Contemporary Arts
Abstract Art Today
THE present exhibitions at Tooth's and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts de- scribe the present condition of non-figurative art, the first by showing five Parisians all of whom belong to what has been ambiguously and debat- ably called 'the other art,' the second through a wider sur- vey of British work, with comments written for the catalogue by its authors. Over the years non-figurative art has provided a number of images at least as memorable and influential as those created by the modern masters of figurative painting; one has only to think of Mondrian's 'inimitable gridiron.' What I found particularly characteristic of these two shows was the scarcity of such images; in their place are certain patterns of style, certain sub- ject matter (I use the word deliberately), certain ideas only partially realised or embodied; these are in the main school works. Taking the Tooth's exhibition first there is the case of the French Canadian Jean Riopelle, the most accomplished stylist of them all. He shows the current devotion to pigment and fans out his clusters of thick, bright, opaline taches with all the dexterity of a born prestidigitateur. The result is elegant, infal- libly tasteful and most enjoyable, but also academic in its easy slickness. How often one has seen the same kind of pictures, the same degree of accomplishment in other guises: impressionist, fauve or cubist—and coming from even earlier times. Paul Jenkins's paintings are likewise extremely pretty though they belong to a different tradition; they would hang appropriately over some mantelpiece inhabited by shells and crystals and other picturesque natural forms. By an adroit, shrewd and again extremely tasteful manipulation of technical devices and material accidents he has conjured a world of references to nature, microscopically or telescopically viewed.
Again in the pictures of Jean Dubuffet there is a similar technical inventiveness. His devotion to the drawings of the insane and the child, to graffiti and other uncontrived things, is a hang- over from enthusiasms formed and well worked over in the Twenties and Thirties when the pages of a magazine like Minotaure, to take only one example, were generously filled with what Dithuffet has in the Forties called Tart brut.' His sophisticated use of this material, sophisticated more often than not by reason of his careful technical ingenuity, appeals to our more informed responses. The imagery again does not appeal directly and relentlessly, but indirectly through the intelligence. It illustrates in modern terms ideas of interest to the am4teur sociologist of our own and other cultures. He does not hold the key to more profound sources of experience as Klee and occasionally Ernst have done.
So far I have mixed the two groups which Lawrence Alloway in his introduction to the catalogue has isolated, those who are 'investigating the decorative possibilities of paint' and those who are searching for `images powerful enough to survive the turbulence of handling.' Alloway in fact put the Belgian painter Karel Appel into the first of these categories and the American Sam Francis into the second but, in my belief, whatever may be these artists' motives and intentions, their achievement does not fit in with such a distinction. Appel's work is certainly the most turbulent performer here and the assault he makes with fierce colour and thick strokes of pigment is exhilarating, but his imagery is surely banal and somewhat similar to that presented by the strong-armed character of the Forties, Jack Bilbo. The fierce gestures of action painters, at any rate of those who paint like this out of the nature of their temperament and not through a simple desire to make a fashionable display, will disperse any preconceived image as surely as Soutine's paint sometimes swept away a tree or a figure. In its place will appear simply the record of a gesture armed with a paint brush. I recall Van Gogh's remark that a religious picture could not be painted in an impressionist manner. In the case of Sam Francis, however, the outstanding contributor to these two exhibitions and a painter whom I have been bound to reassess since first seeing his work, the situation is quite different. His pictures offer something profoundly more mysterious and compelling than can be gained by a particular attitude to the procedures of paint- ing, by an act of self-surrender or by any attempt to import images. His work is as difficult to describe as it is elusive in form and substance, but his diaphanous and dripping veils of colour do materialise a formed and individual *vision which is not decorative or descriptive but is genuinely inspired, which grows and flowers as the picture is painted and which exercises the whole of a spectator's sensibility. I hope to be able to write more about his work before the exhibition closes.
Of the twenty-one artists at the ICA, Sandra Blow, Magda Cordell, Alan Davie, Patrick Heron, James Hill, Roderigo Moynihan (making a return to non-figurative painting), Bryan Wynter belong, in their different ways, to the tendencies represented at Tooth's. To pass from the one gallery to the other is to experience a drop in the level of vitality and certitude. Heron, in the statement which he has contributed to the catalogue, writes of the freedom offered to him by the attitude to painting which he has recently adopted. It is—and I am not so much thinking of his present work Which follows from the earlier—a freedom which is only too liable to be deceptive. It very bluntly displays the limitations of an artist's formative powers and the extent to which his-painting is stimulated by an imagina- tive charge, powers which can hardly be created or enhanced by a mere change of ground or idea. Much of the painting at this exhibition seems rather tied to a new set of orthodoxies and ones which are not by their nature very sustaining. A mere dispersal of conventions, prejudices, a loosening of the arm and the assumption of some wsthetic or philosophy are, it should be plati- tudinous to repeat, not enough. In the case of constructivism, which is also represented at the ICA show, it is necessary not to be too easily persuaded by a body of very cogent ethical propositions; in the case of 'tart autre' it is the gesture, the display of vivacity and the graph of freedom which can so readily stand in for any image pressing upon the brush. The work of Francis, Hepworth, Pasmore in these two exhibi- tions provides a useful gauge and standard; they are not simply channels of idea or feeling.
BASIL TAYLOR
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