Arts
Quaint but unsentimental
John McEwen
As an installation, the most impressive contemporary exhibition of the moment is the matching of Harry Holland's paintings with the sculpture of Malcolm Poynter at the Roundhouse (till 7 July). Of particular interest are Holland's figurative pictures of erotic and/or urban subjects. Holland is in his late 30s and his modelled, tonal. geometrically composed oils of men and women in ambiguous. somewhat dreamlike. relation to each other convey the authority and originality of a mature style. The work covers the last three years but shows some development nonetheless in the increasingly complex poses of the figures and an ambitious shift in subject from the purely incidental to contemporary reinterpretations of classical myths.
The world depicted is chillingly impersonal, people as objects, apparently a deliberate criticism of capitalist society, in which eroticism rises like etiolated fungi in the form of translucently white naked women. their willowy movements strikingly contrasted with the wooden poses of seedily obscured onlookers. One or two of the paintings are straightforward portraits of women, softly modelled celebrations of form. After years of abstract fashion. figurative and representational art is once more accepted in smart circles and no longer dismissed as a defunct mode of expression.
Holland's work only confirms the wisdom of this broader trend. He is a relatively new and extremely interesting addition to the front rank of today's English artists. His prints and drawings are good too. Malcolm Poynter's plaster-cast sculptures of more obviously dehumanised outcasts benefits from this good company but, though initially arresting, reveal themselves on closer scrutiny to be derivative to the point of cliché both in style and subject.
Teddy Millington Drake must now be generally recognised as the best painter of architecture we have, but should any dissenters remain they need only go for confirmation to his latest and best exhibition at Hartnoll & Eyre (till 6 July), 'India Revisited — Paintings of Gujarat, Gwalior. Agra and Lucknow'.
The more to do With structure, volume and detail, the better his work is, as the eight views of or from interiors in the present selection attest. Such concentration suits his deceptively effortless style of watery but goluptious washes bolstered and defined by bold pencil drawing. Sometimes in the past such colour has been little more than staining but more and more he succeeds in making it integral to the composition. Twilit interiors of lilac, rose and apricot contrast with the bleached colours of the full sunlight outside. Fat daubs of paint emphasise the squatness of a frontier wall. He has achieved such integrations before but never more consistently or so successfully. Another view of India. psychological rather than topographical. is presented by the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar (Hester van Royen and Anthony Stokes till 14 July). At home in Baroda Khakhar is a part-time accountant; but for the past few months he has been preparing the greater part of English subjects 'Man in a Pub' — and in answer to the most persistent question of his English friends he has kindlY provided a list of the things here that he has most liked and why. It is an arch and quizzical document: 'Man of the Year, Jack Scott. Weatherman on TV: His predictions made my life possible in this part of the world. He never deceived me in the promises which were never kept.' The pictures are a similarly enigmatic blend of humour and observation, in style quaint but unsentimental, sophisticatedly westernised but true also to certain Indian traditions. The little contemporary Indian painting previously seen in London has been an eyesore. Khakhar's is not, preciselY because it retains an Indian character and sensibility that his fellow Indian artists too often eschew. But the unfamiliarity of this quality in itself distances his work from a Western audience, for all its references to our way of life and of painting, old and new. Sons following in the footsteps of famous fathers have a harder time of it in art than probably any other profession because odious comparisons are so easy to make. John Hitchen is an unabashed follower of his father Ivon Hitchens and why not? Hitchens senior is too good a painter not to have indicated many unexplored possibilities and some of these his son has already followed up: the use of more than one canvas, for example. or canvases in cruciform. to extend his father's notion of multiple pers • pective. His present paintings (Gilbert Parr till 7 :July). however, suggest that he is backtracking into academic realism. Some of the brushstrokes in his flower pieces display a harmony of intention worthy of his father, the colour can be delightfully uninhibited. but too often jarring description for the sake of it obtrudes. The overall effect is of a hybrid turning into a ponticum. Still, there iS plenty of time for grafting and pruning. His huge triptych 'A Landscape Symphony' designed for the Arts Centre. Christ's HosPital, Horsham can be viewed there till 18 July.
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