Magnetic needle
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
Leslie Waddington is making a thoroughly distinguished contribution to the New Year by showing a large collection of recent drawings by Elisabeth Frink. This fine sculptor has always been one of the best drawers in England (I dislike the word 'draughtsman,' so redolent of green eye shades, map making or the flashier kinds of bravura exercise which Cizanne, for instance, in his great drawings, couldn't pull off to save his life), and the new group of pencil and wash studies are filled with a relaxed tenacity of contour and silvery, electric adumbration.. of volume. The subject through- out is a nude male figure with either a horse or a bull. I can remember Frink's drawings about twenty years ago, when the subjects were also horses and riders but described in terms of tightly muscled nightmare apparitions straight out of Blake and Fuseli. Since then, she has sustained the menace in different forms of sculpture and drawing, but there's always been a calmly reflective, far more innocent, side to her work—not all her birds are harbingers of doom or prey—and these new drawings have something of the still, entranced mood that you find in Redon's world.
The subject touches slightly on earlier draw- ings made to illustrate 'The Herdsman and the Bull' in Aesop's Fables, published last year in a limited edition, also by Waddington, but essentially this is an independent series, and not directly connected with sculpture either. A sharply expressive contour line, which some- times disappears into space only to reappear at salient points, describes the man; the animal, horse or bull, is usually a soft cloudlike wash with only its head and eyes and legs picked out: a background, a context, a support, and the source of a continuous formal dialogue with the man, crouched, slumped or standing. The projection of volume and mass by means of the thinnest, closely-packed parallel lines, like magnetised needles, is an immense abstract pleasure to the eye. Fresh and alive, the
drawings have also rather more than dig- nity: they extend the notion, some kind of
intimation, of a myth most beautifully and gracefully. The herdsman turns into a Minoan athlete in repose; the active rider or hunter into a passive groom at ease with his horse, both from a mythical stable.
Round the corner at 8 Vigo Street, the same gallery now has its own premises for displaying modern prints of all kinds, and a number of screenprints by Patrick Caulfield are on show. They are large and strong in colour, massively simple, and their titles tell you ostensibly waat they're about: Loudspeaker, Bathroom Aliiror. Found Objects or Café. But Caulfield is some- thing of a wag, as well as a true visual poet in his deadpan recreations, apparently literal copies of domestic detail or, as in the past, of the well-worn subjects and compositions of pic- torial cliché: the castle battlements, the old wishing well, a conventional still-life.
For Caulfield always does something ex- traordinary to this kind of supposedly debased currency, which clearly he adores, in much the same way that Stravinsky's transcriptions of Pergolesi or Tchaikovsky are also inventions, re-examining the familiar scores with such riveting intensity that something quite new is disclosed, original in tone, disconcerting in mood. Anyone who can transform a common- place object, with boa constrictor undertones of blank banality or irretrievably dull taste, into a new poetic reality, glowing with vitality and heady with references to the whole com- plex business of being an artist alert to the everyday world—anyone who can achieve all this, as Caulfield does, time and again, has my warmest admiration. Work of this order is quite remote from pop art and equally far removed from Lichtensteins's embalming pro- cesses. Caulfield has a deeper imagination and a potentially much greater gift.
Otherwise, considering the past year and the present scene in art, a gloomier note must be struck. Negative forces are at work to confuse the issue between serious art and mindless nonsense so that the rag trade, the world of the colour supplements, advertising, trendy gear, psychedelic happenings and the rest of it are accepted at the same level as the sculp- ture, painting, kinetic art and environmental projects from which these ruthlessly commercial and opportunist activities ponced all their ideas in the first place. The British Museum, after a quarter century of outrageous neglect, has received impertinent and falsely reasoned opposition from the Government in its plan for a new library. A badly needed gallery for temporary exhibitions has at last opened on the South Bank, and turns out to be an inept piece of architecture which would have looked dull by international standards in 1925. There are signs of a possible extension to an already ugly and difficult building, the Tate Gallery, which will implement yet another expensive compromise in a situation demanding radical thought and re-deployment of forces. The Battersea Park sculpture show for this coming summer has been cancelled. Our art schools have become culture factories and the students are fed up: embryo painters and sculptors, they doubtless dread the day when they'll be forced to wear caps and gowns at their easels. I could go on, but more anon, as they say; in the mean- time, let's recall with delight the Matisse show, the model Bauhaus exhibition, the perform- ances of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Phillip King, and the English success at the Venice Biennale, among other good things.
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