THE BIENNALE
INLAND, grass begins to push through the acres of hard-baked silt left by the winter's floods. From the Lido to Chioggia the builders are up at five in the morning to complete the new villas and shop- fronts and roads before the summer influx reaches its peak. In the Piazza our old friend, the lady with the gardenias, circulates among the critics to the boom-dum-dum of the warring café orchestras. Up in the giardini the seats have been repainted a bright scarlet, and the pavilions have sprung to life for the twenty-sixth Biennale.
When President Einaudi, looking like a vest-pocket Italian Truman, made the ceremonial journey up the Grand Canal to open the exhibition, the concrete-mixer had barely ceased turning outside the new Israeli building, and, besides the obstinately empty Russian pavilion, four nations had still to come up to scratch. On paper, however, twenty-seven countries from four continents are this year participating in what remains, despite competition, the world's greatest display of contemporary art. Its value lies in the oppor- tunities it gives to re-chart the artistic tides and currents as they move across the globe ; to re-establish in one's mind individual painters and sculptors, already known in a particular context, in the wider perspective of international competition ; and in the signposts t offers to remote and unfamiliar cultures.
This year the historical exhibitions include a group of Goyas, a gallery of Corots, French and Italian Divisionism, the graphic work of Toulouse-Lautrec (recently seen in London) and the Dutch De Stijl movement.
From Bolivia to Japan, Canada to Yugoslavia the panorama stretches. In so great a concentration it is scarcely possible to particularise about individual artists. The big prizes went, this summer,to Dufy (now in hirseventy-sixth year) and, without much competition, to Alexander Calder, for foreign painting and sculpture ; to Marini (whose preoccupations with geometry seem to have forced his two most recent works into pyramidic form) and, jointly, to Cassinari and Saetti, for Italian sculpture and painting. To Graham Sutherland went the new prize offered by the Biennale's South Ameri- can rival, Sao Paulo.
One may well regret, without seeming prejudiced, that on the showing at Venice Sutherland did not gain the main painting prize. Certainly if there were an award for the best displayed pavilion, the odds are it would have come to Britain. More than one foreign museum-director, it is rumoured, charged with his own country's display, has been told to study the British pavilion and to do better next time. The British Council's plan this year was well conceived and well carried out. Besides a small memorial exhibition devoted to Edward Wadsworth and the display in strength of Graham Sutherland, it was decided to show a largish anthology of work by eight young sculptors—Adams, Armitage, Butler, Chadwick, Clark, Meadows, Paolozzi and Turnbull.
It is a common error to confuse an international audience with an amorphous gaggle of names. (The Egyptian gallery, for example, contains fifty barely distinguishable artists.) These sculptors, however, besides the intrinsic liveliness of their work, have an indefinable identity of feeling (to be denied hotly by themselves but very apparent in the context of the Biennale), which enables them to hold together well as a unit. As far as Sutherland is concerned, it seems likely that the impact made by his three rooms will confirm his reputation internationally, as was Moore's four years ago. Some curious reports have 'appeared about the British representation in Venice this summer. The extent to which this country has recovered international, prestige in the visual arts, fantastic when one thinks back a mere fifteen years or so, deserves to be better appreciated at
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