ARTS
Terminal condition
John McEwen
It is well known that the Queen has a wicked sense of humour, so when she declared that the Barbican Centre for Arts and Conferences must surely be one of the seven wonders of the world, one was prepared for the worst — and just as well, because if ever there was a Gulag Utopia this is it. Aftermath: France 1945-54, New Images of Man (Barbican Centre till 13 June) proves the most appropriate choice for the opening of the Centre's art gallery that there could possibly have been: the Centre itself being a monument to the art brut notions of 30 years ago, which, presumably, was when the first plans for its architecture were doodled on the backs of envelopes. The ugly but informative catalogue sets the intellectual scene of this aftermath time with a 1949 quotation by the gallery owner Pierre Loeb, taken from an address to a conference at the Sorbonne: 'I'm waiting for an art that's ungrateful, ugly, crude, as painful as giving birth, because it's a question of birth, not of games any longer, here as elsewhere.' The Barbican is yet one more memorial to this post-war mood of purging seltrmortifica- tion and belief in primitive renewal. `Ungrateful, ugly, crude' could not better describe its disdain of decoration, its raw use of iron, naked tile floors and walls en- cased in pebbled concrete, both outside and in the building. That the art gallery was also, appropriately, in the aftermath of planned intention, is made apparent by the fact that the passages, from which it has basically been contrived, originally con- sisted of 'walls' of nothing more than plate- glass windows and concrete-faced columns.
Art is always under suspicion in puritan- nical England, and clearly it had no original place in the legislated Eden that is the Bar- bican.. Plays and concerts — something to raise the morale of the workforce at the end of the day, by all means — but no exhibi- tions encouraging disturbing thoughts at lunch-time, please. Such is the dominant attitude, and here it has prevailed again. Eventually, of course, someone relented; and later still the glass and concrete, just to hold a nail, were blanketed in wooden screens, the pedestrian flo-thrus (or whatever) — the gallery doubles as a kind of balcony round the top two levels of the Centre's main staircase — made less of a thoroughfare. But it does not result in a lot of difference. The whole place is still exact- ly like an airport terminal — an effect en- couraged at one stage in one's inevitable odyssey (like at airports it is impossible not to get lost) by another passage display of Contemporary Canadian Carpets (also till 13 June).
Aftermath itself is based on a selection from the pictorial and sculptural section of the Pompidou Centre's Paris-Parts extravaganza (reviewed in this column last summer). The vastly over-documen- ted Paris-Paris — in which pictures and sculptures were dominant but only one ele- ment of many — was a one-in-all attempt by the French both to come to terms with the embarrassment of the Occupation and to prove that Paris was still the artistic capital of the world in the decade following 1945. Perhaps on purpose it all proved ton much to digest. Aftermath amounts to a new exhibition. There is no work from the war or the later Fifties, representation is more evenly meted out and new additions have been made. In other words, it is more of a curiosity and less of a promotion.
The war, of course, remains the spectre at the feast. The most luxuriant blooms of the School of Paris — artists of the golden age like Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso — may pursue their optimistic ways as colourfully and playfully as ever; but for the younger art brut brigade — the heirs of Surrealism — Graeco-Roman civilisation came to a full-stop (via the mechanised slaughters of 1914-18) with the extermination camps and the atomic bombs. For them the only answer was to look for renewal in the holY innocence of the art of children and lunatics, and of pre-Greek or non-Greek cultures. Accordingly they chose simple images realised with impoverished tech- niques and materials. It was an art of sackcloth and ashes, difficult for soph- isticates — like its leading advocate, Dubuffet — to sustain. He is revealed as a painter in the old tradition, savouring the sweetness of life however hard he may try to spit it out; and his masterliness cannot fail, as a result, to be more appetising than frightening. Nevertheless, his belief in the power of primitive art is mitigated by the symbolic force of two anonymously scrat- ched heads photographed on the walls of Paris by Brassai.
English art takes a buffeting, the show demonstrating that most of the stuff pro- claimed here in the Fifties and even the Six- ties had been perfected in Paris years before. Even the best, of course, have to start somewhere, and it is interesting to he reminded again of the influence of Dubilf- fet's graffiti in forming the figures of Hockney's early, and some would say liveliest, pictures; and the equal importance of Picasso's playful machine-part assemblages to the young Paolozzi. As for the standing of our older heroes, who on this evidence would not prefer a reclining woman by Henri Laurens to one by Moore? It has to be admitted that it is the old masters — Matisse, Picasso, Laurens — all
born in the 1880s, who triumph as the least dated artists of the show; just as the old church of St Giles's, Cripplegate, remains the most timeless part of the Barbican. One of their masterpieces would make this new gallery a welcome addition, for all its faults and the missed opportunities it represents; but it will clearly require an endless struggle to maintain such a high initial standard, or indeed to make the space exist at all other than as somewhere to pass through on the way to more exciting things. The present director has already handed in his notice and, even with the recession, it is hard to imagine a stampede for his job.
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