Private. View
BY CYRIL RAY IT's something like Lord's for the Eton-Harrow match : at least as many people have come to look at each other, and be looked at, as have come to see what's going on. But Private View Day at the Royal Academy is not, these days. as dressy as Lord's. There was one grey top-bat to be seen in Piccadilly as I crossed over to Burlington House; there were hardly any morning coats inside; and only one of those 1 came across had a carnation in its buttonhole. True, the President was in full fig, but the coat looked as though it had been run up originally for a figure by Henry Moore.
The women were dressier, of course : those tedious little, close-fitting feather hats are finished with at last, I am happy to report, and I am less happy to report that flower-pot toques; swathed in pink veiling, have taken their place. There were pretty girls tacking and veering in the courtyard, try- ing to present their most curvilinear profiles to the press photographers; bumping and boring inside were their beaky and weatherbeaten mummies, wearing in their lapels the jewelled badges of the better regiments; and their grannies cooed over all portraits of children under sixteen—Rather a darling, don't you think?'—or darted ecstatically from one portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh to another. 1 heard one say to a handsome old gentleman in a short coat and sponge- bag trousers, 'I do so wish my niece were here : she's terribly arty.'
Satire raises its leering head all over the shop this year, and how laboriously art limps after nature! In the same room as Ruskin Spear's Success Story of fat man, fat wife, and fat motor-car. I saw and heard a big man in a blue suit intro- ducing to a friend, 'an' this is the trouble an' strife, ol' man.' I didn't keep a detailed score-card, but I should say that Professor Thomas Bodkin beats the Duke of Edinburgh, Lord Kilmuir, and Dame Margot Fonteyn as sitter of the year. There is a bronze head of him by Charles Wheeler, a painted head by Fleetwood-Walker, a 'sketch in the corner of Sir Alfred Munnings's splenetic little squib—and there he was in the flesh, pinker and whiter and benigner than in his por- traits, saying nice things (out of politeness surely? But no. he has repeated them in print) about that marvel of modern engineering, the life-size bronze of Dame Margot, on her pointes in the Central Hall.
The Dame, though, must have received more attention than the Professor, what with politicians saying, 'Clever, you know,' at,the chicken-wire openwork metal of her statue's tutu, and the wirework eyelashes; and what with Mr. John Berger that evening describing in one Beaverbrook paper as pompous, pretentious, and unspontaneous the Annigoni portrait of her described next day in another Beaverbrook paper (in which Annigoni's memoirs are being serialised) as 'the portrait of the year . . . a masterpiece.'
You can take only so much of the private view : I wonder whether the galleries are air-conditioned. By noon, there were plump ladies, a little mottled under their face-powder, fan- ning themselves with their catalogues on the wooden benches in the porch. Someone had hooked his umbrella over the arm of a bronze bust, near the cloakroom, of Sir Gerald Kelly : so much for one Past President. As for the other, there are two- exhibitions current at Burlington House : the two posters one above the other over the great entrance read : THE SUMMER EXHIBITION Works by Sir Alfred Munnings For a moment I thought it said 'Words,' not 'Works.'
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