Men of moment
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Utopia or Oblivion R. Buckminster Fuller (Allen Lane: The Penguin Press 60s) Time's Thievish Progress (Autobiography III) John Rothenstein (Cassell 60s) It is extremely easy to poke good-humoured fun at Buckminster Fuller on the evidence of his own writings, especially when set out at sufficient length, as they are here, for the style to come through in all its awkward- ness. Sometimes his prose appears to settle for that lengthy, sonorous but plain, quasi- biblical flow of emphatic language so characteristic of many American writers, especially when they are 'improvers' or con- cerned with what R. B. Kitaj, the American artist, calls 'efficacious politics'. But then the clear flow of words is dispersed into a tor- tuously heavy dough of elliptical thought and general obscurantism: the dough is gritty, too, as if it's been dropped on the floor. You can wait ten minutes for a comma, and then whole clusters of them ap- pear distributed with majestic, horribly con- fusing, inconsequentiality.
Buckminster Fuller is, however, some kind of genius and its impact is not entirely muf- fled by the way he writes. He is not a 'village explainer', as Gertrude Stein said, of Ezra Pound, 'very nice if you are a village, if not, not'. By contrast, Fuller is a cosmic 'corn- prehensivist', to use his own word.
The way he writes and the way he thinks are often at variance with each other; that is, the thought really is far above the style and leaps off at so many tangents, however distantly related, that the effort required to keep up with him leaves you slightly dizzy. Only relate', said E. M. Forster; but the trouble here is that Buckminster Fuller does not have the divine gift of relating one thing to another, with revelatory consequences, so much as a positive mania for free-association within his chosen interests of practically everything under the sun, though concen- trating mainly on technology, sociology, architecture, geometry, computers, eco- nomics, electronics, communications, be- haviour patterns and a number of allied weighty issues. His cosmic awareness is Whitmanesque in its open-visioned, unblin- kered concern and very American (still Whit- manesque) in its passion for concrete imagery, for endless recitals of facts, figures, diagrams, and historical parallels.
Famous chiefly for the geodesic dome which was first seen by a great mass of people at the Canadian Expo in the shape of the huge American pavilion, Fuller pushes out all the time towards 'a Skyoceon Map', the.`geosocial revolution', 'curricula and the design initiative' and other matters relating to a world situation which should now be conditioned by wholly new concepts spring- ing from recent discoveries in biochemistry and electronics. What makes Fuller's con- tribution unique is that he is an artist, an inventor, and a designer, before he is a theorist. Passionately concerned with the evils of fragmentation in the face of the whole' evidence, he is a comprehensivist in an age of excessive specialisation: deter- mined at a time of crisis to forge a new language with which to express the new dilemmas or assess the new factors. If the result is tough reading it is well worth the effort, for at seventy-five Buckminster Fuller
knows most of the questions and has had the imagination to seize upon quite a number of powerfully original answers. This is an important book by a great man, if you take it slowly.
With the third volume of John Rothen- stein's autobiography, life as we know it comes flooding back again described with an elegantly mannered, exact, almost Edwardian flair for formal language. Rothenstein is, first, an excellent professional writer and not a public figure who has taken up the pen. His memory is capacious and his assessments of artists' characters very precise but in- clined, amiably enough, to warmth and an easy toleration. He is wonderfully good on Spencer, Lewis, Smith and Bacon. among others: his memoirs are always subtle keys to the artists' work and identity.
Three things have to be said immediately about Rothenstein. He is an excellent writer and an acute art historian; what he is not in sympathy with he mainly ignores, though there is. an absorbing section in his book which deals with recent developments in art in a manner that is basically sceptical but refreshingly open-ended. On his own life and direct experience he is more inclined to skate over surfaces than to probe deeply: but this is, after all, the autobiography of a still public person and the comments that he permits himself have the ring of honesty.
The second thing that must be considered is that he was Director of the Tate for a long period in its history when its income for the acquisition of new works of art was nothing short of a national disgrace.
Bearing this in mind, with the fact that Rothenstein is supposed to have been con- servative in his taste, it should always be re- membered that he fought strenuously for the best artists of approximately his own generation—and with success: one can do little more. The Tate is rich in the work of artists who were, in their day, considered thoroughly awkward: Spencer, Lewis, Burra, Moore, Sutherland, Nicholson, and some others.
The third factor, which properly points all the more forcefully to Rothenstein's reasoned judgments, good humour, and re- silience, is the appalling build-up of circum- stances involving other people's egos, vanity, ambitions, treachery, and on occasion psy- chotic dementia, that triggered off and fed the flames of the so-called Tate Gallery affair, described in volume two of Rothen- stein's autobiography. This was dealt with on that occasion in what seemed to some people rather self-justifying accents, but in truth Rothenstein was incredibly self- disciplined. The way in which the Trustees abused their power is touched on again, briefly, in the present book : 'But the circum- stance that revealed beyond question the seriously changed relation between Trustees and the staff was the secret appointment by the Trustees of one of their own number as my successor. In the event they had to be reminded that the prerogatNe for such ap- pointments belonged to the Prime Minister and the appointment was not confirmed .. The job was publicly advertised at the time, but applicants put in for it with little con- fidence.
Now that the Tate is a happier institution. it can at least be said in recompense for the suffering that Rothenstein was exposed to by chicanery from individuals whose job it was to support him, that John Rothenstein the writer and scrupulous chronicler of modern British art will have a place within its history when those other nonentities will have been forgotten. His book ends with a most loving account of the history of his home and its environment in the Thame Valley, and the book is filled with a warm zest for life tem- pered, self-mockingly, by a mild caution and mistrust of excess that is never imposed over others. There are many, very funny, poker- faced descriptions of the eccentricities of artists. The hook is hugely enjoyable, and a real document of its time.
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