ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
How to be Flexible and Consistent Too
By BRYAN ROBERTSON
(*IN completing the final draft of The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald sent the typescript t Ciertrude Stein for her comments and said, in an accompanying note, that he hoped it was bet- ter than his previous book which Miss Stein had Ilso been kind enough to read before publication. the typescript was returned with a few short, constructive suggestions pencilled in the margins, and a brief note which thanked Fitzgerald and went on to say that Gatsby was a very good book dad a very beautiful book 'but of course it is not better than your earlier book though it is different, for we do not get better as we get older but only different and older.' This is not an accurate quotation, and the story is possibly ,inocryphal, but its implications are relevant to an artist's evolution. Gertrude Stein's observation (itinds pessimistic at first and limiting to our ense of the possibility, at least, of human or artistic improvement. But Miss Stein was not trained in philosophy by William James for nothing, and on second thoughts her maxim is kss negative because it allows for the possibility ol human or artistic change. And this opens up an "en more radical field for speculation, for an artist's evolution is not necessarily a tidy and easily decipherable •progression from a to z, to- wards some absolute peak of perfection. It is "ften an unruly affair, sprawling all over the Place. All the seeds of later development are clearly visible in youthful works whilst later Paintings make explicit reference back to earlier Preoccupations. An artist's evolution is, in fact, a process which alternates between anticipatory and recapitulatory activities: a looking forward, a. marking time, a glance backward—and some- times a moment of synthesis arrives when every- thing comes together. When we consider the art of the past, we tend to extract a particular phase °f an artist's work for approbation from his entire cruvre because that phase happens to fit in With our current notion of what painting is sup- posed to look like. Late Titian, for instance, is supposed to be sublime—at this moment. It may Well be, but the paintings of his middle age are equally wonderful, though rather different. But later Titian is more expressionist, the actual Painting is looser and broader and looks more Modern.
Another tendency today is to expect an artist to stay more or less on one note: perfecting that note, of course, and making occasional shifts in Modulation, but essentially to show a powerful consistency. Flexibility is suspect: only Picasso has managed to get away with it. A clearly de- fined brand-image is more soothing. Wider ranges of interest imply a dispersal of energy, a lack of _,anY strong co-ordinating principle or raison a etre. It is paradoxical that at a time when the Whole artistic situation is marvellously open, and everything is possible, we have the greatest respect and veneration for those artists who move from and magisterially, like giant bulldozers, 'rom a to b and stay there, with imperturbable calm and confidence.
To return to Gertrude Stein's remark, it is un- fashionable for an artist to become different and Older and to move through a series of stylistic Neville Wallis is Ill and hopes to write main shortly. changes—though if the artist is worth con- sideration there will inevitably be a unity in his work as a whole, however abrupt the transitions may appear to be, or even disruptive of earlier phases. All this would seem obvious enough, but in the case of Jean Hdlion we are faced with problems which stem from this kind of pursuit. A gifted French artist from Normandy, whose contribution to twentieth-century art has been radical and sustained, Halion is represented by a compact retrospective show at the Leicester Gal- leries which provides London with a unique ex- perience. He has sturdily resisted the Gallic temptation to refine everything down to a logical and consistent testhetic statement, and instead has given full rein to his own personal logic—which is there, throughout the work, but channelled into several spheres of interest that embrace abstrac- tion and realism with equal force. Without making extravagant claims, it is fair to say (after thirty years' work) that Helion is an important artist and his exhibition should not be missed.
Unfortunately for M. Hdlion, and for students of modern art, there is the sad example of Chirico, who made many beautiful and original paintings in a quasi-abstract metaphysical vein in the earlier years of the century and then, rather noisily, denounced modern art as a whole and, in particular, renounced all his own earlier work which did not subscribe to the ideas contained in his new work—and his new work was bad, vulgar, and academic in the worst sense, and ponderously realistic. The strange case of Chirico is happily isolated, and must not be allowed to confuse our gaze on M. Helion's individual achievement.
His work in the late 'twenties and 'thirties was abstract, hard-edged, immaculately painted, and had its own character. He once observed-- respectfully—to Mondrian that 'a straight line cannot replace a curve': and indeed Helion's paintings at that time did not possess the puri- tanical angularity and uncompromising severity of Mondrian's dynamic abstractions. More to the point, HClion used curved edges and implied rounded shapes in his canvases—and wanted to make 'human' abstractions. (Or an abstraction as rich and wonderful as a man. He couldn't—hence the later venture into realism.) Many other things were at work, of course, too numerous to describe here, but these included a concern for alternating centripetal and centrifugal compositions, with a parallel attempt to reconcile opposites: e.g. a Northern, almost Flemish, psychological colour sense with a warmer, more Venetian range of decorative or symbolic colour—Helion's final, in- vented colour in essence is extraordinary and has a special, rather troubled, bite. But compare the abstract painting of 1938 (cat. no. 11), with its levitation and general dispersal of shapes, with the more recent and realist landscape of 1963 (cat. no. 41), full of air and movement, and you will see at least one strand in the overall, total consistency of purpose.
In some aspects, Fielion's work is as French— or Northern French, verging on Flemish----as fourteenth- or fifteenth-century French or Flemish Books of Hours or illuminated manu- scripts. You have only to look at the orange, the red, the blue and the green that he likes to use. He is also French in the concentration and pre-. 'cision of his construction. In other ways, Hdlion has maintained an extraordinary independence, certainly an originality, and upheld a splendid flexibility of style. But the spirit, the humanism, the ethos, is entirely consistent. All his painting, in all its phases, is self-sufficient and self-con- tained, but in order to understand his vision we must look for the abstract qualities in the realist paintings and the realist implications of the abstract work. Both attributes meet, at many sur- pr:sing Icvds.
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