ART
Taste Catches Up I no not know what is the purpose of the Royal Academy in holding an exhibition of all kinds of contemporary art for the first time within its walls. Such an exhibition, in which " Group " painters have been asked to exhibit, is being organised at the moment. Possibly the idea is to kill " modern art" by kindness ; to range beside its little battery all the academic big guns. I prefer to see in it an attempt to academise everyone, so that when the exhibition is finished bright young painting, to be really bright and young, will have to start all over again. Or it may be a simple attempt to see the good in everything. If it is that, it is a sign of a sensitive reaction to the times on the part of the Royal Academy autho- rities. It is an exciting policy, just as it is exciting to try to see good in the great new blocks of fiats growing up in the towns. If you don't it makes no difference—they go on growing up. Only you are rather less happy in the long run than the people who see in them clean lines and clean living. In England, one progresses slowly from repulsion to a state of keeping an open mind. Getting to like things in our own time is an aspect of what we call freedom, and so it is something we think worth fighting for.
The art dictator's sway is not lasting. Ruskin ordered us to like Gothic architecture and Turner, and after a time, and in our own fashion, we did like them. So much so that there are more works in the Tate Gallery by Turner than by any other painter, and every guide-book still has a Gothic soul. But the more adventurous have questioned Turner's supremacy, and have founded the Georgian Group to protect un-Gothic architecture. Ruskin's rule has passed. When I was sketching recently in a provincial town an art-enlightened lady came out of her mellow red-brick house and said to me, " Are you Georgian? " In the same circumstances twenty years ago she would not have bothered to come out at all, having no doubt that she was Gothic and that I was mad. Writing only fifty years ago, William Morris said of St. Paul's Cathedral; " I have found it difficult to put myself in the frame of mind which would accept such a work as a substitute for even the latest and worst Gothic building. Such taste seemed to me the taste of a man who should prefer his lady-love bald." He found a political explanation (as um always can for distasteful art manifestations) for the evils of the Renaissance, or the " New Birth." But here we are, many of us, admiring St. Paul's, later Gothic and William Morris all at once, and feeling dogs, if rather bewildered dogs, for doing so. And, it seems, here is the Academy preparing to admire the London Group, the New English Art Club, Surrealism, and everything else.
But if you are a topographer or an artist with an architec- tural eye in these days, what ages you must cover in spirit as well as distances in fact. First, you go round England guide- book• in hand looking at old-world Tudor manors and Gothic churches ; next, you cover much the same ground, but ex- ploring different corners searching for the masterpieces of Vanbrugh, Soane and Chambers ; then, lifted high on the shoulders of advanced critics, you peep over stucco walls at the monstrous delights of the nineteenth century. (You begin by laughing at these, and end by comparing them favourably with everything that has been built since.) If you are an architectural student, and measure buildings as part of your training, there is only one plan which will keep you up to date ; you must measure, draw and photograph a New Tudor housing estate, with its service roads, its crazy pave- ments, and its blown-on half-timber gables. Or you could set about one of the more rambling brand-new by-pass-road pubs.
Cezanne is an old master, like Turner and Chardin and Gainsborough. He is hung in the National Gallery and the 'buses stop outside the door. That commits us to accepting more than the pictures of Cezanne. Among other things, we begin to wonder and inquire about the buildings we see about the country more often than we see a mediaeval church or a moated grange. Gradually taste catches up with pro- duction. Taste is no longer a whirligig—it is a panorama. This is one of the benefits of science and enlightenment ; of the wide use of wireless, books, galleries, documentary films. And it is a great benefit, if you can cope with it. The Royal
Academy, at any rate, is going to try. JOHN PIPER.
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