Contemporary Arts
Forms of the Academic
Tilt: intention of the old art Academies of Western Europe was to establish a pictorial or sculptural rhetoric and then to ensure its transmission from one generation to another in the form of a tradition. The decline of the Academic system began as soon as what •had once existed—to employ the useful distinction proposed by Coomaraswamy—as figures of thought came to degenerate into mere figures of speech, for valuable changes in rhetoric can only occur when they are provoked by serious modifications in idea.
The three main guides which took the place of earlier Academic virtues were those of sincerity, originality and modernity, values which are just as likely to be the sources of a new `academicism'—to use the word in its present pejorative sense—and which have indeed been the inspiration of most of the bad avant-garde art of recent times. This year's summer exhibition of the Royal Academy happens to be accom- panied by some other shows which invite com- ment upon the evolution of the 'academic' and its relation to originality in particular. Needless to say the majority of the paintings at Burlington House are trivial or offensive in idea and in form, or inept in their manufacture, but it would be academic, thoughtless I mean, to take for granted that one could not expect to find on these walls work of genuine merit and seriousness.
The attempt has been made in recent years to enliven and modernise the show by giving space in particular to young painters belonging to the tendency which has been called 'neo-realist'; it is now as natural to find a Bratby or a Middle- ditch or a Greaves at Burlington. House as at the Beaux Arts Gallery or the Biennale. But this particular environment, stuffed as it is with the evidence of received ideas and automatic figures of speech, does brutally reveal the 'academic' hibits in work of an up-to-date appearance. To assert a serious and thoughtful individuality and integrity of expression in these circumstances and surroundings is a special achievement and none of these young artists has looked so persuasive in recent years as Carel Weight, whose intentions at least have some affinities with theirs. His paint- ings of modern life in a figurative language which does not grow out of the established twentieth- century styles have a most affecting firmness on these walls.
Now some would hold it against Weight that his work does not •show an obvious response to modern scientific and/or philosophic world views. To believe that art must. exhibit that kind of modernity is paradoxically the result of our contemporary devotion to history, for the past ‘, can easily be made to prove that the best work " of an epoch necessarily reflects the contemporary world view as expressed in religion, philosophy, science, and must under every circumstance do so. To act upon this principle may simply involve a thoughtless and superstitious attitude to the relationship between the making of pictures and notions of the moment.
Such an elementary mistake is extremely well demonstrated in 'a show at the Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. of some Italian painters, among others there, who have belonged to a recent ideology called Spazialisino. They have been considerably
inspired by the deliberate modernism of the Futurists and it is suggested that 'they do not reject the new visual conventions of science.' Their own claims in this direction are much more confident. The relation between many of these pictures—which belong to the tachiste, action- painting family—and the ideas and revelations of modern science operates at a trivial level, a level of naturalism more often than not. It has the shallow if accomplished prettiness which is the mark of all the most successful 'academic' art to whatever catchphrases, manifestos or ideas recites it may be attached.
The modernism of the fabulously successful Bernard Buffet (Tooth's) is of a different kind. Very precociously he discovered a personal idiom for appealing to a prevailing Parisian mood— attenuated and spiky forms, austere drawing which evoked the image of a cage, sad colour and mournful expression, but an art very far on the melodramatic and picturesque side of genuine tragedy. It was a merit of his earlier pictures that he seemed in them at least to be persuaded of the validity of his performance, but in his latest paintings, mainly still lifes and views of an uninhabited Paris, he goes lamely through the old routines and the results are just embarrassing. One wonders how much longer the success can last.
In his introduction to his excellent choice of pictures by Andre. Derain at Wildenstein's, Denys Sutton reminds us that after a huge early acclaim the artist spent the last thirty years in the wilder- ness, shunned by influential opinion and criticism for his lack of originality. If one of the safe- guards against the 'academic' is a continuing and engaged preoccupation with pictorial problems and a refusal to surrender to expedients of thought and performance, then one cannot say that even Derain avoided his academic moments. But I feel that this was not due so much to laziness of mind or hand as to a failure sometimes to work in the way that suited him. He once said that everyone ought to find the wine that suits him \ and that he had not found it. It would be more proper to say that he did find it but that some- times he drank something else. In that respect he is singularly like Corot,' whose late works are attempts to deal with things for which he had not the taste or the talent.
Derain's fauve paintings, his later landscapes, several of the still lifes and portraits in this exhibition are proof of his excellence. It is right to regard him as a victim of slovenly and `academic' opinion, for it should have been the duty of thoughtful appreciation and indeed of a thoughtful criticism to preserve such work, even if it be inconsistent, from neglect and dismissal.
BASIL TAYLOR
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