins in the south, and had an obviously highly developed artistic colony as well as being a flourishing entrepot for export- ing all kinds of works of art. The route through Italy was well defined and predictably grand: a quick look at Venice with the cultured Con- sul Smith, on to Florence to catch up on gossip with Horace Mann, Walpole's indefatigable correspondent, thence to Rome for business and a gawp at the sites and on to Sir William Hamilton's luxurious villa at Portici, near Naples, where the talk was full of Her- culaneum volcanoes and, if you arrived late enough in the century, you might catch lovely Emma and dashing Horatio.
Even the artists who went under their own steam, rather than in the entourage of some cultivated milord, showed a disconcerting lack of originality in their choice of locale. J. R. Cozens, the doyen of English watercolourists, never strayed much beyond the environs of Rome and Sir William Hamilton's villa, but his treatment of those sites remains unsurpassed. All his watercolours, and there are a plentiful supply of them in this exhibition, are in velvety sweeps of blue and grey, usually taken at sun- set and incomparably rich and mysterious. No one else came anywhere near approaching his mastery of this medium until Turner. Of the other eighteenth century watercolourists who gravitated towards Rome, some are merely pedestrian topographers, others, like Pars and Willy Reveley, had an architectural training and produced some excellent views of the monuments of ancient Rome. Others again, like Alexander Runciman, saw ruined temples as stage designs, appropriate settings for tragedy rather than milestones in the historic progres- sion of architectural styles. The Scots, it seems, were insatiable enthusiasts for Italian landscape and the exhibition includes some of the best work of Jacob More, David Allan, John Alexander and, of course, Allan Ramsay, com- plete with a sketchbook of jottings taken in Italy.
In the nineteenth century, the emphasis changes from noble patronage and informed antiquarian curiosity to a cheerful enthusiasm for those watering places that offered the most spectacular effects of light. Venice takes over from Rome as the centre of visiting water- colour talent, though Rome, with the German Nazarenes dominating artistic café society, still appealed to the purists. Bonnington, Turner and their hosts of minor followers left an indelible image of Venice as a kind of magical aurora borealis, a romantic pot-pourri of white stone, blue water and ever-changing light. The Turners arc as magnificent as one might expect and there is an unusually interesting and rarely displayed group of sketchbooks. Equally in- teresting are the Samuel Palmers of Florence and Rome, from that watershed in his develop- ment between the visionary period of Shore- ham Valley and the later saccharine-sweet potboilers. The rather grandiose panorama of Florence, in particular, still has elements of his earlier style but points unerringly towards Ruskin.
Ruskin and Lear terminate the show; the few later works are a decided mistake, and also signal the end of the Italian hold on English watercolour painting. Apart from being a rare chance to feast one's eyes on a truly superb collection of the very best English watercolours, this exhibition is a reminder that a compre- hensive exhibition of the Grand Tour is long overdue, though the size and scope of such a show would be pretty daunting. For the moment one can hardly cavil at the present selection.
Meanwhile, at the Whitechapel Gallery, there is a thirty-year retrospective of the work of Ghika, a Greek painter whose work is not often seen in London. His background is Cubist Paris and the international world of stage design, mixed with a firm allegiance to the Greek landscape. This kind of post-Cubist painting tends all too easily to degenerate into senti- mental pattern-making overlaid with a veneer of narrative sugar. A number of painters in England in the late 'forties and 'fifties found themselves enmeshed in this particular trap, and here the irresistible scenery of Greece makes all but the most resolute canvases little better than rather appetising travelogues. If Ghika has not entirely succumbed to this temp- tation, a number of his paintings come peri- lously close to it. Some of his earlier canvases have a definite affinity with the Byzantine masters of mosaic, an arrangement of line which the Cubists themselves would not have scorned, but others make the surely too obvious identification of little windmills and white- painted island houses with the predetermined notional Cubist landscape. The best things in the exhibition are the large pair of paintings called Sky and Earth, painted in 1966, which would, incidentally. make magnificent back- cloths.
Three sculpture shows in London are worth a look-- most notably the Magritte exhibition at the Hanover Gallery. It has always surprised me that there is not more surrealist sculpture. since their curiously emblematic humour is so eminently realisable in metal. The images here will be familiar to admirers of Magritte's painting, but are considerably more disturbing life-size. At the Marlborough New London Gallery is an exhibition of the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, his first in London. The favourite motif is a smooth outer husk split open to reveal a rough interior; the sensation is not unlike discovering a rotten orange, and then realising that all the others arc the same.
Somewhat more relaxed is the exhibition of Noguchi at Gimpel Fils, a polished perform- ance by the foremost Japanese sculptor whose interests extend from Martha Graham and stage design to Buckminster Fuller and tradi- tional Japanese landscaping in a modern urban setting. I particularly liked a number of definitely minimal sculptures, in the American sense, reminiscent of elephant droppings, and some elegantly archaic suspended metal bars which clang resonantly like a temple gong. His other pieces, immaculately hollowed and grooved, seem to make too overt an appeal to inquisitive fingers.
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