Arts

Sutherland and the head-hunters

Bryan Robertson

There has never been such a time as the twentieth century for masks and evasions. With bombs, pesticides and fingers itching to change the ecological balance, Nature itself is scarcely encouraged to maintain its natural cycles. As part of nature, many of us are in practically full armour most of the time, with the visor firmly clamped down. Natural cycles? Anne Bancroft is currently playing, off-Broadway, the role of our hero's mother in a new play by the brilliantly funny John Guare which depicts the big Galactic freeze-up (which comes after what James Purdy once called the economic burn-out). Miss Bancroft's alarmingly lively mother — remember Mrs Robinson? — is both parents in one because she impregnated herself with her own banked semen after she'd switched from man to' woman with the sex-change op. Joyce wrote of 'every man his own wife', but this is a variation that Ulysses couldn't envisage.

If masks are in favour, life itself is a protracted masque, either acted in or produced by ourselves as actor-managers. Fancydress costumes, rather more opaque and resilient than you can find in thrift shops, are equally de rigueur. role-playing has been scrutinised more than enough: before popular psychology was flipped over the book counters at us and so confused the students, we'd at least read Radiguet's Le Bal du Conte d'Orgel — or Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity; we'd certainly seen in the theatre Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, or, in the cinema, watched Renoir's La Regle du Jeu.

`Dream delivers us to dream', said Emerson over a hundred years ago, accurately as ever as the harbinger of existentialism and much else of recent and radical consequence, 'and there is no end to illusion'. But in this century our passion for disguise and concealment — our morbid dread of full frontal exposure — goes far beyond a dream-laden cruise away from reality.

We're rather good about reality, in fact: Marxist, Taoist, Buddhist, tightly pragmatic Tory or uneasily pious Labour Party realities, birth dreams and fears of dying, the psycho-sexual facts of life, cancer or genocide: we face up to it all, but rarely to ourselves, We all want to be different: most unexercised intellectuals would rather look like Bjorn Borg playing tennis.

Nobody is satisfied, or very few. A surprising number of adults are content to eke out an emotionally precarious existence inside the self-engendered confines of infantilism, or fantasy that's vaguely romantic,or painfully neurotic but equally self-projected.

If all this suggests irresponsible, self

indulgent fooling around with circumstances both real or imagined, and an inability to be at ease with ourselves, it may also suggest an alibi, though hardly one of morality or ethics.

This alibi, of slovenliness, calls attention to the fact that most of us have lived for a long time in a hazy post-Freudian, postJungian wide Sargasso sea of illiteracy and half-digested misinformation — over which we do not so much skim as snorkel, with inadequate equipment and an inability to float easily let alone swim.

The roots of contemporary mannerism are plainly not healthy, clearly unwise. Mannerism in art history refers to a kind of art which corties into being when the dominant style of a given period — like Baroque, for instance — becomes vapid, anaemic, and plumply, thinly or neurasthenically effete through lack of faith, the essential driving force behind any action, the formative, constructive flow or spiral in any form, its morphological energy.

It is possible to have no beliefs: to be incapable, through despair or merely bad experience, of subscribing to any of the orthodoxies — but to be possessed and driven by invincible faith. But all this is difficult for the artist forced by history, patronage and the market to forge an immediately recognisable and authoritative style at a time (since 1870 in fact) when revivalism is all the rage. Under these conditions, each successive and supposedly new style is instantly mistrusted as soon as it's recognised and accepted. We cannot wait, right now, to bring back the 'sixties, that heartless, fat, money-grubbing, if hectic and adventurous, ardent and joyous period — having killed, through adoring misinterpretation, the 'twenties through to the 'fifties. The instant expendability of art goes back to the Gothic revival. Even our best known clothes designers are mostly costumiers rather than couturiers.

If manners not only naaketh man but, in a time of no beliefs, create mannerist society, recent times are still more fatuous, ethically and aesthetically, so that the artist's search for truthful definition in abstract or figurative terms has been doubly confounded. If he's wanted to explore figuration and avoid abstract devices, rejecting their dangerous capacity to become impasse-solutions, in themselves, in his attempt to explore what he actually perceives around him, then it's even harder for such an artist as Sutherland, with his special qualities of abstract, formal awareness as well as direct perceptual insight, 'The eye is the first circle,' said Emerson, also, who plainly envisaged the advent of conceptual art in which art cri ticism made manifest is substituted for art as an ordered work of imagination and method, a good servant and a rotten master, elevated above inspiration itself. But those who fret for the return of readily, directly comprehensible 'realistic' painting should be warned that all the best figurative art of our century is, without exception, mournful, grim or wildly, abusively deranged in spirit and substance.

This dark strain extends from the tristesse of Picasso's rose and blue periods: cripples, beggars, emaciated circus performers, pallidly enigmatic girls; through Beckmann's costumed odysseys of revenge and burial, Grosz's pig-faced racketeers or haggard transvestites in Berlin; Tchelitchev or Berman's bitter-sweet but intrinsically dark romanticism; the parochial Euston Road artists' genteel, frugal sense of colour and touch — striving for Degas! —as they painted from social conscience — Mass Observation — their charladies; to the screaming horrors of Bacon's abandoned crew of strolling players who only know two equivocal roles: the jailer, and the prisoner.

In America, Edward Hopper's vision of all night hash-houses and drab streets deserted in their low-keyed sober cold colour, painted near-anonymity of surface, calm dead light of noon, late afternoon or 2am or Sunday mornings in America, is hardly cheerful. If Hopper speaks for an inert realism, which he does most nobly considering his time and place, then Vermeer's apparently dead-pan 'View of Delft' makes one want to cheer for the luminous human spirit.

Sickert's Camden Town interiors, or elderly people on seaside benches aren't cheerful either. There's the old Bedford, but his best theatre piece is the raising of Ldtarus.

Piero's 'Flagellation of Christ' is an astounding feat of abstract art, but if it doesn't exactly raise a smile, we know that Botticelli and Bellini aren't far away. But who, since Matisse, has celebrated the comforts and pleasures of our domestic lives, pretty women, and views across terraces to the hills at sunrise? Or aquariums, since Monet and Matisse?

The greatest realist painter of our century is Balthus, but he has an unnerving vision: very young girls, in alertly unconcerned, dreamy pre-pubescenee,, loll around invitingly on chairs and couches like incipient lesbians; violence tears through everything: that pearlescent white skin of the naked girl lying — or is it thrown — back on the bed has her head twisted, and almost out of sight, at a frightening angle, and why is the 'huge knife still quivering on the bare floorboards by the bed in this empty, windowless room?

A child with an ancient, baleful face watches goldfish in a bowl with the same intern patience as the eat/diners wait for their fish suppers in the big murals in La Mediterranee in Paris, which Balthus painted years ago.Some of his most cornpelling work is the pen illustrations for Wuthering Heights, and the turbulence and destruction of that masterpiece are the least of the pressures in Balthus. See the mulatto grope the little skipping girl in his 'Passage du Commerce' (Mr James Thrall Soby's version in Connecticut), but don't avert the eye before you see, in the same street scene, a figure in white carrying a ladder which prefigures the whole of George Segal's white plaster figures with cinema letters on ladders or women at dressing tables, and realise how just it is to compare Balthus, formally at least, with artists so disparate and unevenly grand as Piero, Poussin, Courbet, Tenniel and Caravaggio. All this is a far cry from David Hockney, of different and jokier intent, but with a curiously desiccated, old-man-as-voyeur dryness and asexuality. in his vision, and his strange lack of sensuousness that's finally a bit depressing.What of the portraitist? Is he centrally irrelevant to present needs, apart from board-room trophies, or merely de trop? Forget photography: it replaced nothing except amateur sketchers who worked innocently and for pleasure instead of a thousand pounds a fling, as they do now in provincial Guildhall or RA summer shows: the camera is the biggest liar in the business, it can focus on a flatiron and produce the perfect image of a fortified pointed citadel in eastern Persia.

To provide trophies and memorials, portfaiture as taxidermy, or the art of the shrunken and stuffed head, is a well-known, still popular, even loved art form, as affectionately regarded and just about as unhealthily as the way in which Tony Perkins watches and wore his mother's wig in Psycho. This bloodless form of head-hunting can be found nearer home than New Guinea; in Burlington House every summer.

There's also portraiture as an advanceguard activity of the mortician, recently well demonstrated by the passionately cold Andy Warhol. A most lovingly aesthetic exponent of the great American Way of Death, Warhol's images tightly embody death and violence: the suicide leap from the Empire State, the electric chair, a lynching, 'wanted men' — lethal camp, unknown to Miss Sontag, Taylor garishly made-up for photographers to conceal her deathly appearance after a near-fatal operation, Jacqueline K. after her husband's death. Even the flatly painted soup cans are embalmed. Some early pencil drawings of crumpled soup cans look as if they're already wilting under destructive sentence from those grinder machines.

There is much else to say about portraiture since Degas, Whistler and Fantin Latour illuminated the human likeness by explaining it for the last time with love — as well as with pre-Freudian psychological acumen. Whistler's 'Mother' is one of the great modern images: as monumentally unsentimental in its understated subtlety of tone, and as original in perception as well as concept, as the passages in Proust on the death of his grandmother.

With Mallarme (his close friend, as Ter

ence Maloon reminded us last week at the Somerset House Thames exhibition) Whistler was the other true founder of modern art. Without Whistler, Morris Louis, Olitski and many other painters could not have existed. Mallarme triggered off, in 'Lin Coup de De', the principles of chance as in John Cage's use of the I Ching in musical composition, and randomly abstract collage, as in the Ph i Selon Pit, which anti cipates the Dada collages of Hans Richter as well as the 'simultaneity' theories of Messiaen and Boulez. But Whistler who was no more an aesthete than Rothko was simply a great 'colourist', brought his psychological probings, as delicately robust in visual, tex tural terms as those of Henry James, another transported American with second sight, and his slowly spiralling, muted laser beams of intelligence into the very air, troubling it with a burgeoning awareness, an inhabited presence, as his golden rockets slowly shoot up into the dark blue fir mament of night to cascade down like veils, like Morris Louis, Olitski and so many of his other, later fellow-countrymen. Whistler and Monet achieved for space, air, atmosphere, what Matisse gained later for pure colour — liberation and a new life.

Whistler achieved so much i else other than portraiture; but, it's worth remem bering that, after the 'Mona Lisa', his portrait of his mother is the human image most fooled around with, obsessively, by other artists — which doesn't explain its strength but indicates its potency. But we now arrive at the fresh issue of academicism; and here I must usher in the brave, I believe intrepid (and very patient) subject of these notes: Graham Sutherland. Sutherland is an avowed Catholic artist, which could mean that the assumption of faith, for he is a convert to the church, means the concession of belief. But to be so clearly and tightly registered doesn't make life easier for any artist. Artists prefer open options, pubs with many exits.

In tackling portraiture, as an unfashionable issue, Sutherland's disadvantage was formidable — as one of the most deeply poetic and original landscape imagists of this century (if you doubt me, name all the others, consider who's done better with the metamorphoses of landscape).

In 1940, when he was, like Moore, briefly a war-time national hero through his great mining paintings, Sutherland told his keenest and earliest admirer and patron, Kenneth Clark, that he wanted to try his hand at portraiture eventually and the remark signalled, at its first realisation, a logical extension of his landscape terrain for Sutherland's first subject was Maugham.

But later portraiture achieved a more directly independent and more subtly disconcerting ethos and momentum which the National Portrait Gallery's magnificently presented show at Carlton House Terrace demonstrates with the nicest, most delicate of clues conflicting so absorbingly with far more directly clamorous, sometimes raucous, visual thrust.