Exhibitions
Tribute to Edward Bawden (Fine Art Society, till 31 July) Georg Baselitz (Tate Gallery, till 1 November
Cultural conundrum
Giles Auty
Last week I wrote about the art of Richard Hamilton, more in sorrow than in anger. Unusually for me, my view that his major retrospective at the Tate was of an unsatisfying nature seems to have been shared by a majority of British critics. Judged by disappointing attendance fig- ures, the public has a rather similar idea of Mr Hamilton's artistic merits. Even a recent attempt by the Tate to stage a dis- cussion of his work for a specialiit audience had to be cancelled for lack of response.
In view of the foregoing it may surprise you a little to learn that Mr Hamilton has just been picked by the British Council to `represent' this country at next year's Venice Biennale. Anyone who missed my long tirade last December for the front half of this paper (`The triumph of anti- culture') may well wonder which precise section of the country it is that Mr Hamil- ton will represent. Those who did read my disquisition will know the answer, of course: the tiny but power-crazed mod- ernist faction which dominates Britain's museums of modern art, Arts Councils, art schools and arts broadcasting. Each mem- ber of this is embedded so firmly in the woodwork as to be near impossible to dis- lodge, resembling in this respect recent communist potentates who also shared a similarly mystical conception of their mis- sion. Like Stalinist five-year plans, the pro- grammes our cultural masters devise for us promise much but deliver little. I fear the new dawns pledged us by modernists remain as intangible as consumer goods continue to be in Moscow shops. The best solution is to allow our modernist masters to continue to organise their biennales and Turner Prizes, museum retrospectives and international blockbusters, and then simply laugh at their findings. Those with the vim to do so should then try to organise a living culture of an alternative and more authen- tic nature. Arts Councils and the British Council should be kept at the furthest pos- sible remove, since the results of their med- dlings are habitually fatal.
This week I wish to compare tributes of different kinds to two print-makers. The first was organised by the Fine Art Society (148 New Bond Street, W1) to the memory of the charming and courageous English- man Edward Bawden, who died three years ago in a small house in Saffron Walden. The second has been organised by the pow- ers that be at the Tate to honour the irre- sistible rise, with their enthusiastic support, of the east German Georg Baselitz to a sta- tus of international artistic celebrity. Mr Baselitz's happy relationship with the mod- ern museum hierarchy in Britain and else- where in the West has enabled him to acquire an amusing castle to live in. But is his talent of similarly inflated proportions?
The Tate's exhibition is impressive in scale: 85 prints and a brace of sculptures and oil paintings reminding us of the artist's habitual forms of mark-making. The first major influence on Baselitz was Dada; violence and social iconoclasm also trig- gered his first essays in print-making. As a written guide to the exhibition explains: 'In "Oberon" 1964, fungoid, phallic growths emerge from a desolate, swamp-like land- scape and are transformed into anguished heads on elongated necks'. In short, we are cast immediately into good German cheer- fulness. Have you ever encountered a work by a 20th-century German artist positing anything but gloom? Much of. Baselitz's work is figurative, but he escapes the opprobrium reserved by curators of mod- ern collections for all forms of realism by turning his images on their head. I have no idea whether the Tate's audience would be willing to repeat this process but they should know the artist would not approve. His reversed heads and eagles are part of an autonomous process of unfathomable intellectual complexity. This and their vio- lent pessimism explain the extremes of adulation showered on the artist by mod- ernist thinkers too young to have known war or any real conflict for themselves.
Among Edward Bawden's varied experi ences of a working life spanning more than six decades was the experience of five days in a lifeboat after being torpedoed 600 miles from land in the South Atlantic and of being evacuated from Dunkirk with only his clothes and the watercolours he had managed to make there. Bawden worked in five different sectors as a war artist and before the war knew the typical struggles of a young, married artist in a far from pros- perous climate. Bawden was a complete professional who could turn his hand to almost any aspect of art with distinction. I had lunch with him in 1988 on the occasion of his 85th birthday and cannot praise too highly the cheerfulness of an old man living largely on his own. The current exhibition features several of his own delightful prints and watercolours plus visual tributes from his many artist friends. To their justified praises I add this small personal footnote.
`Brighton Pier', 1958, Unocal by Edward Bawden (1903-1989)
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