HURLING A POT OF PAINT
The press: Paul Johnson looks at an intruder in the art world
CONSIDERING the huge number of peo- ple who attend art exhibitions, and the prodigious sums of money now spent at art auction, surprisingly little noise is made by art journalism. Which of you could name the art critics of the Times, Telegraph Or Guardian? Ears are cocked when someone like Arianna Stassinopoulous decides to take Picasso by the scruff of his neck and rattle him till his rotten teeth fall out. But routine coverage of painting arouses little interest. Most people regard contemporary art as a remote phenomenon which has lost contact with social reality, something for 'them' (vaguely believed to be a cosmopo- litan stew of pseuds and sodomites). And many art journalists widen the gap by writing not so much articles as inter-office memos to each other in glutinous jargon. All this helps to explain the sensational success of Modern Painters (£3.50), the brilliant new quarterly edited by Peter Fuller, the first art magazine for years Which has succeeded in talking to a general educated public. It sold out its first issue of 10,000 copies, which is reprinting, and its second number is to be seen everywhere. Fuller is regarded as a renegade by the Left which, oddly enough in view of Stalinist art theory, now identifies itself with modern non-figurative extremism. But the furious political attacks on him have merely stimu- lated the chattering classes and pushed the sales of his mag.
One reason Modern Painters has been snatched at eagerly is the poverty of the field, not indeed in numbers but in quality and excitement. For art must excite or it fails and becomes functional like furniture. The first article I ever published was on the subject of modern Finnish painting, writ- ten for the long-since defunct Art News & Review, and I remember to this day my efforts to convey the spine-tingling I felt. Not much of that in the group of magazines I have just been examining. To be sure, there is ample worthiness. The May issue of the Burlington Magazine (£6.50) has contributions with titles like Two Neo- Classicial designs for a Bourbon Chapel in St-Denis' and 'Georges Trubert, the Rene Master and Waddesdon Mss. 21'. Some of this material is excellent: there is a fasci-
nating analysis of the influence of the Auvergne landscape on J.-F. Millet, illus- trated with his paintings and photographs. But it is dismaying that none of them is in colour. With the rapid fall in the cost of high-quality colour printing, I nowadays refuse to buy an art book which is not predominantly in colour. Why should one settle for less? The May Burlington has no colour whatever in its 70 pages of editorial, and its grey appearance is made even dingier by the presence of many brilliant colour advertisements from dealers. Apol- lo (£4), another excellent scholarly pub- lication, whose May issue is devoted chief- ly to the history and the new buildings of the National Gallery of Canada, manages four colour pages in an editorial spread of 63; again, not good enough. The Connois- seur (New York, $3) has many pages in excellent colour-photogravure, but is now a general magazine with a wide arts cover- age rather than a specialist revue (though I loved its superb article on Lutyens's dolls' house).
The most impressively illustrated article in the whole bunch of mags I examined was devoted to a group of mediaeval frescoes from Georgia, a 16-page colour spread published in Art International. This quarterly, which deals with contemporary art as well as art history, is published in Paris and printed on heavy paper at the Imprimerie Blachard in Le Plessis- Robinson. It is very well done and even its black-and-whites are of high quality. But the price is £12.50 for a single issue. By contrast, the best American art magazines can run a high-cost editorial display and still keep the price low thanks to the sheer gigantism of the US art market. Art in America ($4.75 or £3.50) is in first-class colour throughout its 80 pages of contents. But then, it carries 120 pages of advertise- ments from galleries. There is the same kind of balance in another New York magazine, Art Forum International ($6.50.
'Oh dear, a hippy convoy.'
or £4.95). I liked this review, which has a wide spread of topics, but it suffers from the designer triumphalism which afflicts many quality publications today, based on the assumption that everyone has the perfect eyesight of an 18-year-old. One article, fascinating in itself, on photos taken in Lucknow in 1858, was printed in a spotty grey background which forced me to give up reading half-way through; the type of the captions throughout is too small for comfort and the footnotes appear to be set in ruby 43/4 point. Editors even of art magazines must remember that the reader comes before the layout man.
The British art market, I calculate, is only about a fiftieth the size of America's, and few contemporary art magazines could survive on gallery support. The hand- somest of those I've seen, Art and Design (£4.95), had a February issue devoted to David Hockney, with only five pages of ads out of a total of 100. Both its colour and its black-and white illustrations are of excep- tional quality. But why, in this day and age, print the body text in a sans-serif type-face? It is hard to read and gives the page an old-fashioned 1930s look. Studio International (£5.00) is another good- looking publication, with excellent colour and a sensible attitude to typefaces and layouts: a bit bland and obvious in its choice of topics, though. Its 72-page issue had only three pages of advertising. Art Scribe (£3.00), which gets an Arts Council subsidy of £18,000, ran a 100-page issue in May, with 36 pages of ads. It is well printed but much of the content is not what I would call art at all: two out of three of the illustrations to an article on John Murphy's work appeared to me to be mere black oblongs. Art Line (£1.50) is the best value of the mags I examined: only one page of editorial colour, very newsy, way-out sub- ject matter, screaming layouts and typography, ugly. Design "Week (80p) had layouts which look like a poor man's version of Campaign and the editorial lacks distinction; but it must be accounted a brave effort to publish a weekly at all in this field.
Against this background, it is not sur- prising Modern Painters is talked about. It has refused an Arts council subsidy, and with only 20 pages of ads in its current issue out of a total of 108 (six editorial in colour) it will have to rely on readers to survive. That I think it will do, because it is edited to be read and contains a high proportion of clearly-written, controversial material, from a variety of viewpoints, many of which challenge the lazy, uncerebral assumptions of the modern art world. It is a stone hurled fiercely into turbid waters and the ripples will continue to spread. All the same, my favourite art-reading, I sus- pect, will continue to be Sotheby's Preview (£22.00 subscription for nine months), the superbly-illustrated guide to coming sales, which unashamedly straddles the abyss separating art and mammon.
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