FINE ARTS AND ART BOOKS
Summertime blues and greens
John McEwen
The 214th Annual Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy (till 15 August) has an illustrated catalogue (L3.95). This gives the Academy the chance to boost and boast, though old-fashioned manners prevail to the extent that no mention is made of the appeaL fund for £6 million recently launched to save the institution's independence. Over a thousand people a day visit the show, proclaims the President, and more than a thousand works of art are sold. 'Numbers, we'll be told, aren't every- thing', he continues. 'True. But they are something . . . evidence surely that this show, which has always welcomed the widest variety of perceptive skills that is consistent with quality, has successfully weathered the bouquets and brickbats of changing taste to become an established but never a stationary institution . . . and proof — if such were needed — that the artist's eye is as fresh as ever it was.' Numbers, for the President, quite clearly are everything.
New ARAs, even new art critics, have been ground small over the years by the im- memorial mill of the Summer Exhibition. They promise reform and attack, they end on the hanging committee giving the nod to compromise or, in the case of critics, writing long and chatty notices of there'll- always-be-an-England variety for up-market `Dailies' and 'Sundays'. Even the hard in- tentions of presidents come to dust. Sir Hugh Casson himself made a special effort at his first Summer Exhibition to woo leading contemporary artists back to his academic fold: one gallery was set aside and Peter Blake — an artist bridging the respected and the respectable — was given a free hand as its selector. The revered Pro- fessor Gowing — once of the Spectator, now head of the Slade — also agreed to become an Associate, and seemed to act as a beneficial bait for a time. And yet this year, with as presentable a hanging commit- tee as one could hope for (including Peter Greenham, Anthony Green and Eduardo Paolozzi), the absence of all but a very few of the best of our artists is more con- spicuous than ever; and even among the most widely respected of the Academicians there seems a disinclination to show: Paolozzi and Gowing, Philip King and Jef- fery Camp all failing to contribute. For the
majority of artists with a high opinion of themselves and reasonable hopes of immor- tal fame, the Academy is, now, and ever shall be, anathema.
The reason, year in and out, is there for all to see. The Summer Exhibition remains a social event. It is not chic, but it is halloo- ed, and its very lack of ambition or inquisi- tiveness reflects a certain comforting decen- cy and moderation of behaviour. In party political terms it is more of a Liberal than a Conservative manifesto, with no allusions to celebrations of wealth or bloody sports pervading a weekend cottage view of rural and other life. Hence the colour supplen1en- tary abstraction and arty pride in stylistic derivation. It is not so much a show for Sunday painters, as for those who work at weekends; and in this it would seem decidedly not impervious to change, for surely it looked far more forthrightly n amateur in the days of indoor servants 31" and more years ago. Significantly enotiftb, the most popular print (57 red stickers) is 1)) Patricia M. Mallinson of a lonely figure presumably lost in thought about all t1115 kind of thing, entitled 'Evening on IPA 'Sands'. Sands'. Most unpredictable is the improved form of some Academicians: David Tindie for more daring compositions; Sandra 131° for being less over-blown. Vivian Pitch forth displays as sure and intrinsic a feel for watercolour as ever; and Allen Jones once again contributes some much needed erotic fire. A distinguished group of invited ar- tists, having cast a cold eye over the 1•53
exhibits, gave the prize for the most out- standing exhibit to a still-life by Craigie Ait- chison — three cheers for that as well.
The major retrospective at the Tate Gallery of Graham Sutherland's work — including etchings, posters, ceramics, even sculpture — was intended as a climax to the artist's career, but now — along with an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum devoted to his war drawings (both shows till 4 July) — acts as his memorial. Sutherland's reputation, like those of Nicholson and, to a lesser extent, Moore, has diminished in recent years, at least among artists and critics, and the over- comprehensive selection at the Tate must surely now confirm him once and for all as a minor artist. This judgment, of course, does not particularly contradict the publici- IY, which modestly defines him as having `long been regarded as one of the greatest British artists of this century'. Most of 'the greatest British artists of this century' have, of course, been parochial derivatives of School-of-Paris stars (their Own 'greatness' still in dispute) and Sutherland is no exception. Like Moore, he imitated but eventually squandered, a lot of ideas generated by the gargantuan Picasso in the late Twenties and early Thirties Particularly on the gothic theme of Grum- ald's 'Crucifixion', which he allied to an innate preference for spiky and tortured trees and branches. But this happened later. In the Thirties, when such gothic preference was still his own and subject only to the romantic promptings of Paul Nash, Sutherland produced his best work, in the form of sketchbook gouaches. The blackness is mysterious, the colours burnt oranges and browns, rosy pinks, mid- night blues — are very personal, and the aura of foreboding has a metaphoric and contemporary (the imminence of World , am Two) strength, that moves these pic- tures effortlessly from the particular to the general — and their spirit still invigorates the best of the war drawings, where tor- tured farms are everywhere. , But after the war — except for an aca- demic but quite witty brush with society por- traiture and a belated effort to return, in every' sense, to his roots — all is fame, for- tune and negation of spirit. Picasso gets the ,,PPer hand and then, much worse, Francis 'aeon — friend and to some degree prottge --- who actually does become the grand ar- tist Sutherland, always happiest with page
size, misguidedly aspired to himself. His Pastiches of Bacon — who even ap- propriated Sutherland orange — are even crucifixions because more desperate, than his
the of Picasso. He left England for ,,e South of France — to be nearer Picasso? a
move is certainly To be farther from Bacon? The loaded with meaning -
and made minty green his hallmark, a rare he revisited modern painting. Then, in 1967, he revisited the Pembrokeshire coast that ad been the first landscape truly to inspire aun, and tried to recapture — on a 'aeonesque scale, with 'golden' frames by
Alfred Hecht — the magic of the little gouaches; but while he seems truer to himself in these late paintings of gnarled roots and trunks, the passion of the early work has long been spent. This passion, a Wordsworthian romanticism, can equally be felt in the etched tributes to Samuel Palmer that first brought him public ac- claim, and in some of the Paul Nashian posters he designed as a graphic artist in the Thirties. All they lack is originality — soon to be applied — and they help consolidate the achievement of the early work on which his reputation as an artist, however minor, would now seem almost totally to depend.
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