ARTS The romantic strain
BRYAN ROBERTSON
No matter how directly you confront life, with the sharpest and clearest eyesight, it is arguable that a degree of romantic faith is useful for survival, however elusive fixed beliefs may prove. In this sense, we are all 'romantic'. In art, the term has become meaningless, save in relation to a specific epoch, and so has the supposedly reverse label of 'classical' except as a historic sur- vival. As concepts within literary terminology the old classifications can still be pursued; but painting and sculpture have long since arrived at a stage when paradox, always inherent in stylistic divisions, has finally con- sumed both sides. The creative signs of tem- perament are more ambiguous, together with their disciplines. The romantic agony becomes a classical complaint.
When an artist places nine rectangular and parallel slats of wood on the floor and then retires from the scene, leaving this work of art for our stimulation, a case could be con- structed for a severely classical interest in symmetry, perspective, the relationship of one kind of volume (the slats) with another (the room), and much else. The intention may be positively, for a re-examination of first principles from a fresh aesthetic angle or, negatively, anti-art, against collectors and galleries, to oppose the establishment, or pro- test at authority and the wars in Vietnam or Biafra. However it is attributed, the artist's gesture is romantic. And when the old con- ventions of art converge with technology, science, 'environment', aleatory systems and other structures, we are in a new stage of sociological limbo: but the romantic impulse persists.
Three exceptional exhibitions on a grand scale, now safely lodged in London, raise the 'romantic' issue in divergent ways: 'Berlioz and the Romantic Imagination', picturesquely installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum; 'Claude Lorrain' at the Hayward Gallery, and one of the Arts Council's noblest ventures; and 'Jean Francois Millet' at Wildenstein's. In the meantime, and until they can be described in these pages at length, a plethora of other remarkable shows with briefer time- spans demand attention. All of them support or deny those variable attributes of the romantic imagination.
Since the most questing. innovatory, and dominant language in art of the past sixty years has been abstract, and so much space in these columns given up to attempts at its physical and metaphysical definition, it is a pleasure for a change to point to the work of two fine artists in which abstract qualities are only implicit. Edward Burra's drawings at the Lefevre gallery (until 15 November) are as masterly as anyone familiar with his paint- ings might suppose. The acute vigour and economy of his line has a healthiness and unpredictability of its own, always free of cliché or mannerism, which disarmingly records a haunted world that takes satire as a starting point and extends to darker shades of pessimism. The theme, consistently from the nineteen-thirties onward, is what used to be called lowlife: in bars, cafes, cinemas, brothels and sidestreets; or else the lowlife of the unconscious which, in Burra's vision, achieves epic grandeur even when hinting at the underside of a leaf or petal. His roses are not sick, but disturbed. Here is a unique chance to see the drawings of a modern English master. To retain what might so easily descend to the realms of morbid patho- logy inside the brighter light and properties of a play, or 'theatre' in the best sense, is artistry at the highest level.
At the Mayor gallery, an equally rare exhibition is devoted to the pastoral-histori- cal, religious-allegorical paintings of Andre Bauchant, the French gardener and nursery- man who began to read history books, pro- fitably, around 1900 when he was in his late twenties. He began to paint, self-taught, in 1917; in 1927 Diaghilev commissioned him, aptly as usual, to design the costumes and sets for Stravinsky's A pollon Musagete. Added together, this information may give some notion of his delightful fantasies in which brightly robed figures, rather puny as in Claude's Vergilian landscapes, disport themselves among the rocks, trees, flowers and streams of an Arcadia sweetly remi- niscent of the Loire valley where Bauchant passed most of his life. The paintings have a gravity and a flint-like glitter which may belong to a particular region of France but in essence stem from French mediaeval art. This exhibition is a real tonic for the senses.
Three other shows by widely differing artists have separate properties in common, apart from the fact that all three artists are English: Terry Frost at Waddington's, Wil- liam Scott at the Hanover gallery, and Alan Reynolds at the Redfern. By now, the 'roman- tic' notion becomes a trifle strained, but still relevant. Reynolds began as a landscape artist, as English in his allegiances as Pal- mer or Nash. Enjoying (and in retrospect suffering) a huge youthful success, Rey- nolds forged ahead via Mondrian to appar- ently more cerebral, certainly more abstract, ends. Topography stiffened into topiary and froze, so his supporters believed, as circles and squares. The progression was toward a deeper vision: his recent white reliefs have a rhythmical consequence which flows with perfect logic and the same lyrical momen- tum as the earliest paintings and drawings.
William Scott and Terry Frost, belonging to an older generation, are achieving much more than mere survival. After departing from his lean, frugally-spaced still life com- positions into more abstract phases, poised always between richness of paint and economy of form, Scott has come clean, as it were, with a series of gouaches in which
the familiar domestic utensils, frying pa bowls and cups, of the early pictures. rea as pure paint: spreading like pools or blo of pigment on a wet surface or dragged int thin handle-like channels. The result has ta delicate weight of Nicholson; but the tas behind it all is consistently, and individually Scott's. Conversely, Terry Frost brine an almost naive spontaneity to bear o sophisticated intentions. It began with boa bobbing on the water in the harbour at S Ives; over the years, crescent or mei° wedges of colour have fought it out ssi stripes of an almost agricultural delibera tion: the lyrical vision again moving int abstraction. The new paintings have size an force, with increased sensuality.
Having written at length in Studio Iwo national on Paul Huxley's new paintings, no exhibited at the Rowan gallery. all I thr. say here is that the show is a singular impressive demonstration of an original min arriving at maturity. The paintings contin to explore the morphology of deceptive simple, always active, semi-geometrica shapes: very dark blue on turquoise spa which changes in each work, both in ton and in pitch of light, and becomes a su stance, though insubstantial as scent. The also transmit, romantically enough, the oh lute solemnity of great temples filled xi the spirit of the deities they enshrine: suc is the measure of their abstract authority And so serious an accomplishment forc me to risk the charge of excessive considera tion, or intemperate language, for 1 belies that Huxley is now fully disclosed as o of the two or three most important artist of his age in England.
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