ARTS Redecorating the world
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Art columns tend to be rather solemn affairs, intent for the most part on trying to explain the unexplainable: for if a painting or sculpture, is totally expressible in words it surely need not have been laboured over in the first place. Art exhibitions rarely provoke the nice opportunities for humour legitimately provided by movies, for ex- ample, and occasionally the theatre. Music critics presumably suffer from the same deprivation: conductors never seem to fall off the rostrum; concerts, like art exhibitions, are stately affairs, the issues they raise, as in painting and sculpture, are too serious to allow a critic any degree of levity, though there is room for disrespectful speculation, perhaps, in any consideration of the paths recently trodden by Stockhausen, and John Cage has always enjoyed some of the instincts of a farceur.
This week provides us with an exception to the general rule in the exhibition of paintings, sculptings (the artist's word. not mine), serographs and drawings by Peter Max. now installed at the London Arts Gallery in New Bond Street. The gallery, in the first place, has rather less of the spirit of repose. con- templation and quiet spacious atmosphere than you'd normally find in a New York lunch counter but the implied principle is not a bad one: if you can walk straight into a small shop, off Bond Street, and be directly exposed to art, that's fine; everything depends upon the art. But the art of Peter Max, an American ex-commercial artist who, according to the catalogue, 'gave tip his office for a creative retreat and came up . with some 5,000 designs and 4,500 written ideas for graphics from foldable furniture to designs for the stars' (my italics)—this art really will not do.
What you see is Aubrey Beardsley raped by Walt Disney in his Fantasia period; Beardsley might have enjoyed it but the result in terms of slovenly drawing, cheap, ' bad colour of the Day-Glo variety, banal compositions and feebly pretentious at- tempts to establish some kind of quasi- religious, astrological-astronomical myth - ology, is an affront to the simplest visual intelligence. Max is well known as a designer of book jackets and record covers in the psychedelic mode and in that area has achieved a huge commercial success. I think his work probably takes tired adults happily back to the strip comics of childhood: cer- tainly his success as a 'serious' artist is part of the same enshrinement of infantilism that you find in pop art, when millionaire col- lectors pay $50,000 or so for a giant ham- burger made of coloured vinyl.
In London, quite a lot of people have paid well over £1,000 apiece for paintings by Peter Max, who has clearly never relin- quished for one second his role of com- mercial artist : he's just on to a new market. There's a certain poetic justice in his en- terprise; for the past decade or more painters have been feeding off commercial art for ideas, so they really can't complain when a high-powered, publicity-conscious, com- mercial artist strikes back and invades their own territory. I don't complain, either; but I can say that this is some of the worst, cer-
tainly the most trivial, art I've ever seen get by in London.
The catalogue claims that 'Max has set out to create a tangible and simple fusion of East and West by applying the joy of Eastern Yoga teaching to the whole range of technological systems of the West with the hope of redecorating the world.' I like the modesty of the man's ambitions, concede that he almost certainly believes in what he's doing, accept that the persistent com- mercialism, in all senses, may come from others and not from him; but if this is serious art then Beatrix Potter is Giotto. It's a relief to escape from the London Arts Gallery and take in the style. elegance, and flair for colour in any neighbouring shop window display.
Back in the world of sanity, the Tate Gallery has put on a fine exhibition of sculpture by Julio Gonzalez, the Spanish artist who was close to Picasso from the time of their shared youth in Barcelona until Gonzalez died in 1942. in Paris where he had lived and worked for the whole of his adult life. Gonzalez helped Picasso to make a lot of his own sculpture and was somewhat overshadowed by Picasso during his life- time, but his fame has spread steadily since his death and artists were trying to get a Gonzalez exhibition for London back in the early 'fifties. The present show was in fact suggested to the Tate by Phillip King. and the catalogue contains a most trenchant and absorbing note on Gonzalez and his use of welded iron by the American sculptor. David Smith. Gonzalez. in short, is greatly loved by other artists and one can quite see why when confronted by the purity and self- evident integrity of his sculpture. The Tate exhibition should also be assessed, in- cidentally. by a visit to Gimpel Fils, where there is a group of Gonzalez drawings.
The exhibition at the Tate is one of the most beautiful, in lighting and installation. that I can recall in recent years. The organisers have done Gonzalez proud. The fierce, bristling, cacti-like shapes rear up in thin, jet-black severity against calm white spaces; often the iron sculptures—which Gonzalez saw as embodying the idea of 'drawing in space'—spring up from rough- hewn lumps of stone; the total effect is of pride, dignity, an intense concern for biomorphic form. and a valid alternative to cubism through the way in which the ar- ticulation of each sculptured shape invokes open space as an equal partner in its formal expressiveness. Gonzalez really managed More than anyone, except Picasso, to free art from the hermetically sealed solidity of cubism, in which each space became a separate plane in addition to whatever the space enveloped. The sculpture as a whole is alive with a sensation of release and imaginative liberation. Its dignity comes not only from the imagery, which refers back to Negro art as well as plant forms and human anatomy, but also perhaps from the tradi- tional associations of iron with either serious,- useful instruments or weapons. or with very grand decoration, like the immense seventeenth-century gates in Spain or the screens in churches. The catalogue also contains some brief statements by the artist which are extremely moving : 'Only a cathedral spire can show us a point in the sky where our soul is suspended! In the disquietude of the night the stars seem to show to us points of hope in the sky : this immobile spire also indicates to us an endless number of them.' Gonzalez had no money in his lifetime and very little success but he affected sculptors everywhere in their attitudes to material, technique, and permissible imagery. His intentions were clear, direct, and accurately realised. The transformation of sculpture all over the world, since his death, has -enriched our visual experience immeasurably; but then Gonzalez would never have thought of 'redecorating the world'. For him, a truly humble artist and craftsman, the world was an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
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