ART. PiataNartc though our present desire for change may seem,
compared with the itately progress of other ages, nevertheless art moves sluggishly by political or tech- nological standards. This has been a year Much as any other, close-woven with Promise and loss, argument and apathy, achievement blarney and pleasure. Student promise has thrust into view with relentless regularity—but then it is our curious system to assist promise to germ- inate, while failing to assist it to flower. It IS disturbing to realise how few of the un- known names I have marked in my cata- logues during the year will catch my eye again during the next twelve months. Among the losses must be numbered Matisse and E. McKnight Kauffer, each at ais own level one of the most potent in- thiences upon the art of our time. I am glad there is a film about Matisse which uses the camera's sheer ability to record. Here is the artist, the model, the canvas. The camera • "tur is. The painter's hand swings in a sinu- ous line, hesitates as eye and mind develop a new synthesis, goes back on itself, corrects and hardens an outside curve, gathers Momentum for another bravura sweep. No Masterpiece came out of this little exercise, but it remains a clear record for posterity 5 a twentieth-century master at work, of Matisse actually thinking and feeling on tO the picture' surface. Would that there were More like it.
Argument? I suppose 'art' rated more column-inches in the newspapers this year than for quite a time, what with the rumpus tit the Tate and the Churchill portrait. Architecture remained a forbidden subject. Mithras raised the temperature in Fleet Street for a week or two, but the casual dismissal of the New Barbican scheme by the City scarcely at all. Far away now those Shining hopes of ten years ago. How certain We were then that this time we would really grasp the opportunities that war had given us! New Barbican—and at this stage the detual details of the plan are neither here or there—was our last chance to plan one 40-acre site of the bombed city as a whole. Por smothering it out of hand the City of London receives the palm for apathy. , Achievement? Let us divide the prize Between Ben Nicholson, for storming the C on linen tal citadels with his Bietuude till' exhibition, and Ivon Hitchens, for his !litco, urageous 69-foot decoration in Cecil old 'harp House. Delicacy forbids me to touch 001 on blarney, but pleasure! What q splendid 1'ear of exhibitions this has been! Before my ,Inner eye appears the wonderful Claude rom Petworth, seen after cleaning at Wildenstein's; a Renoir mother and child !It the Lefevre Gallery; the 1908 Picasso nead at Gimpel's. Of course, any selection must be arbitrary. MY year, for example, included a sight of ex:king Farouk's claustrophobic museum li)! Pornography, but did not include the aloglath exhibition in Manchester or the Victoria and Albert; the paintings'from Sao Paolo ; Dufy, and later Mane: and his Circle, at the Tate; Moore at the Leicester Galleries; Leger at the Marlborough Gallery; David Jones's retrospective, now to be seen at Millbank; and, for a baker's dozen, the Diaghilev exhibition. Looking back through this list, I see that no fewer than eight of these exhibitions were presented by the Arts Council. How did we ever manage without
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