Art
Novel lines
John McEwen
Carl Van Vechten — Vintage Photographs signals the opening of the inauguration of the 12 Duke Street Gallery at 12 Duke Street, SW1 (throughout April). Its young Owner, David Grob, plans to show what he likes (within vaguely contemporary limits), a refreshingly catholic ambition. Van Vechten died in 1964. Apart from photography, Which he concentrated on for the last 30 Years of his life, he is also remembered for his writing as a novelist and, perhaps most remarkably, for being the first white critic to take a serious interest in Negro arts and letters. His photographs were taken simply to document personalities for inclusion in various books and manuscript collections that he donated to famous American institutions. He practised as an amateur, with no intention of marketing his work, but with a vocational commitment, personally developing a finished print of almost every Picture of the many thousands he took and never retouching or cropping. This is all suitably impressive but the images, perhaps as a result, are disappointing. They are of g.lamorous celebrities, photographed in a °I,1',ead-pan way appropriate to the purpose of uocumentation, but nothing about them Particularly suggests that they are the view and interpretation of Van Vechten rather than another. One of his portraits is of the American artist, Alexander Calder, whose work is currently the subject of what amounts to a memorial survey in Cork Street, thanks to the collaboration of the Mayor Gallery at ' one end and Waddington's at the other (till 25 April). Calder did the impossible: he made abstract art that became universally popular, an achievement that will probably remain unique. Every child's cot now has a 'mobile' suspended over it, 'mobile' making is on the curriculum of every primary school, and all thanks to Calder. He surely approved, because art for him was always the pursuit of pleasure and this in turn makes his work, despite its debt to the superior imaginations of Miro and Mondrian, beguilingly and rarely American. The emblems come from Miro, the colour from Mondrian, the spatial awareness from both, but the playfulness, the essential spirit of the enterprise, is entirely his own. Before hitting on the notion of suspending forms Calder made an art of presenting a toy circus of his own invention as a theatrical event, full of tricks and ingenuity. And this love of the circus — sudden surprises and drawn-out dramas, clowns and, particularly, balancing acts — is demonstrably crucial to his conception of the mobile, the later, earthbound, 'stabiles' and the rest. 'Hen with Red Knife', a 1944 'stabile mobile' at Mayor, could equally well be a sea-lion balancing things on its nose, and in the back room of the same gallery the life-size, metal cut-out figures of his final phase, all juggling arms and masked faces, come closer to a harlequinade than a jungle dance though, typically, the artist himself called them 'Critters' and left it at that, But the 'stabiles', though they never fail to display an intuitive sense of scale (a legacy, perhaps, of Calder Ore, a famous maker of monumental sculpture), essentially add nothing to the inspiration of the 'mobiles'. 'Mobiles', however, are a domestic form, much better exquisite (well demonstrated at Waddington's) than enormous — lightness their essence — and the propped 'stabile' allowed Calder freedom of size, making him in the end, most perfect irony of all, even more in demand as a public sculptor than his totally unimaginative father had ever been. Here the enormity of his achievement is again laid bare. Most popular artists, like his father, become so by dealing in clichés which set the mind at rest. Calder became one by dealing in a novelty that extended people's visual awareness .1-le is not a great artist but he is a good one, and his work brought, and brings, good.
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