A R7'
Three Americans
IN keeping with a supposed instinct for com- promise, the English art-lover has rarely been able to accept modern painting or sculpture which exists as an absolute. Self-expression, vision, call it what you will, is less disturbing if it is not pursued to the extreme limits of formality. The translators or popularisers of a radical innovator are easier to enjoy, and com- prehend. than the less ingratiating discoveries of the original inventor. When elderly spinster ladies from Boston or Philadelphia were waiting outside the studios of Monet and Seurat in order to purchase, with understanding and love, the newest paintings by these great artists, the English art-lover was admiring the work of the Pre- Raphaelites. A few decades later a handful of English collectors were buying paintings by the impressionists, whilst their American cousins were hanging cubist masterpieces on their oWn walls or patiently negotiating the acquisition of a Brancusi sculpture from the reluctant artist's workshop. More recently, in the early 'fifties, an exhibition was held in London of paintings by Nicolas de Stael from which scarcely a picture was sold. For a hundred or two, one might have bought a fair-sized major painting that could be sold today in two minutes—for a five-figure sum. This is to sound, perhaps, a slightly vulgar note of financial acumen; but needless to say most of de Stael's work is now to be found in museums and private collections on the Con- tinent or in the US. The artist is dead.
The point of this preamble is simply to estab- lish the fact that in art, as in other fields, the English find it hard to integrate themselves with the present and prefer the past, or a modified and sweetened compromise with the present. A new generation of young English painters and sculptors is producing, for the first time in my memory. a body of work -of uneven achieve- ment, of course—which does face up to the present and is not a later provincial variation on original themes first established in Paris or New York, although this recent blaze of activity would not have been possible without the ex- ample of American painting Our younger artists are now, however, beginning to think and feel for themselves and are gradually producing original works of art. It is greatly to be hoped that an appropriate response will come—quickly —from English collectors and public galleries. Otherwise, like some of our scientists and tech- nologists, these artists will transfer their opera- tions abroad: to America, in fact, where they have met so far with rather more success than in England—and where a surprising number of them arc in temporary residence.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, three exhibitions have opened which the London art public should consider most carefully : recent paintings by Jules Olitski at Kasmin Ltd.; a retrospective group of paintings by Morris Louis at the White- chapel Gallery: and recent works (part paint- ing, part assemblage) by Jim Dine at the Robert Fraser Gallery. All three artists are Americans— and their accomplishment is extraordinary. Morris Louis died tragically in 1962 when he was barely fifty; the other two artists, of a younger generation, are happily still thriving. All their work relates to the present, to the situation in art that exists now and therefore also refers, however obliquely, to the human situation at this moment. Here is a good chance to catch up with events.
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The easiest artist to begin with is Jim Dine, aged thirty, from Ohio, living and working in New York (occasionally involved in those legendary New York 'happenings% connected with pop-art and with that thin, sharp-sweet, belle-peinture kind of painted surface which comes, distantly, from the expressionism of de Kooning and also enters the work of Rauschen- berg and Johns, with both of whom Dine has certain affinities—especially when the painterly facture is animated or disrupted by the anarchic and elegant surrealistic wit of Marcel Duchamp, who is still a reigning sovereign for one wing of young artists in New York. This is Dine's first London show and he has paid us a com- pliment by making references in his currently exhibited works to Paolozzi, the sculptor, and Mary Quant and Gerald McCann, the clothes designers. His work is abstractedly figurative, elegant, crisp, immensely intelligent, sober— colour mainly restricted to black, white and grey —and beautifully designed. There are a few jokes about the nature of illusion: real objects, projecting from a picture, with painted shadows, and so on. Satire is certainly present. There is a mildly kinky but totally inoffensive preoccu- pation with shoes, legs and underwear. This is one aspect of Dine's work. Earlier phases would reveal great tenderness and a lyrical sensuality: a series of `Palette' paintings, for instance: unseen here.
I cannot comment on the Louis show at White- chapel, through being connected with it. But an opinion may be permissible, and for me Louis is unique, magical, almost religious in serious- ness and sense of mystery, and worthy of pro- longed contemplation. These are slow, deep paintings, so beautiful in their own right that even the most puzzled and sceptical follower of contemporary painting might well forget to ask what the shapes—veils, rather—actually mean. And at Kasmin's Gallery, Jules Olitski's second show in London is a miracle of sheer radiance and resonance. Pure colour, sprayed on to the canvas, impersonally personal, and many other subtleties. The most exhilarating experience in any West End gallery. Off you go.
BRYAN ROBERTSON
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