ART
PASMORE becomes a constructivist ; Sutherland turns to portraiture. There seems to be no glance of recognition as the two files of ants pass one another in opposite directions, intent upon their unseen destinations. The perennial ambivalence of art—in the last analysis its mainspring—is as marked as ever. Nevertheless, as the formal discoveries of the great pioneers of the first thirty years of this century become dispersed throughout the world and settle slciwly into a new academicism, disenchantment spreads. An increasing number of painters retreat from the impasse towards a form of realism, and one may note the beginnings of a new, though non- impressionist, return to the object. Nothing now remains to be discovered except the painter's own soul.
But what is realism ? Today it ranges from existentialist pessi- mism, outlined in heavy black, to the clinical recording of character or a nostalgic response to the big city that is our contemporary equivalent to Inicklin's Toteninsel. Politically decreed (as increas- ingly it is on the Continent), it becomes tendentious and anecdotic, though painters like Gtittuso in Italy (whose vast battle-piece is a major talking-point of the Venice Biennale) and Pignon in France doubtless find intellectual stimulus in the attempt to relate narrative painting to some sort of contemporary idiom. A measure of the confusion wrought in the fashionable mind by the word is indicated by the exhibition " Recent Trends in Realist Painting " at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street. The selection is admittedly and disarmingly wayward—Freud but not Spencer ; Bellingham-Smith but not Ayrton • Pulliam but not Burra. Three- quarters of the work shown is realist only by comparison with full- blooded abstraction or surrealism.
The exhibition has a number of interesting things in it, however. There are canvases by several French painters not often seen in London—the heavy-handed Balthus, who once said he " wished to do surrealism after Courbet," the harsh Gruber, the youthful, ambitious and turgid Rebeyrolle, and the tasteful Minaux. Masson shows two recent paintings, as frothy and Oriental and evocative as once he was angular and linear and unequivocal ; Giacometti contributes two feathery presences. Save for the excellent portraits by Freud and Minton, the influence of Francis Bacon pervades the British paintings.
Sutherland's second painting (dated 1949-50) is the most inter- esting in the exhibition, and so totally unlike anything he has done before that it is worth considering at spme length. Two figures are walking away from the spectator, throwing their shadows before them. At the right a dog, cut by the frame, ambles into the picture. Behind the horizontal railing behind the figures, three stiff pillars of palm-trees, fronded at the top, support the blue-green sky. The scene may well have had i,ts origins in a photograph, for in a sense its content is both casual and insignificant. At the same time the painting is filled with susriense and anticipation and' a drama that results from the manipulation of space. Sutherland, in some of his war-pictures, showed his awareness of the potentialities of deep perspective, and this study, though organised in planes parallel to the picture surface, has some of the same qualities.
Realism, then, in so far as it can be found in this exhibition, is contemplative and emotive, rather than didactic. It finds its authority in a visual-stimulus ; it is the result, not' of an intellectual- belief in the social justification of naturalism, but of a need to find, in the emphasis of some aspect of the natural world, reinforcement for the expression of an artistic sensibility. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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