When did you last see Mr Frampton? ARTS
PAUL GRINKE
The Fine Art Society, that quintessentially Ed- wardian emporium of the arts in New Bond Street, has reasserted the triumphal position it held at the turn of the century with an ex- hibition which deserves to be widely applauded as a pioneer essay in revivalism. It would be hard to think of a more appropriate setting, outside the Crystal Palace, for an exhibition of 'British Sculpture, 1850-1914,' and Mr Athol Hill has made, an excellent job of the awkward task of displaying a large number of small bronzes without turning the gallery into a knacker's yard.
The tide of the exhibition must have caused a number of raised eyebrows and a quick rush to the shelves to see if there really were any British sculptors before the First World War. Bul Rupert Gunnis's excellent Dictionary of British Sculptors ends at 1851 and the Studio magazine began in the 1880s; in between is a wasteland with only the rather Samuel Smilesish activities of the Fine Art Union to offer navi- gational guidance. The exhibition owes its inception to the enthusiasm of Mr Andrew McIntosh Patrick of the Fine Art Society under the crusading wing of the Victorian Society. A great deal of scholarly assistance has also come from Mrs Lavinia Handley- Read, the subject's most capable apologist and author of a long catalogue essay which will remain the standard introduction for some time. It is in many ways a model exhibition, with a detailed and attractive catalogue and a very comprehensive collection of pieces which must have been gathering dust in museum store-rooms for many years. Whether it will herald a general revival of interest in this neglected period remains to be seen, but it is extraordinary that half a century of sculpture could have been dismissed for so long.
After the fanfares, I must admit that there are not many new names to get excited about, except perhaps George Frampton. But it is a revelation to see how good the sculpture of three men better known as painters—Ricketts, Watts and Leighton—could be, and how under- rated the sculpture of Alfred Stevens and Alfred Gilbert of Eros fame. Almost all the works, even after the influential teaching of the two expatriate Frenchmen, Legros and Dalou, in the 1870s, are idealistically figura- tive—perhaps geared, as Mrs Handley-Read has suggested, to the demands of the great public exhibitions of art and industry which were such a feature of the late nineteenth cen- tury. The critic of the SPECTATOR saw this quandary in 1884 when he observed that English sculpture had cast off the Neo-Classic 'only to be faced with a perilous choice be- tween the fascinations of Michelangelo, the asceticism of the early Italian and the voluptu- ousness of the modern French schools.' It was an eclectic age and the voluptuaries of France stood little chance against the Art Union's suc- cessful reproduction of dull marble sculpture in Copeland's 'parian or statuary ware,' ex- amples of which stood proudly on the mantel- pieces of hundreds of lottery winners. Their chance came with Leighton's 'Athlete and Python' of 1877, the first piece to be cast in
bronze, a medium which could reproduce the rough moulded texture of clay, and allowed sculpture to be reproduced in editions without losing its vitality in the impersonal process of mechanical reduction.
Most of the English sculptors, with the notable exceptions of Alfred Stevens and G. F. Watts, had worked on the Albert Memorial in the 1860s, and the tradition of artistic metal- work which figured so largely in the pages of the Studio magazine alongside sculpture proper can be traced back to this enormous decorative project. The exhibition abounds in plaques, door-knockers, medallions and even a delicious letter-box by William Burges. Polychrome sculpture was revived, although all too often degenerating into those hideous gesso-work panels, and Alfred Gilbert, prob- ably the most inventive sculptor of the period, made an exquisite pair of votary figures sur- mounted by haloes as intricate as the rose-knot motif of the Glasgow school. The exhibition contains a supplementary display of medals of an engine-turned precision with a waxy copper patina. Most of them are remarkably good, thanks to the unsung abilities of the Wyon family.
At the Tate Gallery is a large retrospective exhibition of the mysterious and indeed secre- tive painter Balthus, organised by John Russell. Balthus is a thoroughly mandarin taste, lauded by Artaud and Camus and as recondite an en- thusiasm as the poems of Cavafy or the novels of Villiers de lisle Adam. Mr Russell has called Balthus 'the last of the great European painters,' a considered judgment, but not one that most visitors to the exhibition will readily agree with.
Any approach to Balthus's work is hampered by his own extreme personal reticence and the impossibility, for which he is no doubt heartily thankful, of placing his work in a niche on the wall of modern French painting. His paint- ing is literary in content, vastly conscious of the European tradition in art and posed as a series—often subtle variations on one theme— of disquieting questions. With paintings as occluded as these, there is an almost irresistible temptation to look for passages paraphrased from such divergent sources as Piero della Francesca and Poussin, or, more recently, Bon- nard and Seurat. Mr Russell has done some sovereign work on these lines in his introduc- tion and these iconographic revelations help make clear Balthus's awareness of his own position at the nadir of a great classical tradition.
The greater part of Balthus's work is a series
of interiors, set possibly in the drawing-room of some provincial French manor house where somnolent girls dream the afternoon away with the audience of a favourite cat or a girl friend reading intently on the floor. The subject is commonplace and one would have supposed both placid and domestic, but Balthus focuses on it with frightening intensity. The cats, omni- present in his paintings, have the age-old wis- dom of a witch's familiar, capable of invoking the most voluptuous if lethargic movements of pubescent sensuality. The girls are almost autistic in their stiff postures and withdrawn inability to communicate. The most atmo- spheric of this group is 'The Room' of 1949-52, a nude girl sprawled asleep across a chaise- longue while a dwarfish retainer with a menac- ing expression pulls the curtain; at the back of the dark room a cat and a jug in a basin squat on sidetables with almost Egyptian calm. It is as mysterious and portentous as Fuseli's `Nightmare' and as difficult to elucidate.
The genesis of much of Balthus's painting comes from his obsession with Wuthering Heights, which he first discovered at the age of thirteen. He made a series of illustrations to the book in the 1930s, some of which are included in the show, and they share some- thing of the same obsessive identification with the characters of a novel as Simeon Solomon's illustrations to Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon. But in recent years, Balthus has lightened his palette to a dry, flaky colour, almost like fresco painting, and made a num- ber of large sunny odalisques, which owe much to Matisse and point to an avenue of escape from the Gothic intensity of his earlier in- teriors.
Balthus is a difficult painter, in that his work is almost ungainly in its intensity. Most of it, except perhaps for the landscapes, is in the nature of a private monologue, and one sus- pects that much more of his work is a form of autobiographical musing than such evidently personal documents as the famous, and regret- tably unobtainable, Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre, which is a Balthus-eye view of a Parisian quartier.
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