Art
So stale
John McEwen
Continuous Creation (Serpentine Gallery till 29 March) exhibits the work of five middle-aged, relatively established artists — two English, one German, one American, one French — nevertheless reckoned by the organiser, Michael Compton of the Tate Gallery, to be too little known in this country. Four of them have it in common that they present their work in the form of 'environments' — each allotted a room, which he theatrically transforms — while Robert Filliou, the Frenchman, states his 'parallel between the present-day cosmology of physics and that of the China of the Tao-te Ching' on strips of canvas that can be regarded as 'pictures', placing him at once in a different category. The Daily Telegraph and News of the World have already rather half-heartedly tried to fan the cooling embers of philistine indignation by advertising the presence of some donkey droppings in one of the tableaux, and Michael Compton himself sees the work of the participants as healthily anarchic, but the overwhelming impression is of datedness, of Sixties enthusiasms tired by 20 years, of weaker offerings by older artists.
In the first gallery we are confronted with the imagination of Paul Theck, the Amer ican, best known for a period piece entitled 'Death of a Hippie', now, more than a decade later, still obsessed with death, this time in the more familiarform of the funereal raft bearing the emblems of this world into the next — the emblems too, unfortunately, contemptibly familiar. Next, Anna Oppermann, plastering floor and walls with personal mementos and scrawled thoughts in the accumulative manner of her compatriot Schwitters, 60 academic years on. Next, our own Bruce Lacey (teamed with wife Jill), once of the Alberts and 'An Evening of British Rubbish' fame, now celebrating the joys of a smallholder's lot (hence the donkey droppings, eggs, bantam feathers, goat turds, etc) in a whimsically municipal way — the life visibly ebbing from the symbolic stockade of branches and withering foliage made all the more apparent for lack of the undeniable and still salutary zest of the Laceys in person. Finally, Robert Filliou, his work the embodiment of all the French mean by 'spirituel'— literary, poetic, witty, philosophically concerned — the most original of these artists but slower to the point than in what looks to have been his intellectual heyday ten, even 20 years ago. It all adds up to, at best, a nostalgic, at worst, a depressing experience.
The most immediate available corrective is to be found down the road in South Kensington at the French Institute, Queensberry Place, where the Arts Coun cil, once again, makes ample amends with its sponsorship of a fine exhibition of Picasso Graphics (till 1 April, then touring to the Bede Gallery, Jarrow, 16 April-25 May; Library Exhibition Gallery, Milton Keynes, 3 June-4July; Rochdale Art Gal lery, 18 July-16August; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 26 August-26 September; Bristol City Art Gallery, 7 October-7 November; Reading Museum and Art Gallery, 18 November-19 December). From a total output of over 2,000 prints 121 examples have been chosen, the selection emphasising that the artist completed four fifths of these after the age of 63. There is no spirituality in Picasso, and this is never so obvious as in the late prints, where he increasingly agonises over his own failing sexual powers. So much sex, albeit of the most delicate eroticism ever seen in Western art, does get one down after a while. All at a go it is a bit like being force fed with an endless diet of meat and gravy. Contrary to what the catalogue proclaims, his later paintings, because of their greater diversity both of subject and form, are superior to the graphics.
The most swinging gallery in London at the moment is the newly opened The Space at 5 Young Street, W8 (just next to Barkers, Kensington High Street). This is undoubtedly due to the youth and impeccable credentials of the directors: Paul Kasmin (son of the dealer John Kasmin), Daniel Moynihan (son of the painter Rodrigo Moynihan), and Jasper Morrison. Kasmin concentrates on dealing in photographs, Moynihan in painting and sculpture and Morrison in rare contemporary art books. At present it is photography's turn (till 10 April), with an exhibition of the work of Harry Diamond — longstanding customer at the Frenoh Pub, famously painted by Lucian Freud. Diamond took up photography only ten-odd years ago when he was. in his mid-forties, and his images are accordingly rigorous and free of pretension. They have a feeling of being the product of necessity. The East End and the demimonde are both presented free of comment, Lucian Freud, in particular, now famously photographed.
At the Patrick Seale Gallery Christopher Clairmonte is showing paintings and drawings (through March). Clairmonte is 48, and like most of his generation in England was knocked sideways by the tidal wave of New York abstract painting that hit London in the late Fifties and early Sixties. He succumbed for a while, but happily returned before long to his first love, topography. He draws compulsively, mostly round Brighton and Hove where he lives, Clairmonte is an excellent topographer, having an eye for the humorous as well as the idiosyncratic, for the arrow pointing the words 'Family Fun' at the 'First Aid sign as well as the little old lady who takes a green ice daily in the shadow of 'The Grand'. An (almost) facsimile sketchbook for the price of £15 — numbered and signed — admirably completes the show.
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