ARTS
Exhibitions
Indian ink
Giles Auty
Rabindranath Tagore: Paintings and Drawings (Barbican till 5 October) W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs (Barbican till 19 October) New English Art Club Centenary Exhibition (Christie's till 17 September) The short time I have spent so far on the Indian sub-continent stirred profound longings, though for what, precisely, would be hard to say. Seeing the country for the first time, I felt sadness at not having known it much earlier. Two of my cousins grew up in India and were strongly affected by the experience. If one could have two lives, at least one should be spent studying that great country and its cultures.
For all unable to fly off for a month or so and immerse themselves in the heartbreak- ing muddle of Indian life, several visits to the Barbican during the next few weeks to see an exhibition devoted to the multi- faceted works of Rabindranath Tagore will provide some compensation.
Much of the exhibition centres around Tagore's output of painting and drawing, activities which the great poet, philo- sopher, playwright, novelist, composer and writer of songs did not begin until nearly 70. Like the Cornish primitive, Alfred Wallis, who began painting at a similar age, Tagore was an untutored artist. There, of course, most of the comparison ends. Tagore was a man of great cultural knowledge and achievement: the first Asian writer, for instance, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, whereas Wallis was a semi-literate scrap dealer. What links them, however, is their purely visual inven- tiveness. Many men of letters are visually illiterate; my own father, though a first- class scholar, had the lowest ability in drawing I have ever seen. Visual art begins, but does not end, with the inner being. While the artist cannot be more than he or she essentially is, it is quite possible to be a good deal less, through straightforward lack of artistic develop- ment. Those who want to make a lasting impact neglect either aspect at their peril. By the time Tagore began to paint, he had already passed a lifespan of seldom surpassed achievement. India's great poly- math was born in 1861 and died 80 years later. He was thus the almost exact con- temporary of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), one of the few European artists with whom Tagore might have felt an affinity. Ta- gore's visual works began with scribblings made in the margins of his manuscripts. Such doodles, we know, are laden with meaning; those made casually on tele- phone pads, for instance, nearly always reveal homicidal urges towards their au- thor's marital partner or in-laws. Tagore's scribblings carried a rather more complex psychological message, overlaid with a propensity for art nouveau arabesques and curlicues. Doodling, like automatic writ- ing, was a cornerstone of surrealist prac- tice. No doubt this accounts in part for the enthusiastic response which greeted Ta- gore's visual work when it was first shown in Europe and America in 1930, a time when any act which 'opened the sluice gates' of the artist's subconscious was looked on as an unqualified virtue.
For the most part, the works on show at the Barbican are in Indian ink and water- colour and range from rambling scribbles to simple blocks of colour and form. Many are beautiful, some awkward but nearly all interesting. Metamorphosis is a frequent theme, often connected with animals. My own favourites include 'Crescent Shape with Face', 'Lovers', 'Landscape with Yel- low Sky', 'Decorative Bird Form' and a marvellous, semi-vorticist 'Elephant'. Some of this work has qualities in common with the Shoreham-drawings of Samuel Palmer, who also explored the potential of Indian ink. From a poet of outstanding quality, such lyricism is to be expected, of course; yet it should be added that while Tagore was one of the great creative all-rounders of the past century, his visual art forms an interesting, rather than a central part of his total achievement.
Outside his huge range of artistic gifts, Tagore was also an ardent theorist in the often unrewarding fields of international co-operation and progressive education. His great achievement in this area was the foundation of Visva-Bharati, a multi- disciplined international place of study. If alive today, he would surely have been saddened, however, by the recent going to pot of Dartington Hall, an institution for which Tagore's own Sriniketan School provided the model. Like the Elmhirsts who founded Dartington, Tagore had great faith in informal education, with an emph- asis on self-expression and creativity. How sad and paradoxical it has proved that extremes of liberalism in education are as often stifling and enervating as liberating to the aspiring artist. In the climate of the 1930s this had yet to be realised. Today there is no excuse.
While concentrating on Tagore's visual work, the exhibition organisers have realis- tically chosen to provide some idea of the scope of his lifetime's achievements to what may be a new and unaware audience. To this end, excerpts of translated poetry, song recordings and screenings of Satyajit Ray's documentary Rabindranath Tagore play a vital part. Perhaps most enlightening of all is the background provided by Sunil Janah's photographs on the theme of 'Ta- gore and Rural Bengal'. Janah's shots of the Orissa famine of 1944 and of Calcutta docks are among the most moving I have seen. Janah is a true poet of the camera and one who makes his visual points without over-emphasis. Generally he relies on natural effects, such as cloud forma- tions, to set a haunting mood for his images.
In a way, I regret seeing Janah's images before moving downstairs to view the magnificent exhibition devoted to the photographic journalism of the American, W. Eugene Smith, for whom under- emphasis was seldom a problem. Smith embodies many of his homeland's virtues and failings, with brashness and aggression failing to conceal deep inner uncertainties. Smith was a country boy possessed of remarkable energy, talent and courage; his images of wartime Okinawa and peacetime Pittsburgh — which he makes seem almost as hellish — are unforgettable. Whether in Dr Schweitzer's leper village, an asylum in Haiti or the American Deep South, Smith showed tireless concern to prick the con- science of the world. There is much evi- dence he succeeded. It is a measure of Smith's stature as an artist that the last to be convinced was often the photographer himself.
Throughout August I would have been glad to devote this whole review to the New English Art Club Centenary Exhibi- tion at Christie's (8 King Street, SW1). August is the cruellest month for art reviewers, while September promises a harvest of exceptional exhibitions. This show counts as one of these, although many of the painters on view seem repre- sented by untypical works. Looking at some of the artists, it is hard to realise they were once labelled revolutionary.
As ever, I enjoyed quiet delights such as Stanhope Forbes's 'Forging the Anchor', Norman Garstin's 'View of Mount's Bay from Newlyn Harbour' and Sir William Rothenstein's beautifully composed `Mother and Child'. Rothenstein was one of the first to warn Tagore of the dire perils of occidental 'success'. Ironically, since the fervour of his European acclaim in the Twenties, Tagore has been almost entirely neglected here for 50 years.
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