Art
Openness
John McEwen
Jeremy Moon was killed in a road accident in America in 1973. He was thirty-eight and left a wife and three young children. His importance as a painter warranted a long obituary in The Times. Too often in such circumstances that is the last one hears, but the Rowan Gallery have admirably sustained their support: their current show is the first of a series of exhibitions over the next few years that will be devoted to Moon's work.
'Jeremy Moon: paintings 1962-64' (Rowan till 2 March) includes some work from his first show at the gallery in 1963. It was well received at the time and it is easy to see why: its assurance is as forthright today as ever. The colours are bright, the odd triangular canvas already hints at the liberties he would take with the canvas shape in his later work, but what stamps its authority most clearly, and refreshingly for an English artist, is its absolute confidence in purely abstract means — colour, shapes which have no naturalistic reference, at least not directly. What is more there is very little obvious reference in it to the work of other painters. The critics to their credit were right in acclaiming such a debut, though a brief survey of Moon's career at the point where he started to paint seriously makes his independence and maturity more understandable. He was already twenty-nine at the time of this first exhibition. He had taken a degree in law at Cambridge in 1957, had subsequently undergone a period of ballet training with a view to becoming a choreographer but settled for a good job in advertising before abandoning all for art at the age of twenty-six, having been inspired by a visit to an exhibition of young English artists in the summer of 1960.
None of this would be of interest were it not visually evident in his work, and it is. There is the feeling of assurance that comes from a decision taken after reasoned debate, moral commitment made manifest by the independence of his view; there is also evidence of his legal training in the logical progression of his ideas, and of his knowledge of dance in the preference for rhythmically wavering lines or dramatically contrapuntal effects. Moon took lessons, but he was insistent on the benefits of being for the most part self-taught, free, that is, of the withering self-consciousness suffered by so many art-school trained students. It gives his work a freedom from convention as well as freedom of choice. It also served to keep him open to the outside world. These early paintings evoke the visual sensation of such things as being dazzled by sunlight ('Eclipse', 'Naxos') or contemplating movement ('La Danse'). They are based on the experience of looking in the most day-to-day sense, not just at other Paintings, a feeling admirably expressed by Moon in an early interview. 'In my picture entitled `La Danse', he says, speaking of this same painting of overlapped ribbons of red, Yellow and orange on a green ground, '1 was concerned about balance, harmony, tension, pleasure, movement and beauty.'
Moon, even on the evidence of this early Work, was one of the best English painters of his generation. His pictures survive because of their openness. They are not boundlessly ambitious but they are genuine. A good Cambridge man, he always considered 'art a moral activity', though not, it must hastily be added, a puritanical one. His Paintings are a worthy testament to that belief, however small a place they may ultimately occupy in the history books.
After all the fuss about their last show together, a fuss that involved dog messes and four-letter words (theArts Council sub. sequently apologised for its refusal at the time to distribute the catalogue on account of a certaiff paragraph), one might be forgiven for reading Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth's new self-explorations at Waddington and Tooth (till 4 March) as Interfaeces' rather than 'Interfaces'. The formula is basically the same as before in that the work on view is an extempore combination of their talents, mostly devoted to bedaubing photographs of their faces in scatalogical, sometimes art-referential ways. The work is presented in a series of boxes that display two images when closed, four when open. One door shut will usually reveal, depending on whether it is to the left or the right, three portraits of one artist or the other. As before Dieter Roth — though each image is signed and, in some cases undoubtedly, worked on by both of them — provides most of the originality and humour on view. His is the quizzical, crew-cut face, and his marks are the wild obliterations, the eollaged bits of food and pieces. Hamilton's IS correspondingly English, an extraordinary eighteenth-century mug usually seen in chinless profile, wearing a once trendy Mao cap, but this rather strained effects, both his face-pulls and otherwise, seem just as much at cross purposes with
those of his friend (and benefactor) as•before. Hamilton needs Roth at, demon
strably, any .cost. Roth needs Hamilton like a hole in the head.
At the Mayor Gallery (till 24 Feb) there are a few photographs by Man Ray and his erstwhile girl-friend (subsequently Lady Penrose), the lovely American Lee Miller. Ray is a visual jack-in-the-box but these Photographs are rather boring and formal except for the one nude study of Miss Miller herself. She was a photo-journalist — her work, like Ray's is currently to be more impressively seen at the Hayward surrealist exhibition — who had that gift of the trade for catching the eye of picture editors under fire, as here where she photographs the shadow of the Great Pyramid, not the monument itself. Dorothea Tanning provides a similar, though more relevant footnote to the Surrealist extravaganza, with an inconsequential gathering of little drawings, paintings and prints (JPL Fine Art till 27 February). `L'energie, la generosite, la violence nee de la grande peinture, ou le corps explose dans l'espace mental', as one critic put it when describing the effect of her art on him. Well, yes, quite.
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