Festivals
Venetian Scandal
By BERNARD DENVIR ARTISTS were excluded from the vernissage •of the twenty-ninth Biennale at Venice because (it was said) their cajolery of the critics in 1956 had gone beyond the bounds of circumspection. There were, however, an unusually large number of priests and art-dealers—amateur and otherwise—present. Dominicans like urbane pelicans sipped orange juice at the USSR party, Trudging in the pouring rain, through the mud- soaked grounds of the Giardini, were a constant succession of black cassocks, smart black suits and immaculately starched Roman collars, monastic' habits and Manhattan-styled clerical tuxedos. It would seem that the Church—un- deterred by its brush with Mlle Bardot's father at Brussels—is endeavouring, perhaps ill-advisedly, to transfer public relations from the sphere of the instinctive to that of commercial-cultural psychology. Contrary to expectation, there was no pavilion of religious art this year. As a douceur, however, the 4stituto Internazionale di Arte Liturgica, a well-meaning body which looks rather to Maritain than to the art traditions of the Sacre- Cwur, was offering prizes of nearly six million lire for works of religious art shown at the Biennale. Religious art was a term to be under- stood in a very generous way. Comte Wladimir d'Ormesson, one-time ambassador of France to the Holy See, explained it as Wile qui s'attache a un sujet religleux, mane si elle n'est pas destinge au service du culte.' As he is one of the prime movers in the organisation, his words presumably carry authoritative weight.
Perhaps becauie of the existence of these prizes for religious art, there was an unmistakable ten- dency for crucifixions to swim through the spatial murkiness of even the most advanced abstractions, and for paintings which, in other years, would have been entitled `Girl in a Landscape' now to be called 'Mary Magdalene.' As it turned out, the plum of the religious art prizes went to Manessier, who, like most 'religious' artists, is (roughly) an Expressionist who is closer to Rembrandt than to Poussin. In some ways it was a good thing that it did. For the French, who apply to culture the same full-blooded sense of competitive vigour which other nations reserve for sport or politics, had been expecting the great prizes of the Biennale to go to their own team—the strongest members of which were Masson and Pevsner. They were outrageously disappointed when all the big prizes went to Italians. `Scandale a Venise' shrieked the headlines in M. Wildenstein's weekly Paris art paper Arts, and had not Manessier made good, there would have been barricades in the Piazza San Marco, whilst the toscin sounded from the Campanile.
All this may seem largely irrelevant to the hornme moyen visuel who knows a certain amount about painting and does not know what he likes. But modern art is part of modern society, and the Biennale reflects the fact. It involves politics and publicity, the tourist trade and tax-evasion—all the creaking, obvious machinery by which art is ', related to the general life of the mid-twentieth century. The idealist (and it is he who usually shouts loudest for art to become 'part of society') would be shocked to his bones by the Tammany Hall atmosphere of the pre-opening phases of the biggest art exhibition in the world.
The various prizes which range from £1,000 to a television set or a week's meals at a Venetian restaurant are awarded by a series of committees, made up of the permanent Biennale officials, and the Commissioners of the various national pavilions—Britain being represented this year by Sir Philip Hendy and that doughty victor of many a Biennale Mrs. Somerville, head of the Fine Arts Section of the British Council. Lurid details leak out of what goes on. . . . 'We'll Vote for Masson, if you vote for Kandinsky' . . . or 'Swop you two decorative artists for a draughtsman.'
There is so much involved, and so little of it to do with art in the way that most people under- stand the word. National prestige, and its more practical manifestations—for it must not be for- gotten that the Biennale is a mart as well as an exhibition—counts as much as it does at a meeting of the UN or UNESCO. Personal publicity, at its most astute and pertinacious, is displayed in a manner which would make professionals in the game seem cack-handed. Above all there is a constant battle of ideologies—all of them over- lapping, and interpenetrating. Religious art and non-religious art; abstraction and realism; America or Russia; Italians or non-Italians—these are the main lines of allegiance, and, though aesthetic values- obviously have some importance, it is obvious enough that the disparity on this plane cannot be all that decisive. You cannot produce half a dozen new Moores or Picassos every other year. What the Biennale demonstrates is that modern art is part of modern life. It has - undergone a kind of managerial revolution; it is not only an art des musdes, but an art des con- servateurs.
More serious, however, for the nature of art, and for its future, more patient too of improve- ment, is the whole question of the desirability of `prizes.' Admitting that we live in a `competitive' society, and that art necessarily reflects the fact; realising that the artist works today for an amorphous patron—part rich dilettante, part anonymous civil servant—we can at least avoid further complicating his life by the introduction of this strange, well-meaning 'prize' system. It was all too obvious that amongst the artists of the Western European nations exhibiting at Venice, many had produced their paintings with one eye cocked on the International Institute of Liturgical Art, and the other on the Guggenheim Foundation which distributes every other year the largest art- prizes in the world, and whose director, James Johnson Sweeney. is famed for his Celtic devotion to abstract art. Art, like life, may be a lottery, but it would be a pity were it to devolve into a treble chance.
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