ART
Art and Football (The Football Association, 45 Park Lane.) THROUGHOUT the year paintings on an unusual theme have been creeping into the one-man shows and the mixed exhibitions. They weiT the forerunners of " Football and the Fine Arts," the £3,000 competition with which the Football Association cele- brates its ninetieth birthday on Monday next, and the results of which, chosen from • 1,700 entries, are now on view at 45 Park Lane.
This was a fine, unexpected and imagina- tive effort to stimulate artists in a field most frequently overlooked even in days when cricket not uncommonly provided a subject. Competitors were specifically told (as in a previous competition this year) that " sym- bolic " treatment would receive the same consideration as " naturalistic." In conse- quence, considerable diversity of aim is apparent. Brains have been cudgelled into unfamiliar channels : have gone to history, have ranged from fireworks to the chalked goalpost on the tenement wall and from fog to floodlight ; have tried to make compo- sitional capital out of odd views of corru- gated iron stands and the Klee-like parallelo- grams of an agitated net ; have dwelled upon the funny hats, the rosettes and the rest ; have played themselves to a standstill with illustration that would disgrace a boys' weekly and abstraction without visi'lc bearing upon the set subject.
There are gaps. I did not see the long- distance charabanc with its windowfuls of swinging rattles and tam-o'-shanter'd heads; or the figures on each others back's peeping over the wall round the ground ; or the equipment of a big club's gym ; or the white sea of litter washing the empty stadium after the crowds have gone. What I did see—in addition to one lone reference to the pools—were the crowds arriving (C. Chamberlain, Richard E. Slater) and departing (B. Bradshaw, Arthur Hackney, Stanley Robert Jones) ; players in the snow (Thomas Bromly, John Elwyn and, with a Grandma Moses charm, Fred Uhlman) in the net (James Boswell, Daphne Chart, Albert Irvin) ; against the cold dark dregs of a winter afternoon in Gloucestershire (Richard MacDonald) and on cinders against a potteries' sunset (James Palmer). Among the paintings these all seemed to make some sort of gloss upon the subject. The prints are surprisingly dull, though Phyllis Ginger's straightforward portrait and Robert Tavener's Changing Room catch the eye. The sculpture, on the other hand, is lively, and there are excellent things by Peter L. Peri, Stephen Rickard, and Willi Soukop.
Sport is perhaps a sculptor's suliject, for at least he is less self-conscious about the human form than the painter. The artist today is inhibited by the certain knowledge that he cannot hope to equal, let alone sur- pass, the wonderful " long-Tom " action shots which are a commonplace in daily journalism ; knows too that in the absence of classical veneration for the human body and the scientific curiosity of the Renais- sance, an excess of movement is unlikely to be sustained by more than an interest in compositional szill. To hope to catch the moment of supreme grace or significance, the moment of truth, whether in ballet or bull-fighting or football, seems to him almost self-contradictory, for it is but the culmina- tion of a whole sequence of co-ordinated movements, all interlocking one with another and it is the sequence which has significance. Degas we remember, not for the rendering of a brilliant foirette or pas de deux, but for his angular off-stage studies of dancers awaiting their cue.
At all events there are no Duchamps among the painters here ; it is a sculptor— F. E. McWilliam—who has made the most daring space-time experiments in perspective and sequence. For his two groups, not wholly successful buf among the most interesting exhibits, he has been awarded one of the main prizes. One senses a touch of the we- must-have-one-of-these-to-show-we're- broadminded atmosphere inseparable from such occasions in the various Honorable Mentions, and it seems a pity that there was not a rule to stop an artist receiving more than one prize, but most of the main prize- winners are worthy enough. The jury of Professor Coldstream, Sir Philip Hendy, Mr. Philip James and Sir John Rothenstein (no footballers as far as I know amongst them I) made awards to Brian Robb, L. S. Lowry, L. L. Toynbee, Alfred Daniels, Susan Benson and Jack Daniel among others. The only comparable exhibition I can think of in recent years was that organised in connection with the 1948 Olympic Games. iris one is a lot better.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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