'New Spirit' at the Academy
John McEwen
The press release for the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting (Royal Academy till 18 March) says that this is the first time an international contemporary painting exhibition has taken place in Europe for 16 years. 'Indeed', it continues, `no such exhibition has been attempted in the world for at least a decade and it will thus stand as a landmark in art history.' Such hype, even the hype of declaring anything 'new' (just forgivable in the name of advertising), will hardly endear more sensitive souls to the Academy's latest, and most surprising, winter extravaganza, but even they must honour the principle of the thing. Any celebration of the work of living artists is commendable and all the more so when, as in this case, it is at the instigation and risk of a private institution. This show is not a touring exhibition devised elsewhere. It was the idea of the Academy's Exhibitions' Secretary, Norman Rosenthal — the Academy approved, the money was assigned. By any standards it was a sporting decision. The Academy currently has an overdraft of about £1/2 million and costs £16,000 a week just to tick over. Even with the help of a government indemnity and £50,000 worth of sponsorship, mostly from the West German government, it is still having to put up £150,000 to pay for the most brazenly uncharacteristic art it has ever presented. For the Academy's spirit alone the show deserves to succeed.
This may not be easy, but then it never is With 'modern art'. An interpretative masterpiece of a show could meet with apathy, the present rag-bag of star names and novelty acts may muddle through. A New Spirit lacks personality. It is not bound by any detectable conviction, it argues no case. What we have is largely to do with fashion — a sample of 1981 market trends in Europe and New York — with just enough personal and nationalistic bias to make a confusion even of that. This was predictable. The exhibition scheduled to have occurred now was cancelled, and the present show had accordingly to be organised from scratch Within less than a year. Perhaps, too, some Of as contradictions are the inevitable result of Rosenthal's sharing the selection with two friends — Nicholas Serota, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, and Christos Joachimides, a critic based in West Berlin. The work of living artists is, unfortunately. Particularly liable to be roughly treated in this way. It fills the short-notice bill because of the lower costs involved and the greater ease of securing loans and cooperation. A Le°uPle of years ago the Arts Council °tinged on a show of ostensibly the latest in American painting at a few weeks' notice, no doubt forestalling a more measured review of the subject for years to come. It can only be hoped that the haphazard circumstances and selection of the Academy show will not result in a commercial flop. If it does it will make it all the more difficult for new ideas in art to be exhibited.
The greatest weakness of A New Spirit is that neither the selection nor Joachimides's catalogue essay (made no easier for being written in English by a foreigner), gives tiny real indication of what the new spirit is. 'Wherever you look in Europe or America you find artists who have rediscovered the sheer joy of painting,' writes Joachimides in his opening paragraph. 'In the studios, in the cafes and bars, wherever artists or students gather, you hear passionate debates and arguments about painting.' True, to be a painter is more fashionable in art circles than it was ten years ago, but this could as well be interpreted as a retreat into conservatism as a new spirit in painting. According to Joachimides, however, the two are not contradictory: 'This exhibition presents a position in art which conspicuously asserts traditional values, such as individual creativity, accountability. (pall ty, which throw light on the condition of contemporary art and, by association, on the society in which it is produced.' It is all very general, and not made any more specific by the selection or the hanging.
There are 38 artists in the exhibition — who, inevitably, are most conveniently categorisable by nationality — principally 11 Germans, 8 British, 6 Americans and 4 Italians— in age the participants range from Picasso, with work done in his nineties, to the current whizzkid of New York painting, Julian Schnabel, who will be 30 this year. Seven artists over the age of 60 are included whose work is considered not only to have inspired the spirit in some other artists in the show but also to continue to embody it. The remainder of the participants are in their fifties and forties, with a tail-end. 'younger', group in their thirties. Much of the work selected is very recent and none of it older than ten or so years. In a show purporting to present something 'new', whatever it is, the first objection must be to the inclusion of artists who appear to be doing less vigorous, joyful, sensual. spirited pictures than they were a decade or more ago. This, glaringly and unfortunately, applies to four of the seven 'old masters': Helion, Matta, Bacon and Balthus. The only conceivable explanation for the inclusion of Helion is as a sop to the otherwise unrepresented French. His touristy pictures of gaily coloured market-folk are the shock of the show, and make one yearn for his dull but decent pre-War abstractions — thus demolishing another faint implication of the selection: that a move from the abstract to the figurative is always for the better. Matta does the electronic mirages that brought him fame in the Forties, only trendily bigger and unframed. Bacon can still pull off a good painting, but his recent habit of incorporating little arrows and directional signs also seems little more than an attempt at up-dating. The spirit, even the design, has been the same for 30 years. As for Balthus, already much over-rated historically, his nubile girls now lack all menace and mystery. the pomposo academic scale of his latest work making those same old stylistic references to the late and great, a sort of pictorial name-dropping, quite embarrassing. That nothing much has happened in the Seventies that might not equally apply to their work Of the Sixties or before, applied to a number of the other more famous artists in the show, from Warhol (his presence inexplicable except as a crowd-puller) to Robert Ryman and his variously white canvases (an artist of the minimal school the school, that is, particularly singled out in the catalogue as the puritanical opposite of anything newly spirited). And the hanging throughout in its jarring oppositicins, its total unpredictability looks like one big tease, of painters and public alike.
This time last year the Academy presented a gloriously muddled summary of Post-Impressionism, but the show was saved by some spectacular loans and one historic room. This year's muddle bears the same gallivanting stamp of Norman Rosenthalwhose light-hearted approach, it must be said, has brought some light and air to the Academy but it has less to redeem it. Its omissions of Jasper Johns, of John Walker in England, of women (if you are taking a fashionable view), of Pattern Painting, sci-fi, Chicago art (if you are looking for the bright and anti-dreary) are as numerous and surprising as some of its inclusions. Fashionable acknowledgment of the last, previously despised, paintings of Picasso, is duly given the nod with the inclusion of four marvellous examples, and they in themselves make a visit worthwhile. The late Philip Guston's late style owes much to their example and he too looks good, along with his fellow American expressionist de Kooning. The two of them (Picasso apart) save the faces of the old. It is interesting to get a glimpse of the work of certain Italian artists wig) W rlast year's rage, and of certain German ones who may well take New York by storm this Spring. Richter, recently seen at the Whitechapel, is still the most interesting German painter, and Baselitz the best of their younger brigade, though none of his already notorious upside-down images here has the power of his sculpture, also recently seen at the Whitechapel. But the majority of this much trumpeted art is merely recycling the ideas of 10, 20, and, in the case of some of the Germans, 60 years ago. The only real difference being the increased size of everything. If you want to be big you must paint big, is the message. This is something the English with the exception in the present show of Hockney and Bacon soberly, resolutely and somewhat insularly refuse to do. Hodgkin, Auerbach and Freud do not seem to manifest a new spirit at all and, ironically, look all the better for it.
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