The New Generation
Nevile Wallis reviews the new generation of sculptors at the Whitechapel Gallery with his customary insight on another page. Certainly it is a very jolly show which includes some very pretty pieces. The impression is of some gigantic artist's nursery cleaned up for the occasion, or open day in the school art department. Something too of a walk through Heal's, or a well-set-out trade fair of glossy consumer goods. Never far away either are the Sunday colour supplements; one expects to see Shirley Conran coiling herself round, say, Volution, posing for a photo- graph (maybe we shall next Sunday). Bryan Robertson makes no extravagant claims for it in the catalogue: 'esthetically, carving has been found to be too slow a process to incorporate an enlarged gamut of human feelings and reactions.' Enlarged perhaps, but hardly deepened, and indeed it's hard to see how the word 'feeling' got in at all. But on only one point do I seriously take issue with the exhibition's proponents. It may be true that the use of pretty colours in- troduces a new dimension : they seem to me to render the materials irrelevant and that I had thought was what sculpture was about.
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