ART
Happy arrivals
BRYAN ROBERTSON
To define the background to the engrossing and intensely enjoyable selection of old master drawing from the Teyler museum at Haarlem, now impeccably installed and lit at the Victoria and Albert museum (but only until 26 April), I had best quote one succinct paragraph from the official hand-out. 'The Teyler museum of Haarlem in Holland was founded in 1778 when Pieter Teyler, a Haarlem silk merchant and a precursor of many philanthropists of more recent times in America as in Europe, bequeathed the for- tune he had made in commerce to endow an institution for the advancement of science, art and learning. His trustees established a museum, converting his own house for the purpose and filling it with a selection of such obj'ects as excited the curiosity of the age, ranging from machines for making electric sparks to prints and drawings. One of their earliest actions was to buy from an Italian duke a large and remarkable collection of Italian drawings. Among them were some twenty superb Michangelos [! I, a number of works by Raphael, a Correggio and a hundred Guercinos. A magnificent collection of a hundred drawings by Claude [! !J prob- ably came also from the same source . . In the nineteenth century Pieter Teyler's trustees turned their attention to the art of their own country and gradually accumulated a collection of Dutch drawings as notable as the Italian.'
The extract explains perfectly the main- spring of the Teyler museum and its founda- tion: typical of a fellow countryman of the Roosevelts and Vanderbilts who, in America, were to sustain this same idealism. The country which produced Vermeer, Rem- brandt, Van Gogh and Mondrian is not content with aesthetics in a vacuum—and, if anyone imagines that Dutch benevolence and enlightenment of this order came to an end at the close of the eighteenth century, may I mention that in comparatively recent years Mme Kroller-Muller gave her house, large park and estate at Otterlo, and dazzling collection of modern art (Fantin Latour through Cezanne to Braque and Mondrian) to the Dutch nation : I cannot think of any comparable gesture being made in England since Lord Iveagh handed Kenwood to the nation, a long time ago.
At the v and A it iS hard not to make straight for the Rembrandt drawings, notably the sturdy, rich and economical Figure study of a young woman in a cap, with fur- trimmed gown, standing with her hand on a table and her back turned. The drawing is economical in the compact modelling of the figure and the lightly indicated space it occupies—implied by the table on the left and a curving vault contour on the right; rich in its unstressed sensual interplay be- tween delicate calligraphy and dense black masses—for the fur trimming, sleeves, and ruff; and sturdy in its sheer presence and aliveness: this girl is really there (unlike Miss Stein's damning indictment of her native Oakland: 'the trouble with Oakland is there's no there there'), so concisely ab- stracted in terms of pen and brown wash on white paper.
One of the Watteau drawings is of a Standing Pierrot and, although the view is far more frontal and direct, quite without that looming elevation seen rearing up from below, the drawing in 'red and black chalk heightened with white on grey brown paper', brings instantly to mind the elegiac and
epoch-making painting by Watteau in the Louvre, called Gilles or Le Jongleur. If this
is one of my favourite paintings, it is because it brings, with those faces peering through th:. bushes, some apprenhension of loneli- ness, alienation and fear, the nineteenth- century, p.■ chologically-in formed awareness of human identity, into an eighteenth cen- tury allegory about youth and age; and all done by makiitg the solitary central figure soar up—almost leaning backward, with some precariousness—into space with a fairly obvious device of foreshortening as the figure ascends.
Elsewhere, the Van Dyck is superlative: a bravura, swashbuckling, near-painting exer- cise in hard and soft marks on paper, slack and tau: oppositions, obviously enough, in the figures tenderly lifting a slumped, draped body in The Entombment of Christ. There is much else to report on; but if one may generalise. the Italian section of the show is perhaps the noblest, with the Dutch contin- gent a close second. The Raphael studies are superb and make a capital introduction to
an artist who is somewhat forbidding to most people today. A pity, though, that Eng- lish drawing, with its own special quality of darting reticence—or sweetly bland pastoral
acceptance—is not represented at all. Van Dyck is really one of theirs. But our native tradition of draughtsmanship was fairly erratic at the time this collection was formed —before Blake and Rowlandson were known, and when Turner was only three years old (though doubtless making stunning traceries in the air with his rattle).
The Leger exhibition—the first I can recall in England—which fills the combined re- sources of space most beautifully at the Waddington Galleries is an event of para- mount importance in the field of modern art in London : a triple triumph of resource- fulness for Ei nst Beyeler, the celebrated Swiss dealer and connoisseur who first gathered the show together in his own gallery at Basle by buying all the paintings and drawings necessary for a thoroughly representative collection (some works were purchased from surplus stock at the Leger Museum in the south of France); for Vera Lindsay, who persevered in her determined efforts to make a London showing possible; .and for Leslie Waddington, who now out- Wildensteins Wildenstein in addition to all his other recent successes. The show is per- fectly hung and lit and is a joyous experi- ence from start to finish.
De Chirico once painted a small, haunting 'metaphysical' still life of a relief contour map, lapis blue sea, a ruler and a few geo- metrical instruments, called The Melancholy of Departure. The art of Fernand Leger, with its optimistic clean-cut celebration of man and nature and a technological or mech- ansed culture in the twentieth century, is filled with a bright orange, green, brown, blue, vermilion and white insistently clear Joy of Arrival. His work is so French in its clean, sharp forms, its earthiness and un- forced muscularity (think of those cyclists zooming across Normandy in high summer.
and a mixed scent in the air of gasoline and pernod), so utterly universal in its classical principles of construction and lively repose.
Space precludes more comment; but if you need a spring tonic—and.who doesn't—hurry off and see this dazzling show: a historic event in its own right in London, the most cheerful occasion imaginable, and as un- dated as Poussin, or Chanel.
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