Arts
Towards another art world
John McEwen
Towards Another Picture (Nottingham Castle Museum till 25 January) and Art in One Year: 1935 (Tate till 28 February) are neither of them as comprehensive as their titles or recent press coverage might suggest, nor are they notably coherent, but they are interesting. They have been comPared, but their interest is certainly of different kinds. Nottingham is interesting because the confusion of its aims and, therefore, presentation perfectly illustrates the confusion that exists within the minds of a large part, particularly the administrative Part, of the art world in general. The Tate Show is interesting for what it reveals of Current attitudes at the Tate, also, needless to say, to some degree subject to the same cpnfusion displayed by the show in Nottingham.
One of the better quotes from the catalogue to the Tate exhibition sums it all up. It is by William Coldstream, who is cited as saying of the 'thirties that 'the subject . . . discussed interminably then was the gap between art and life'. How much more true today, when that very gap is filled chockful of bureaucrats, teachers, even a seasoning of critics. A group that, for the most part and for now well-established reasons, subscribes to that vague left-wingism which has long been a badge of art-world membership. And yet the teensy-weensy art world is an elite, and a very bourgeois one at that, no dirty finger-nails or weekly pay Packets in sight. A world, what is more, divided against itself in all sorts of ways — some proclaiming old truths eternal, others hot for change — but of minor, even minimal, interest to your average suburban Tory or urban Socialist. More and more such Contradictions exercise the mind of the artbureaucrat, be he the curator of a museum, the administrator of a provincial arts laboratory, a member of the ever-increasing Arts Council or just a journeyman teacher.
An anthology of British artists' writings since the War, also entitled Towards Another Picture, accompanies the Nottingham exhibition and admirably demonstrates this chaos of current attitudes. The compilation of non-artists with genuine ones, aesthetic questions with sociological, only enforces a confusion that is inherent. William Roberts believes a picture should tell a story, the Artists' Union sees art as a liberating force for social change, Sir Charles Wheeler accuses the British Council of supporting only leftish modern art, Gustav Metzger castigates the dealers, Wyndham Lewis lays about Herbert Read and so on. Andrew Brighton, co-organiser and co-editor of Towards Another Picture With Lynda Morris of the Midland Group
Gallery, has long campaigned for the intellectual acceptance of painters whose work is popular with, and well known to, a general public outside the art world, artists like Terence Cuneo, David Shepherd and Rus sell Flint. Only last year he wrote a long article criticising the Tate for neglecting such artists in favour of the much less gen erally popular offerings of the avant-garde prescribed by art-world taste. Brighton has always seemed an advocate of fair play rather than egalitarianism, but the muddled exhibition we get at Nottingham amounts to the latter. This is the gap between art and life made manifest: something for the Burlington Berties, something for the locals; an abstract here, a story there; irony for some, education for another; a touch of academicism, a pinch of pluralism. A confusion and multiplicity of aims that results in egalitarianism, of everything cancelling each other out and being reduced to a single standard.
Art-world considerations are always to be guarded against, but art, in this case painting, is subject to a far more demanding set of laws, not least that it is nothing to do with fashion. There are good paintings and bad paintings, and pieces of canvas with oil paint of them that are not 'paintings' at all. The Terence Cuneos and David Shepherds flourish because people still like to think a hand-done picture is more dignified, and it is certainly more lasting, than a photograph. They think a print is more posh than the same image cut out of a magazine. And they want documentation, not creation. Therefore to encourage comparisons between Bacon and a Cuneo is at best silly, at worst an insult. Of course there are difficult cases such as Russell Flint, a man with a nineteenth-century sensibility to watercolour and a fatal taste for titivating subjects, but, even thus muted, the non-art in the exhibition is easily discernible from hack academicism and worthy provinciality, both categories also quite strongly represented. Naturally it is quite amusing — how often do you see an original Cuneo? Or a picture owned by Ted Heath? (an honest pub scene by an artist also patronised by Harold Wilson, needless to say) — but the show's ultimate shortcoming is exposed by a quick tour of the permanent museum collection next door. There, in a no less arbit rarily selected line, are Roberts, Ben Nicholson, Eurich, Pasmore, Sheringham et al, so what is the difference? And if you still do not believe in standards, take a look at the Boningtons.
The Tate has not bitten off more than it can chew to such provincial ends, but in its approach to showing all the art it has in its
collection deriving from one year, 1935, it shows the same concern not to appear too avant-garde or correspondingly philistine. Richard Morphet makes an academic case in his introduction for everything on view, though much of the work is beyond redemption. Here again in a much more digestible samping we are confronted with a gamut of styles, mostly in painting, with the only difference that Woolsworthian names make way for some famous ones from abroad — Ensor, Masson, Klee, Magritte. Being a public institution the Tate is understandably a butt of criticism, most constantly perhaps for two things. That they acquire art that is fashionable (perhaps made worse through selecting by confm it tee) and thus, years later, have to pay through the nose for the real, lasting, work of the time. This is admirably illustrated by the present show. Almost none of the art on view entered the collection before the war, and certainly none by those artists who are now considered to personify the period. The prevailing taste was apparently for views of farm implements and London backwaters, and the sensation of the time was obviously a Meredith Frampton fulllength portrait of a Pont Street hostess badly in need of one of Dr Faivre's cachets. One of those dreadful paintings, in which everything appears to be made out of wax, that periodically cause a stir at RA summer exhibitions. By contrast the Klee was acquired in 1964, Helion (1965), a famous Nash (1970), Winifred Nicholson (1975). Before the war funds were minimal and the director was not subject to a purchasing committee; now the position is reversed. What difference has this made? How do the Tate's aims differ today from what they were in 1935? Is it in mind or in scale? This is what one wants to know and this is what one does not get. And that is disturbing. Will we, despite the greater publicity for art, be as hoodwinked by our fashions as they were by theirs? The lack of objectivity in this show does not encourage optimism.
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