Robertson the Whitechapel
BRIDGET RILEY
Bryan Robertson, who left the Whitechapel Gallery this week, became its -director in 1952. One cannot help feeling that this is the end of an era, and one must not let the occa- sion go by without at least an attempt to say what that era achieved. The British contem- porary art scene immediately after the last war was inarked by an infectious apathy and a vici- ous insularity. There was little information available and less wished for. There were few, if any, travelling exhibitions, scarcely any art books or periodicals, and the most meagre opportunities for showing recent work. This state of affairs was underwritten by the curi- ously ambivalent British attitude to foreign artists—that, on the one hand, no native artist could 'hope to compete with them on equal terms, while, on the other, what these foreigners were doing was • so suspect as to be better ignored.
Students who entered art schools in the late 'forties and early 'fifties found them staffed by a generation whose horizons were inevitably bounded by prewar concepts. I clearly remem- ber the shock with which I discovered, in the late 'fifties, that art had not stopped with the surrealists. And, if the intervening twenty odd years were a blank, the enormous upheaval in American painting which was happening at this time was hardly rumoured over here.
What Bryan Robertson did at the White- chapel was simply this: he made people aware of developments outside these islands, he pro- vided a focus for British artists and he encour- aged them to work in an international context. In his own words: 'I've always believed that England's basic trouble has been an inability to come to terms with the twen- tieth century and it is surely crucial to understand now, not 1900 or 1935.' Threaded through the Whitechapel exhibitions of the 'fifties we -find British artists of the generation of Barbara Hepworth, Michael Ayrton and Robert Colqhoun, as well as foreign 'artists such as Mondrian (shown in 1955), Nicholas de Stael (1956), Sidney Nolan (1957), Jackson Pollock (1958), Malevich (1959). In
1960 Henry Moore was given his first large ex- hibition in England outside a commercial gal- lery. Nor must one forget the exhibition of Turner which opened Bryan Robertson's regime, and the famous Stubbs exhibition of 1957. If British eyes were to be opened to the twentieth century on an international front, they were certainly not to be closed to our own past achievements.
But perhaps the most extraordinary develop- ment was reserved for the 'sixties. A whole new generation of British artists began to appear in the Whitechapel atthis period, accompanied as before by major shows of foreign painters, chiefly American (many of them also of a new generation): Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschen- berg, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Philip Gus- ton, Mark Tobey, Serge Poliakoff, Arthur Boyd. The New Generation shows of 1964 and 1965, sponsored by the Stuyvesant Foundation, brought forward a profusion of British painters and sculptors: John Hoyland, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Patrick Procktor, Patrick Caulfield, Paul Huxley, Phillip King, Christopher Sander- son, Tim Scott, Derek Boshier, Roland Piche, Derek Woodham, David Annesley, . Michael Bolus, William Tucker, Anthony Caro and Richard Smith both had one-man shows.
And here, as one who took part in the 1964 show, I must try to explain how Bryan Robert- son's personal friendship with an artist, while losing nothing of natural warmth, is all, in a sense, part of the principles on which he has run the gallery. By taking every opportunity to in- troduce us to visitors to this country—writers, painters, musicians, poets—he encouraged the exchange of ideas and, what is more, on an equal footing. This sense of confidence, at any rate at the beginning, was very necessary. But above all, his unique blend of enthusiasm with critical attention creates a perfect climate for such meetings. Two years ago he wrote: 'We're in the middle of an extraordinary phase in Eng- lish art and I'd like to believe that Whitechapel has provided some of the background stimulus, as well as the celebrations.' Which is exactly what it has done.
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