ART
Treasure trove
BRYAN ROBERTSON
It is hard to tell how a public saturated with images from newsprint, the streets, television, will react to the truly stupendous exhibition at the ICA of 347 engravings made by Picasso in his ninety-first year at Mougins. from 16 March to 5 October, 1968. Three visits to this taxing collation of smallish scenes, executed in a nerve-racking range of styles —every nuance of which is sharply, in- sistently Picasso's own, and nobody else's— are hardly enough. The engravings demand detailed, slow, relaxed scrutiny: you cannot just `do' this exhibition in one session. It is, incidentally, the .finest show held at the mot since its rebirth in the Mall.
Some moralists have pointed to the odd- ness of the law, under which the police have seized John Lennon's allegedly obscene, sup- posedly erotic, pseudo-oriental calligraphic drawings of coupling bodies—and, so far, have ignored Picasso's engravings which are concerned with the act of love in every con- ceivable posture, stance, costume, and his- torical epoch. But it is possible to argue that Lennon deserves to be prosecuted for bad drawing, nothing else, and sentenced to three years hard work at the Slade to learn how to draw. The authorities might reflect that artists have made drawings of these human antics for thousands of years; Holman Hunt, of all artists, made a long series of mildly obscene paintings for Edward the Seventh but Windsor has never been under a cloud.
Picasso, even at his present great age, remains the finest draughtsman of this cen- tury and one of the supreme drawers of any epoch. The works at the los reflect an artist's preoccupation, as well' as a dreaming voyeur's: that is, everything is extremely posed, as if on a stage set, or as if the per- sonages were- intended to shift from image to image through a series of tableaux
vivants in endless historical costumes, mythoi logical undertones, and overtones of many aspects of art history. But they are also dazzling as drawings because, although we have seen much the same pitch of virtuoso sleight-of-hand before, in this series the changes in mood are so endlessly subtle and so marvelously caught by the varying in- flexions, pressure points, slowness, inertness, or ravishing speed of the line. The range of black, grey or silver tone, dappled, mottled, pitted, scratched, fuzzed or what- ever, is breathtaking: here is consummate orchestration.
In each one, a male figure, usually of advanced years, appears as an onlooker before a female nude in an endless series of seductive, sprawling poses on a bed. Some- times she has a companion, occasionally all three are intertwined, but inoffensively and charmingly so, with so much quaint- ness and such elaborations of positioning and helter skelter of surrounding detail, wall- paper, furniture, clothes, armour, that the most vigilant censor would surely walk away in bemused confusion. Phallic overtures ex- tend beyond the obvious requisites, so that paint brushes, pipes, even spears and lances, take on a new-old significance. These draw- ings are really not possible to describe, not because of their sweet and funny, unsalac- ions content, but because they are possessed of a swift, ethereal magic that turns words into lumps of stone. Go and see them, many times: no exhibition in 1970 is likely to be more important or extraordinary than this one.
At the Hanover Gallery, John Wragg proves yet again that he is a connoisseur's sculptor with no gift whatsoever for creating telling works of sculpture: that is, his work is well made, follows the styles somewhat ponderously and usually a bit late (now he is up to David Smith, Caro and the Picasso. Gonzalez iron school of gesticulating, thinly signalling, semaphoric, black constructions: cut-out bits of metal actually used as part of the sculpture, and all) and the total result is a non-exhibition. The same can be said of Joe Tilson's newspaper pop-art commen- taries at the New London Gallery. It is high time that Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy et al were declared illegal subject matter for all artists over twelve. There really are other people, other subjects, even in the world of day to day journalism from which Tilson (or Richard Hamilton) draws his maddeningly limited view of life. There is also a kind of non-exhibition of brightly coloured, large, empty canvasses at the Rowan, in which the slanting diagonal lines make a kind of wide tartan grid. The paint- ings are by John Edwards and it is hard to see how a management that presents Bridget Riley, Philip King and Paul Huxley can be so trustful.
The best value in town, in what is other- wise a desert so far as shows are concerned, is at the enterprising Wright Hepburn gal- lery (West Halkin Arcade) where theatre designs by Piero Gerhardi for The White Devil mix to deadly effect with studies by Georgiadis and others. The prices for these splendid designs are so modest that one begins to question the validity of the price range of large, empty, abstract canvasses by many young artists who wguld look down their noses at 'theatrical' art. This same gallery still has some exquisite studies by Erte for the Folies Bergires, and a number of equally inventive and refined works for the same series of spectacles executed by Zig, who died of drugs at the age of twenty- five,
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