ART
Max Ernst (I.C.A.) and other exhibitions.
AFTER surrealism reached the Press advertisements and the revue backcloths, after Mr. Dali was anagrammed into Avida Dollars, most people thought the joke was over. Three London exhibitions suggest that only as an organised movement is it dead. Joke, did I say ? Surrealism sprang from Dada, and the humour of that movement, in the words of Moholy-Nagy, was " the gallows humour of the condemned." Thiase were the days of moustachioed Mona Lisas, of urinals submitted for exhibition as fountains," of hatchets supplied to visitors who might not like the pictures on show, of Kurt Schwitters reciting his one-letter poem " W." They were all angry young men dancing a " harlequinade of nothingness " and cocking a snook at aesthetic and social pretensions—prophets of artistic anarchy (though capable of short-lived dreams of Dada world-government).
Max Ernst, an important retrospective exhibition of whose work is currently to be seen at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, was associated with Dada after the First World War and has remained faith- ful to the surrealist concept ever since. (Until the advent of Dali he was the movement's only painter of consequence.) His contribution to the armoury of contemporary art has lain, not in novelty or brutality of concept, however, but in technique—especially in the exploitation of texture. It was Ernst who invented, or discovered, the collage, that " fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities " ; the frottage, or rubbing; that reproduces the grain of wood, the veining of leaves, the weave of material. As will be seen from the present exhibition, which ranges &Cm about 1913 up to some of the miniature " Microbes " (tiny abstracts the size of postage stamps) produced this year, his work has at different times contained echoes of the Douanier Rousseau, Klee, de Chirico and Masson. Some of it is nonsense, but it is never frivolous nonsense. For Ernst the picture has always been a thing- in-itself ; he is free from Dali's obsession with Freudiana and the reliance upon trompe l'oeuil that has accompanied it.
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At the Hanover Gallery Richard Chopping shows some blonde and delicate examples of infinite precision in this genre. Francis Bacon downstairs, however, radiates more of the savage anti- aestheticism of early surrealism. After all, it is not such a jump from Breton's first surrealist image, " a man is cut in half by a window," to Bacon's glass-boxed presence. The eight large paintings on show here are the result of two recent trips to Africa. Popes and cardinals have given way to elephants and rhinos and wild dogs, set in acres of long grass and bare canvas. Compared with past horrors, these are polite indeed, and Bacon's summary technique suggests contempt rather than anger. He has nevertheless—inter- mittently—that " power to create hallucinations " of which Matta speaks in connection with Ernst, and the most finished of the three jackal-dogs seems to me just such -a heightened, charged perception.
" Scottie " Wilson has been claimed by the surrealists for the tenuous connection between his innocent fantasies and their own earlier " automatic " drawings. He has recently exhibited with success in Basle and Paris, and his latest doodles, more ambitious than hitherto but conceived and executed in no less humility, may be seen at Gimpel Fils. At the same gallery Kenneth Armitage, fresh also from triumphs abroad in Venice and Paris, is holding his first one-man show. His is an almost two-dimensional sculpture, an affair of silhouette pointed by the slightest protuberances. His groups of human figures are flattened into thin slabs of metal or plaster ; coalesce into Siamese twins or triplets or quadruplets ; angle themselves on their spindly legs hie firescreens. The idiom (it is a form of expressionism) is limited, though the range of invention within the idiom is not so limited as at first appears, but there is life in Armitage's forms and it is the ordinary life around us observed with wit. These are no anthropomorphic monsters or pantheistic landscape-figures, but simply " People in a Wind," " Family going for a Walk," translated into personal sculptural terms. Whoever is interested in the new collective phenomenon presented by the younger British sculptors today, should see this show. Also here is more of James Tower's most excellent pottery, notable, as always, for its decoration. I can think of no more acceptable Christmas present than one of these bowls or dishes. M. H. MmDLE-rox.
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