ART
Who's kidding
Evan Anthony
It's treacle time in the galleries, and we have pictures of the kiddies, by the kiddies, and for the kiddies. Bah, what a lot of humbug there is around. However, life needn't be all rabbits, wrens and bluetits. Nuts to Mrs Squirrel — and to the exhibition of paintings for the nursery at the Medici Gallery in Grafton Street. If it's appealing to the eyes of the young that concerns you, I think both you and they will have a happier time at Lumley Cazalet in Davies Street, where Francoise Deberdt is exhibiting some fanciful colour etchings and watercolours of an old fashioned moon landing, a whale ingesting, and a princess or two. At the Prudhoe Gallery, Duke Street, Raymond Chow is part of a mixed exhibition, and his drawings of children and buildings go a skilful step deeper. And finally, without going into the subject of art as therapy, or the freshness of vision of children, Through the Eyes of a Child at De La Rue House, 84 Regent Street, is an international exhibition of art by mentally handicapped children, and you would have to be paded indeed to remain immune to the impact of such stuff as children's dreams and nightmares are made on — whatever their IQs.
And now girls and boys, run along and play while I tell mummy and daddy about a genius. Joan Eardley died of cancer in 1963 at the age of forty-two. Roland, Browse and Delbanco of Cork Street are presenting her work as part of a 'Christmas present exhibition.' It is quite a present. Some seventy small pastels and several paintings are all that remain of her estate. She painted scenes of the slums of Glasgow and of the Catterline coast. There are pictures of horses and riders, of children, of broken-down dwellings — and if that survey of subject matter inclines you to think that all we have here is a sociologically oriented artist, pulling relentlessly at the heart-strings, you would be missing the point by a mile. The picture of a slum child sitting in a doorway may be moving, a street with rundown buildings can be romantically depressing — but these are not sentimental pictures, tugging away at you with highly emotive subject matter. If you are moved it is because extraordinary talent is a very, moving thing, and having that talent Joan Eardley is capable of touching profound depths of feeling in any viewer.
A lonely child, a chink in a wall, brickwork in need of repair — they represent more than an artist's indictment of the indifference of the local council; these are not posters produced by Shelter. Joan Eardley doesn't merely draw dilapidated walls — she paints portraits of walls. These are incredibly beautiful pictures — it's as simple and complicated as that.
Superficially more complicated, but really much simpler, is the work of Peter Behan, trying too hard to attract attention by being enigmatic. At the Buckingham Gallery in Old Bond Street, Behan's six feet by five canvases look a bit phoney. In
a series of paintings called Everyone's Going to the Country we see aborted
figures, floating in space, looking like
testicles or breasts or stumps or . . . choose your weapon. Anyway, there's a lot of canvas left white, and there are bits of
turf here and there. What I mind most about these examples of Behan's work is that I don't believe they really mean much to the artist — it is essentially too cerebral and too affected an exercise. An actress at the opening who claims to have reacted
positively and immediately to one of the paintings told me that it reminded her of
the Swiss Cottage swimming baths, so I suppose he's communicating with somebody. No, it wasn't Esther Williams.
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