Art and art deco
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
If anyone wants to know what the generation gap is all about in terms of work, vision, the thing made, conceptual ideograms as opposed to perceptual ideograms from life, or from memory, then all he has to do is visit Marlborough Fine Art where Keith Vaughan, in his fifties, is holding his first show of paint- ings for some years; and then walk straight up Bond Street to Kasmin's Gallery where paint- ings by Frank Stella, in his early thirties, are exhibited.
The old tired opposition of figurative paint- ing to abstract art is not wholly relevant here: what I'm thinking of are the characteristics like formality, a varied impasto, oil paint itself, and a carefully modulated scale on the one hand, which are a small part of Vaughan's more obvious properties; and unswerving giantisim,
insistent attachment to an impersonal, tidily applied staining of surfaces, water-based acrylic pigments, and clear colour, untroubled by tonal modification, in the case of Stella, who typifies the present direction of American paint- ing, and its followers elsewhere. You're up against a totally different set of physical terms as well as intentions, and they're about as far apart as animal life in the bush contrasted with marine biology.
Simple generalisations apart, the Vaughan show by any standards is highly serious, con- cerned with difficult problems which it resolves with difficulty if at all; the Stella show 'under- mines seriousness with solemnity and is con- cerned with easier problems whose solutions are achieved, painlessly, with melting ease. But given the particular identity of these two ex- hibitors I must-declare myself for Vaughan, and leave the Stella paintings where I am certain they belong: in the field of charming light- weight decoration. Their big scale does not make them any weightier.
If anyone cares to check up on this view, they may well find themselves at a loss to under- stand my reasoning. The Stellas make a spectacle, the Vaughans do not. The Stellas are radiant, cheerful, calmly unfussed and give out a heavy perfume of luxury, like Tiffany lamps or twelve yards of golden Thai silk shot with pink and orange. The Vaughans are inclined to dourness, certainly to sobriety, sometimes appear worried over and abandoned at some penultimate moment. of completion, and far from suggesting luxury often imply the atmo- spheric equivalent of naked isolation in the pouring rain and an east wind.
Vaughan's subjects remain constant; figures in space, or in landscape, in crowds, singly or in Twos or threes. The Vaughan' man is now familiar : tall, barrel-trunked, long limbed, bul- let headed, with awkward joints and an arm or a leg (or a tree trunk) often shooting out of the painting like the serpent in the great Bathers by a River of Matisse (which didn't get to London last summer and should have done). The present show seems to be pushing further, if only marginally, and these fresh stirrings can be found in a small painting called Orchard with Figure in which a pale and light-dappled figure with raised arms is set in a multi-coloured and exotic landscape, so that what is English and northern about Vaughan's environment sud- denly turns into 'something not unlike a naked Cortds in the Mexican jungle invoking an audience with Quetzlcoatl. The handling of paint here is minutely particularised in thin strokes and ribbons of paint, and the range of colour is far richer and wider than usual. Vaughan's early allegiance to the restricted idea of colour in, say, Braque, or the schematic colour range in de Stab], shows signs of ex- pansion. A bigger painting, Group of Figures 1967, also suggests a move forward in the odd firework display of paint in the middle distance, just above the heads of the figures.
Having suggested that Stella's paintings make a spectacle, I should add that so do the brilliant neon strips outside Studio One in Oxford Street at night, and though Stella's work is as refined and objective as ever, its decorative qualities are in much the same category. These huge banded circles swinging outward and thrusting in again hie the motifs in Islamic art would also make very agreeable drop curtains for a ballet. The pinks, oranges, violets, greens are seductive, too, but are now perilously near the best commercial art.
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